One Piece Review

The reason to take One Piece seriously is bookkeeping. Oda plants a detail (a scar, a flag, a throwaway line about a fish-man's old crew) and settles it two decades later without the payoff feeling retrofitted, which almost nothing else at this length manages. The world is the other achievement: a globe with weather systems, an economy, a colonial history and an actual explanation for why the map has a hole in it, so the arcs read as visits to places rather than as stages.

The peaks are Skypiea, Marineford and Dressrosa: a four-hundred-year feud over a piece of land blasted into the sky, a rescue mission that escalates into a war the story had been quietly arranging since the first chapter, and a kingdom made to forget the people its ruler turned into toys. Oda's art is dense, cartoonish and increasingly crowded, and panels in the later arcs can be genuinely hard to parse.

The pacing is the standing complaint and it is a fair one, since arcs sprawl and the weekly schedule shows. The reveals land because the setup was real, which is rarer than tight plotting, and the sprawl around them is why the whole is an A rather than an S.