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.
Of course, there are official efforts being made to make its size more palatable. Netflix's popular live action series covered roughly 95 chapters in its eight-episode first season, with a second season on the way. Meanwhile, a second anime adaptation called The One Piece is in the works. Set to debut on Netflix (the success of the live action series has influenced the streaming service to pretty much go all-in on the franchise,) it's being made partly in order to lure in potential viewers that are intimidated by the current anime's immense episode count. However, if your main goal is to somehow convince fans that One Piece isn't as protracted as it looks, you've picked the wrong manga. One Piece is long no matter how you try to adapt it – and there's nothing wrong with that.
On the cruise
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.
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 on YouTube, so devoid as your choice will be of creator Eiichiro Oda's intended narrative rhythm.
As many fans have discovered – a common complaint is that those 1,100 chapters feel like they go by in no time, leaving them sad there isn't more – One Piece is a layered experience. It is both an adventurous tale of the now and, increasingly, an exploration of its world's past. Its characters are simultaneously reliably simple and carry backstories that echo throughout the narrative to come. Taking out any of these is like playing Jenga with the story – sure, you can maybe pull a few blocks off the top, but One Piece events and characters ripple throughout it in a way that eventually you risk the whole thing toppling over.
Getting into One Piece means being in it for the long haul. It's constructed in a way that takes advantage of its own length, and is one of the rare pieces of fiction that manages to bypass any accusation of an expiration date. Rather than feel stale in what can only be considered its twilight years (Eiichiro Oda has said that we are in the manga's final stages), it's instead become more rewarding. If you're up for it, it's a great read – or watch, if the anime is more your style. If you're not, that's cool, too. One Piece might be the most popular manga in the world, but it isn't the only one.
Enjoying Netflix's adaptation? Here's everything we know about One Piece season 2.
