Short review:
For me, this anime was the greatest anime to ever exist for the first ~500 episodes (which is impressively long by almost any standard) but then after that, the anime began to steadily worsen over time.
I'm going to portion my experience into three main parts: pre-time skip, post-time skip, and my overall general view.
Long review:
- Pre-time skip:
When I first got into OP, I instantly fell in love with it for many reasons. I'll name the big main ones.
First, the atmosphere and theme of anime was unique; the idea of sailing the seas to find different unique islands, finding exciting new things, and the variety
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of different devil fruit powers and bosses are all well constructed it felt like the anime had it all when it comes to overall theme: it's new, it's intriguing, and it's exciting especially for the first time you experience it.
Second, the side characters in the straw hats were not very complex or advanced but they were very unique in their own way and likable (probably other than Usopp), each had an interesting backstory and dream, each said something interesting from time to time that was more than some overused gag, and most importantly (this is very important) they actually felt like they actively existed and were adding to the storyline while still peaking my interest.
Third, I was so excited about so many things including the the other straw hats: I had so many exciting questions unanswered and my expectation would be that they would be answered soon enough (guess what? they weren't).
Fourth, a lot of events just made me cry buckets. I rarely get emotional when watching anything really. I think making the viewer emotional over a show isn't easy to do since being emotional means that the narrator successfully made a good story with good elements and characters that one can get emotionally invested in along with a really good production team that can recreate those events very well.
There were no cons in the pre-time skip that are worth mentioning other than some scenes feeling unnecessarily stretched out and Kaku being the worst gag of a villain ever (seriously? a giraffe with a nose for a sword?).
- Post-time skip:
My love/hate relationship begins here. At first it was all love, to me this was the greatest piece of fiction to ever be created but now, not so much. The novelty of a lot of concepts within the show such as the devil fruits, the crazy ideas of islands, and so on begins to wear off after the time-skip.
Post-time skip, you start to notice that Oda has this script that he repeats in almost every single arc involving the straw hats; this script isn't really an issue when you first experience it but after a few times it just gets incredibly boring and predictable. What really pisses me off is that we are almost towards the end and Oda is still using the script again in egghead. The script is basically:
1- Luffy arrives at Z island
2- Luffy meets some main X friend in Z island
3- X friend is in trouble
4- Luffy helps X friend which involves miraculously beating bad guy(s) along the way which saves X's kingdom/island (usually a scene here where you're supposed to cry happens).
This happens almost every single arc and it gets so damn boring to see after a while. I can already see this pattern happening with Egghead. Oda tries to spice the script up but it's more or less the same. This script is a very lazy and boring way of writing up a story that had many elements of success. The script also makes those emotional scenes I talked about incredibly less effective since you can predict what will happen very easily from early on.
Remember how I was talking about the straw hats? Well, here these characters are incredibly dumbed down to one-liners (haha usopp has that funny scaredy cat disease! or haha Nico robin back at it again with a sad joke or haha zoro lost his away again ROFL). Instead of further developing the other straw hats, Oda is not only dumbing them down now but also making them incredibly less involved in any thing significant. Oda tries to undo this by sometimes having them involved in incredibly short-lived pointless subplots but it just comes out to be lame.
Spoilers being in the show's opening is so frustrating. I do not read the manga, why am I being told of so many major events going on? I do not want to know all these spoilers; can I just skip the opening of the show? Sure and I have done that but I shouldn't have to worry about finding out there's a new crew member before they actually join from the opening OF THE DAMN SHOW, I shouldn't have to worry about finding out where X missing person's whereabouts are from the opening when they haven't found them yet, and so much other stuff.
The story has been moving at an incredibly slow pace that the One Piece treasure hunt seems like a lost subplot: when other shows take years showing significant progress towards a character's goal(s), with one piece it is years ON THE SAME ISLAND with almost zero progress.
I have reached a point where it does not matter whether the one piece treasure is is a bunch of gold on some random island, a bomb equal to 100000 nukes, or some secret majestic powers, the excitement just isn't there because it has been unaddressed for hundreds of episodes.
Now that I'm thinking about it, this is a crappy thing Oda loves to do: he will tease you really hard with a supposedly HUGE unknown/possible thing within the story and either never deliver the answer or just take so long that you start to lose interest. My interpretation is that the author does this to maintain interest throughout the series but actually after a while it just gets annoying since it is sooooo overdone.
One of the worst downgrades about the post-time skip is the introduction of haki within fights. My number one issue with it is that it made arguably the strongest type of devil fruits seem like a joke since haki renders it almost useless along with significantly weakening the other types of devil fruits as well. In summary, the introduction of haki is more of an overhaul of the both the power scale and battle system within the anime rather than an addition since haki is basically either just strength or some other busted type of haki that only a select few have. Pre-time skip fights were more fun and entertaining as fights involved some strategy or some expectation of how the fight might look like before it begins (I.e a logia vs a paramecia is not the same as a logia vs logia). However, now with haki it leaves fights way less interesting since more haki can demolish just about anyone, if you have enough of it, in the most boring way possible.
- Overall thoughts and general view:
The show feels completely different than what it started as in a bad way. What started off as a pirate crew's adventure towards an exciting unknown treasure moved towards a god-like superhero show where the MC is just saving everyone all the time. Normally, shows can have more than one plot(s) but moving the whole idea of Luffy from a pirate who wants to capture the great treasure into some God-like savior WHILE JUST BARELY moving forward the first plot in any meaningful manner seems like a terrible idea.
Another thing is Luffy has to be one of the worst main characters of all time. His personality consists of shouting, being reckless, eating an OP devil fruit, and every other very basic main character (loves his friends crew, adventurous, honorable etc..). What do we actually know about luffy? Very little. Has luffy changed at all as a main character during 1000+ episodes? No. Has his experiences changed him in any way? No. We don't even know his "real" motive and dream related to wanting to be the pirate king.
For me, generally speaking, the pre-time skip alone carries the overwhelming majority of my rating points. All the recent arcs along with all the post-time skip content is very underwhelming, repetitive, and simply put: a snooze fest. The post-time skip part of this anime makes it enough to not recommend anyone getting caught up in a show that starts off excellent but screws up everything as it gets closer towards the end.
Aug 14, 2024
Short review:
For me, this anime was the greatest anime to ever exist for the first ~500 episodes (which is impressively long by almost any standard) but then after that, the anime began to steadily worsen over time. I'm going to portion my experience into three main parts: pre-time skip, post-time skip, and my overall general view. Long review: - Pre-time skip: When I first got into OP, I instantly fell in love with it for many reasons. I'll name the big main ones. First, the atmosphere and theme of anime was unique; the idea of sailing the seas to find different unique islands, finding exciting new things, and the variety ... |