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I'd like to start by saying that I don't have many gripes with One Piece's story. The rating that I have given it is not a reflection of any flaws with the story, but instead a product of several other factors.

I might also add that I do read the manga, which doesn't suffer from the same problems as the anime. I rather enjoy it, and I do recommend it.

The anime, though, is a different story altogether.

Since we've already established that I like the story, we'll start with the quality of the art.

When I first began watching One Piece, I quickly fell in love with the ... art. Some people detested it, but it was a bit of a hook for me.

Then, suddenly, after years of tuning in, I began to notice that the animation was a far cry from what it was when I was new to the world of One Piece.

While artistic changes aren't necessarily bad, the types of changes that I noticed certainly were: less detail, more generic designs for some characters, terribly animated scenes.

Admittedly, if the art was the only problem, the show would be at least bearable. Unfortunately, however, that is not the case; the pacing is even more horrendous than the animation, though it wasn't always so.

As a matter of fact, the show's pacing was the nail in the coffin for me; it makes me (and many other viewers) wish that the studio would just throw in some fillers just to put some distance between the manga and the anime.

To be blunt, so little happens in each episode that I sometimes wonder why the episodes are 23 to 24 minutes in length.

The typical structure of an episode is as follows: 3.5 minute opening, 3 minute recap of the last episode, 7 minutes of " new content" (which consists of maybe 4 minutes of actual new content and 3 minutes of pointless reaction shots and overused flashbacks, and I'm being generous here), a 30 second mid-episode break, 8 minutes of some more content which follows nearly the same pattern as the pre-break material, and a 30 second preview of the next episode.

I hope that all adds up to 23 or 24 minutes.

Not like it matters.

The studio clearly doesn't care about producing decent content, so why should I care about carefully estimating the amount of new material that is introduced per episode?

Regardless of what I've written here, I must admit that I will not stop watching One Piece. True, I occasionally fall behind on the anime (as I have now), but I've been watching it for too many years to just give up on it now.

I don't put this kind of time in so that I can quit halfway through.

I'm pretty sure that very few people do, which is probably why this anime still has any viewers at all.

I don't usually write reviews for much of anything. However, at the moment I feel as if rambling is the best and only way to iterate the immense disappointment that I feel after watching Phi Brain: Kami no Puzzle.

I should start by stating that I loved the premise of this anime, and I was also impressed by the fact that it dared to be artistically different. Having said those things, I was really excited about Kami no Puzzle, and, although the pilot episode made it clear to me that it was a Shounen anime, I actually liked what I saw in the beginning.

I ... suppose that my fancy little clincher and hastily written summation of the anime's pros lead up to this statement: Somewhere along the line, the ball was dropped, and it hit the ground with a thunderous smack. Suddenly, the relaxing pace became a race to tie up the story. The rush, in my opinion, only made it more obvious that some earlier episodes could have been swapped out with episodes that better contributed to plot progression. To add fuel to my fire, the story's primary and secondary conflicts were poorly addressed, if they were ever really addressed at all.

I suppose that if you really like Shounen, then Kami no Puzzle's formula won't bother you as much as it did me. Besides, even with all of the humbug obstructing my view, I could see that it had potential and possibly still has that potential. It's all just a matter of execution.