One Piece

77/100

TL;DR: it’s good. It’s baseline level of quality is not that high, but peaks highly and has its own brand of uniqueness.

Synopsis: boy travels with a crew to retrieve the One Piece.

One Piece was the first anime I watched on my own accord. I think the first that I watched in general was Little Snow Fairy Sugar, and the second was either Rozen Maiden or Fruits Basket. But it’s different if you actually choose to watch a series on your own accord, and because of that, it does hold a nostalgic sway over my heart; fortunately I’m strong willed enough to look at the series objectively.

Anime elitists tend to lump the big 3 with each other and critique them as a group. I think that the big 3 are overhated, but beyond that, One Piece is the one that stands out the most out of the three. It does not look like an anime at all, it’s closer to an American cartoon. Normally I would find this to be grating, but Oda and Toei manage to make it work.

The animation is mediocre, but watchable.

In the series, the first 5 arcs are meant to introduce the main characters:

• Luffy: the main character — a teenager who ate a fruit that makes him strechy, and dreams of finding the treasure that the legendary pirate Gol D Roger hid at the end of the Grand Line. Mentally, he’s a Goku clone, which works well for the genre, but is unoriginal.

• Zoro: a green haired young adult who dreams of becoming the greatest swordsman ever. One of the more three dimensional characters - he’s calm, but passionate in his own way. Practical, but kind of deranged. Fights with three swords, one in his mouth, and dreams of being the greatest swordsman ever.

• Nami: a young, manipulative woman who loves money. Annoying character at first, but improves with time.

• Usopp: teenager with a long nose who is a neurotic, pathological liar, but is otherwise normal/socialized. Unlike the others, Usopp doesn’t have a grand dream like the others — he just wants to be a brave pirate like his father.

• Sanji: cook with very low levels of agreeableness, but is still willing to feed people for free due to an early childhood experience. Obsessed with women, and unfortunately his character starts to revolve around that one quirk as the series ages.

One Piece has a giant cast, currently clocking it at 1174 characters. To somebody who has never watched the series, this sounds ridiculous, but note that this means they introduce roughly one character every episode, which is still high, but not obscenely so.

Anime tend to have this weird internal logic where people can jump 20 feet, grow past the age of 20, run at the speed of sound, and survive point blank bomb blasts. One Piece embraces logic and has people fight with swords in their mouth or use weird weapons like slingshots or mouth-sowrds. A significant portion of the cast are over 10 feet tall or non-human.

Out of the first 4 arcs, the first two arcs are fine, but unmemorable. The third arc is really where One Piece starts to shine — Luffy, Zoro, and Nami stumble upon an island where they meet Usopp, a pathological liar who tries hard to cheer up a wealthy teenage girl who is sick and has dead parents. Eventually, Luffy and Usopp discover that the butler of the house is a former pirate who is planning to invade the village and take the estate for himself, but nobody believes them because Usopp is known to be a liar.

Eventually, they face Kuro and his pirates on the shore. Oda constructs the fight scenes to avoid the classic battle shounen problem of characters standing around and watching other characters fight — one character gets injured so he cannot move, another is knocked out, and another is running away, and so on. The fact these are plot convenciences is a little obvious, but the plot conveniences work much better than the classic stand around.

The next arc is a pretty brutal regression to the mean. The crew stumbles upon a restaurant, and Luffy accidentally destroys part of the roof, so he is forced to work there for the time being. Later, hey face off against Don Krieg and his crew, who are kind of boring, just regular power seeking villains. Plot conveniences are not used to avoid the stand around and fight problem, instead, Oda just has the characters stand around while others fight. Unfortunate.

The only cool thing about this arc was seeing Zoro fight against Mihawk, the greatest swordsman in the world, who he dreams of surpassing. Showing the limits of power this early on in the story is respectable, and makes the power scaling seem less bullshitty and ridiculous.

The Luffy vs Don Krieg fight was also mid as fuck, Luffy just tanks everything Krieg throws at him and beats the shit out of him. A pretty big step down from the Kuro fight, which actually involved some thinking and plausible danger. After this comes the Arlong arc, which was better than I remember it being, but not much of an improvement.

Scoring:

Design (10/15):

• Distinguishment: (5/5) - unmistakable

• Animation: (0/2) - mediocre

• Sound: (1/2)

• OST: (1/2) - not a fan, personally

• Character designs: (2/2)

• Backgrounds: (1/2) - eh

Script (36/50):

• Character Investment: (8/10)

• Character Realism: (0/2) - XD?

• Character Complexity: (2/3) - depends on the character, and the time

• Plot solidness: (3/5) - writing falls apart in some arcs, notably the floating restaurant arc

• Plot complexity: (6/10)

• Ending: (4/5) - ending?

• Pacing: (4/5) - a bit slow, but not bad for its time

• Stakes: (9/10) - high stakes

Value (10/15):

• Thematic elements: (3/5) - some, but they are superficial in nature

• Skill: (3/5) - Oda made up most of it as he went

• Originality: (4/5) - some generic battle shounen tropes, but has its own world and logic to it.

Enjoyment (15/20):

• Did I like it: (15/20) - bad on paper, but works in practice. cute, fun show.