EntertainmentTVAnime ShowsOne PieceTrying to make a shorter One Piece adaptation misses the point of Eiichiro Oda’s epic storyWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
EntertainmentTVAnime ShowsOne PieceTrying to make a shorter One Piece adaptation misses the point of Eiichiro Oda’s epic storyWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Viz Media/Shueisha)
This year, the One Piece manga turned 27 years old while the anime will soon hit its 25th anniversary. Respectively, they contain 1,123 chapters and 1,115 episodes each (at the time of this writing). And that’s not even counting all of the movies, supplementary material and tie-in stories, and sheer amount of merchandise that One Piece has spawned. If you’re thinking about checking out the series, it seems like a gargantuan effort. The One Piece story is as vast and sprawling as the seas within its pages.
On the cruise
(Image credit: Toei)
Sinking feeling(Image credit: Viz Media/Shueisha)One Piece’s latest twist is a perfect encapsulation of the series - and something that Eiichiro Oda has been building towards from the start
Sinking feeling
(Image credit: Viz Media/Shueisha)One Piece’s latest twist is a perfect encapsulation of the series - and something that Eiichiro Oda has been building towards from the start
(Image credit: Viz Media/Shueisha)
One Piece’s latest twist is a perfect encapsulation of the series - and something that Eiichiro Oda has been building towards from the start
To put it in the most literal terms, One Piece, the story of Monkey D. Luffy and his attempt to travel the Grand Line and become Pirate King, is never going to be short. When the anime first began, it adapted roughly two manga chapters into every episode, meaning that those aforementioned 95 chapters that the live action series dealt with amounted to about 45 animated installments. That rate of adaptation would change over time and drastically slow down to the current rate, mostly in an attempt to not lap the progress of the manga.
But even if The One Piece will stick to that initial rate, it still leaves us with a 500+ episode series. And sure, it could easily quicken things up and adapt more material per episode, but how fast do you go before you feel like you’re speed-running the thing? And while the eight-episode first season of the live action show runs along at a relatively brisk pace, even the most liberal of adaptations will likely want to hit the manga’s major, memorable story beats. Many of which are years and dozens of hour-long episodes away.
One doesn’t want to be too precious with every single detail of the original story because then what’s the point of adapting it? There’s little fun in cutting and pasting across mediums. But One Piece singularly thrives on that mass of details, the little bits of narrative and mythology and character information that accrues over time until every fan essentially becomes an encyclopedia of the series itself.
(Image credit: Viz Media/Shueisha)
One Piece is so jam packed with it that even more normalized attempts at speeding things up (like viewers skipping certain arcs that they’ve heard aren’t as necessary) risks leaving a lot behind. Want to jump to Arlong Park, the most emotionally impactful storyline of One Piece’s early stages? You’re going to miss out on so much important character building and tiny moments that become way more integral to the plot later. Want to skip the goofy Long Ring Long Land arc that is nestled between the descent from the cloud kingdom of Skypiea and the game-changing events of Water 7? You might as well watch a “One Piece best moments” compilation onYouTube, so devoid as your choice will be of creator Eiichiro Oda’s intended narrative rhythm.
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1Nemesis review: “A magical sense of tension”
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Nemesis review: “A magical sense of tension”
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Cobra Kai season 6, part 2 review: “Returns to the sort of hard-hitting form that made it such a fan favorite in the first place”