I like One Piece. I like One Piece quite a lot in fact, but the issue comes from how insanely long the series is currently residing at 873 chapters and the staggering extent of its world which according to the OPW (One Piece Wikipedia) has named 870 characters.
What I'm going to do is to explain what I consider some of the fundamental aspects of the series and so it comes the appeal of One Piece. I first encountered One Piece in 2015 on an anime event called Iberanime, in Portugal and unbeknownst to me at the time, what I was looking for was a mass success. I really came to enjoy the adventures of Nami, Zoro and of course Luffy as the first Straw Hat Pirates to appear (technically). The series had a unique place illness to it that made it stand out from other more shonen series I'd seen up to this point like Naruto or Dragon Ball and even the show's more dramatic moments there was a tremendous amount of fun to be had. Of course, as I read the imaginative pirate adventures within the first volumes, what I was completely unaware of was what a world shattering phenomenon I was actually dealing with and that revelation would only appear to me two years later when I find out what a massive deal One Piece really is inside Japan.
The main appeal of this series is the simple premise of adventure and I know that's also the concept of countless other shounen series but nothing really captures the same sense of exploration and scale as the world of piracy, in the series. The hero on this voyage is a young pirate named Monkey D. Luffy, a basic character with a simple purpose to find the mysterious treasure named One Piece and with that, becoming the King of the Pirates. This is Luffy's primary motivator from Chapter 1 and remain until the latest chapter, and this keeps Luffy's journey along the one distinct path which is something unique to One Piece which is the same journey along the same path to the point that you can charge Luffy's route on a physical map (in which the crew encounters various island and territory) and this makes the story very easy to understand since allows to a massive amount of variety in the series sub-arcs like Baroque Works or Dressrosa in which the crew must untangle a web of political intrigue and take down a tyrannical false king, for example. The type of stories are unlimited since it started off fairly with a basic villain or villains but as we move on, people see the Straw Hats embroiled in government conspiracies or haunted ghost ships, jailbreaks and even being at the center of a large scale war like Marineford and this is what makes it the show.
I really don't like some major plot incidents that are separate from the Straw Hats but when they occur, they reverberate throughout the world on such a scale that it drastically affects the lives of every character in it, such as my favorite character, Portgas D. Ace or the Yonko "WhiteBeard" (Shirohige) even though One Piece (as series) succeeds on a large scale. There are also a lot of very strong characterizations in the series, but one of the things that are a bit strange for anime and manga connoisseurs is the difference between the two versions where the 'x factor' of each person enters. For each person, the information they have so far is incipient phase what still remains to be known why everything is called into question. Because there is a lack of known and unknown information from the series, concrete examples can not be given with arguments, but it is a difficult problem to argue. The viewer is aware of what he sees, how the characters react (what is later compared to real personalities), and how everything that exists in the shape of the characters actually comes into being. From now, just trust me when I say that nobody writes a story like Eiichiro Oda and with that, you need to see to believe (that's an old Portuguese saying).
Story: 8 |Art: 6 | Sound: 8 | Character: 8 | Enjoyment: 7
Score: 8
