In all fairness, I never recommend watching the anime anyway, there’s 1000+ chapters sure but reading the manga is actually a consistently good experience, the only hard arc to get through is Punk Hazard because while it says a whole bunch of important things, it’s also following (and followed by) a really exciting arc and many of the panels just ended up as walls of text, so it just takes a while to read and many people get halted there, me included for a while!
But with the anime, the first few seasons are really good imo, the style was really good plus being traditionally drawn really lent to the vibe. However, once it became digital it started dropping off in terms of quality (it has recently regained that quality) the pacing also became an issue.
This isn’t to condemn all digital anime, pretty much all my favourites are digital!
Also from the start it was very clear that the story was going to have a gigantic journey, one filled with interesting mysteries to fall into a rabbit hole over:
(The last two aren’t spoilers if you don’t have any context but they mention characters that you won’t know about until later on in the story)
- The will of “D”
- The Void Century
- Origins of Devil Fruit
- What exactly is “the one piece”
- Poneglyphs
- The identity of Luffy’s Mother
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What “crime” did Zunesha commit
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Who the heck is Imu and why do they sit on the throne that nobody is supposed to sit on
One of the most popular characters, Red Hair Shank’s has barely been in the actual story, yet recently we’ve been teased of how powerful he is.
(Spoiler pertaining to the last character mentioned in my list above, this actually is a story spoiler even if we don’t know much about it yet)
The character mentioned in the last spoiler has literally only been in it twice, they first made an appearence in the Reviere arc, where they were shown standing infront of a giant straw hat, Imu was also in the most recent chapters of the story asking about another person who we know literally nothing about, it was terrifying
Even without mysteries, the fights are always extremely fun to read, the story arcs are always extremely engaging and the unique style is always fun to look at!
Also personally I dislike when people see it as a mountain you need to climb quickly when you’re about to run out of food. If you take your time you can enjoy the story, you don’t need to finish it in a week or even a month, it’s really easy to keep track of what’s happening so even if you pick up where you left off after a while, the memories can easily come flooding back, plus if you do forget, there’s no shame in rereading the previous few chapters.
