Eiichiro Oda’s manga “One Piece” has earned its title as the best selling manga ever. With its sales surpassing even Batman, its influence has unsurprisingly spread to other forms of media, having had its story adapted into its anime in 1999. After over 22 years, the anime has recently surpassed its 1000th episode, and the series is more popular than ever. Does Oda’s creation really warrant its praise?

Having not read the manga, I’ll only be going over the anime in this review. One Piece follows Monkey D. Luffy, a 19 year old pirate with a body possesing the properties of rubber, and his journey to find the legendary treasure One Piece and achieve his dream and keep his promise of becoming the King of the Pirates. With him, Luffy travels with his expanding crew of friends that he meets along the way, the Strawhat Pirates.

One Piece is produced by Toei animation studios. Apart from One Piece, Toei is known for producing the Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon series. One Piece premiered in Japan on Fuji TV in October of 1999, and has since aired over 1000 episodes and been exported to over 30 countries worldwide. As of January, 2022, One Piece has 101 volumes of the manga, 1008 episodes of the anime, 14 movies (a fifteenth in the works), and is translated to several languages. In 2007, Funimation began production of an English language release, as well as 4Kids with more localized dub that is generally agreed upon be mediocre at best.

One of One Piece’s main strengths as a show is its amazing cast of characters. Every member of the main cast is lovable in their own way. Each and every member of the Strawhat Pirates is given their own times to shine and showcase Oda’s exceptional writing. The characters compliment each other perfectly and watching the series makes you feel as if you yourself are part of the crew. When paired with the world of cool powers, wacky creatures, and great side characters, the crew is truly a blast to follow throuughout the story.

Another area that One Piece excels at is in its story. While its premise of looking for a treasure isn’t very complicated, the journey the crew has been through more than makes up for the simple premise. The story currently consists of 31 story arcs, each one giving the Strawhats increasingly strong opponents and problems to overcome. One Piece takes its audience through an amazing journey teeming with amazing fights, emotional moments, art, humor, and more.

An area in which the One Piece anime struggles is in its pacing. The anime is widely regarded as being slow when compared to its source material. With its weekly episode release schedule, the anime is very close to the manga. To stick to this release schedule without running out of material, liberties have to be taken. The anime has to stretch out the story and change some things to make it work. This scheduling is definitely a factor in the abundance of episodes, although the length of the manga itself is nothing to scoff at. However, the schedule also means that manga readers won’t have to wait long for their favorite scenes to be animated.

While the sheer number of episodes are understandably intimidating, the amazing story, characters more than make up for it. Though not everyone has the time to sit through over 16 days of a rubber pirate boy going on an adventure, if you do, you won’t regret putting in the time.