In a fall season that has been dominated by talk about sloppy animation, One Piece fans are coming together to celebrate the anime's 25th anniversary – and praising the new Fan Letter special as a "masterpiece".
One Piece Fan Letter, which is now streaming, adapts Tomohito Ohsaki’s Straw Hat Stories and features short tales featuring some of the Straw Hat's most notable crew members. It's not your usual Grand Line-sailing adventures, though: the stories in the anthology are depicted through the lens of an everyday citizen in the world of the show.
Critic Rafael Motamayor wrote, "One Piece Fan Letter is not only a perfect homage to the show and a celebration of 25 years of peak fiction, but one of the best half hours of TV of the year."
"The One Piece Fan Letter was more of a love letter to the fans new & old. Absolute masterpiece 10/10," one fan wrote on Twitter.
Another remarked, "If you like One Piece this is the best thing you will watch for a long time Encapsulates everything the story is loved for and shows a totally different side of the world."
One fan added, "The biggest thing that strikes me about Fan Letter is how it encapsulates the soul of how One Piece affects us ourselves. Small, insignificant people who are able to look up to these larger than life characters and have it change them for the better. I love One Piece."
Remarkably, One Piece Fan Letter is also currently the second-highest anime of all time according to anime aggregation site My Anime List, only being beaten out by 2023's Frieren: Beyond Journey's End.
All told, it's a perfect way to mark the anniversary, while also giving fans something to watch during One Piece's recently-announced break.
The anime, which is adapting the Egghead arc, will return in April. A One Piece remake is also in the works for next year, while Netflix's One Piece season 2 is currently filming.
