One Piece 9/10

 If you haven't heard of One Piece, you really don't care about manga or anime. It's rather difficult to review a series, that's been around for over 20 years, and will probably still be around for another 10 years. I will say though, the hype is well deserved for One Piece, we got some of the best world building and power system in manga history. While I detest what the anime has become, the manga is still top-notch reading material. Plus, the live action adaption is promising as well!

I grew up watching OP as a kid, like most fans, the show was on every day in the afternoon, with endless re-runs for years and years. I enjoyed pretty much all arcs of the island hopping pirates, my favorites being Water 7 and Marineford. When it comes to favorite characters, there's literally hundreds to choose from. The main cast is made up of the Straw Heat crew, along the show we meet their family members, friends, enemies, and frenemies. One of my favorite characters is Edward Newgate aka Whitebeard - I could watch a whole movie just about him and his crew!

I can't even imagine how difficult it must be for the mangaka Eiichiro Oda to come up with so many well-rounded characters, and have compelling backstories for each one. To consistently come up with new devil fruit powers, locations, new fights/obstacles, to not make the antagonists boring or stale, but instead a real challenge for Luffy and co., which elevate it beyond a typical action-adventure anime. Now of course, there are some parts that don't quite follow the logic of the OP Universe and Oda messes up with some ideas, that seem to be pulled out of thin air, but after 25 years, you can't really blame him for some minor inconsistencies. But if you want to nitpick, you'll find some stuff.

 I mentioned earlier that I despise what the anime has become - the main issue me, and pretty much everyone else has with the series, is the pacing. The anime slowed down significantly after the time skip arc, because it had already caught up with the manga. While in the early episodes Toei would manage to put 4-5 manga chapters into one proper episode, nowadays, they squeeze one chapter per episode. Mind you, one chapter is about 15-20 pages. There's no way you can fill up a 25-minute anime with one chapter and not have the most sluggish pacing ever. I'd almost rather watch filler arcs.

 So what's the trick you can use? Stop watching for a few weeks and then binge 10 episodes on double speed, that way you can enjoy the anime again. I did appreciate the effort that was put into the Wano arc animation though, since the fights were big scale and needed to look the part. Unfourtletley, we're back to the old, not so good-looking animation, after the big fights were over. The low effort and greed of Toei really is something else. Sometimes I wonder just how good the anime would have been, had One Piece seasonal releases instead of a weekly release schedule (with over a thousand episodes). Oh well, still deservedly the most popular manga series of all time, thanks to its colorful world and awesome characters.