How do I love thee? Let me count the ways

This series is where it all began for me. The "Romance Dawn" if you will. I remember starting the fifth grade back in 2007, I hit it off real quickly with this one boy in my class. We had loads of things in common and were constantly sharing new interests. One thing we didn't share was his love anime and manga. This wasn't because I didn't like it, rather I just hadn't experienced it yet. One day he shoved One Piece volumes 1-3 in my backpack and told that I would love it. And love it I did. I read through all 13 novels available at the time in a flash. I read and re-read them while I waited for the next to be released. In me grew a love for manga and anime of all sorts, it was like junk food (I feel like many of you would agree). Incidentally, One Piece was, and still is, my favorite manga of all-time.

But enough about me, on to the actual review! I promise that this will be a completely objective review. I think I will start with what is great about this manga, as it vastly outweighs it's flaws.

The most important part of any story is, well, the story! One piece tells a grand tale of adventuring pirates all searching for the ultimate treasure. In a story like this, the world is absolutely massive, and Eiichiro Oda handles it so well. Every new place our characters travel they are faced with trials and tribulations. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. You never know. Each story arc is unique in setting and character development. There are new problems to solve or maybe another pirate warlord to defeat. Either way it feels pretty fresh every time. And it is all very memorable, I can’t think of a single time I felt that a chapter was just filler-garbage.

At the core of the story is its wonderful characters. All of them have their quirks, but they are not defined by these, which unfortunately happens very often in manga. This makes them feel very real. For example, the main character, Monkey D. Luffy, at face value, seems to be just a lovable idiot. But underneath this is a shocking deep, passionate person who looks out for his friends at all costs. For Luffy there are no truly sad goodbyes, everyone has a purpose and a plan so as their friend, he lets them go. The characters are what I love the most I think, you can connect with them so closely on different levels and they never get boring.

But even with a good plot and characters, what is a story if it is not enjoyable? One Piece is a fun and ofttimes, absolutely insane story. It can leave you in stitches or it will make sob like a baby. It is a well-crafted roller coaster of emotions and plots. No matter how old you are, no matter what kind of manga you like, you WILL enjoy One Piece.

Now to the bad. There is not much about One Piece that is truly bad, but nothing is without flaws. I feel like my points are nitpicky things that don’t really hurt the story.

The artwork in One Piece is normally really great. It is generally clean and simple. But occasionally the fighting scenes can get very messy and it can be a bit difficult to tell what is going on. Also worth noting, there is a lot of visual humor and the mouths especially can get very crazy looking, I can see where this would put some people off. It put me off until I got used to it.

The story can sometimes feel a little repetitive. But I feel this is very understandable, last I heard, this story is meant to take up 100 novels (if you bought the whole series new it would cost you around $1300!) so this inevitable. Although, Oda does a really great job of spacing out the similar story lines, so this is not incredibly noticeable.

Overall, One Piece is a great story and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a great series!



Also worth noting: the anime follows the manga series pretty perfectly, so if you are more a watcher than a reader, you will miss out on almost nothing.