I’m in the middle of a lot of different things right now. Once I’m done with Final Fantasy VII and my replay of the Remake I’ll talk about those before I play Reunion or Rebirth (which did they go with for part 2?). But that’s definitely something I want to finish and digest for a little bit before I go saying things about Final Fantasy VII on the internet.

But it’s easy to talk about something that’s so hopelessly long that no one could ever finish it. With One Piece there’s no “ah I’ll talk about it when it wraps up”. I guess it would make more sense to talk about it on an arc-by-arc basis but I’m not sure I want to get that granular. I’m on chapter 160 right now of the manga, which is my first time trying to approach One Piece, and I’ve been moving through it at a pretty solid pace, it only really takes five or ten minutes to knock out a chapter. I joke about never finishing it because as I write this, there are 1188 chapters available on the Shonen Jump app right now and another one is set for publication tomorrow.

When I decided I wanted to get into watching the various Gundam anime series and OVAs, the idea that many of Gundam’s stories are completely separate one-shot universes made the whole thing a lot more digestible even if there is, in a broad sense, a frightening amount of Gundam media. I haven’t watched all of Gundam but I think if I said I’d watched half of all of it I might be right. I had a list on my phone but I guess I deleted it, which is just… Not in my best interest. I was keeping a record of which Gundams I had seen and I decided to just get rid of that information? I’ll make the list again when I write about Gundam 🙂 I’m supposed to be talking about pirates. Ah shit Bandai makes One Piece model kits. I like building model kits.

I’m going to assume you the reader have a general cultural-osmosis type understanding of what One Piece is. Anime about a stretchy pirate guy. Makes friends and fights wacky characters. It’s a really unique setting and I appreciate that it’s so comedy-forward. I didn’t watch a lot of One Piece growing up but I watched a lot of Naruto and I was worried that it was going to be too similar. Around the time One Piece originally came onto my radar as a pathetic worm-child I think I had been exposed to like… Naruto, Bleach, DBZ, the original 3 dubbed Gundam OVAs, Yu-Gi-Oh, Digimon… FLCL? Maybe? And while that list of shows runs the gamut as far as tone, content, style, length, and target demographic, I always assumed that One Piece just kind of fit right into that crowd. What blows my mind is that even though, again, I basically just listed every popular anime, One Piece stands out of the crowd like a single unblinking, drooling idiot making unbroken eye contact with you specifically. I don’t have any strong memories at all of catching One Piece on TV despite definitely seeing ads for it consistently for years. Maybe something about the ads had child-me avoid it? Maybe I was scared of Buggy. Maybe I’m still scared of Buggy.

I actually just popped the anime on my other monitor a few minutes ago to give me something to look at while I type. It’s 1999 Toei Animation which is untouchable nostalgia for me. This is the same studio that produced that era’s Digimon, Sailor Moon, and DBZ and it just looks perfect. I’m sure it’s mostly just a nostalgia thing but this is as “correct” as an anime can look for me personally. The reason I decided to go with the manga was partially because it’s easier for me to focus on, less data, less noise. But also because I’ve heard bad things about the anime’s pacing. Looking into it, it seems like the anime periodically has a 2-5 episode span where there’s no manga to adapt and the anime just has to invent some disposable plotline to tread water until the next chapter releases. I’ve heard people say “skip the filler” but it seems like the issue is overblown in regards to the actual amount of filler. Skipping it seems like it would be more annoying than watching it and honestly if you’re going to commit to a show that calls the first 1,000 episodes “Season 1” it seems a bit neurotic to pick around the handful of episodes that aren’t in the manga. Maybe some time I’ll have the chance the watch all of the anime and really get into that.

All that’s really just to say you should give it a chance, the manga at least but honestly probably the anime too, and probably without worrying about avoiding the filler. And don’t be intimidated by the length, or by the fact that there are multiple TV adaptations of it. Treat it like a serialized series, and break it up into arcs. Give the Shonen Jump app $4 a month and read a chapter of One Piece whenever you would otherwise scroll some terrible optimized feed. Even better if you can do it on an e-ink display. I wish I knew what I was shopping for there, I just want a panel I can read manga on, the Shonen Jump app has something like a dozen series I want to read so I feel like I’m just looking for an android-based e-ink tablet but I’m having a hard time finding anything that seems worth the money honestly.

Or just watch the live action one. I’ve heard only good things. Actually hang on, I haven’t even seen the trailer, let’s watch the trailer…

Wow it’s uh… Very gritty. And sepia. Seems like a really good cast. The kid playing Luffy seems like a good fit and it would’ve been so easy to completely blow that casting decision. Oh god Buggy. Yeah I’m definitely still scared of Buggy. Not sure how I feel about Sanji. Ah shit Mihawk looks great. Yeah apart from the color grading being kind of the worst shit I’ve ever seen in my life that looks like a cool way to get into it.

There are also a huge amount of video games, I’ve given a lot of them a try for various platforms. I would really recommend Pirate Warriors 3 if you like those Musou-style games where you’re functionally just a very fancy weed whacker and the weeds you’re whacking are thousands of armed men and/or moblins. There’s also a pretty fun GBA game, and One Piece Grand Adventure for the PS2 is a really great snappy time. None of these games really do the story any kind of justice obviously, but One Piece Odyssey does a pretty good job of being a self-contained story that I was able to jump right in to with limited knowledge of the series. In practice, it’s a pretty standard AAA JRPG, and the graphics are realistic in ways that aren’t always very appealing, but it’s also possibly the easiest game I’ve ever played so if you want something colorful, turn-based, and more or less impossible to fail at, I genuinely do recommend it.

I try to be as intentional as I can be with the media I consume, and an unavoidable part of that is finding alternatives to “feeds”. I’ve left social media behind entirely, but I still have a hard time avoiding content aggregate feeds and I find my life is much more enjoyable and vivid if I temper my attachment to non-local reality. I used to spend a lot of time getting hyped up over the next big video game release, and I used to spend a lot more time going down rabbit holes of increasingly upsetting news articles, and while it’s good to be aware of the state of things, especially now, it’s really easy to over-prescribe bad news. There’s a lot of it, and it’s the type of thing where gazing too deeply into it causes arcane madness and shit, so things like being able to read manga on my phone instead of stress myself out with high-engagement attention-optimized DoomSlop™ matter more and more to me. Same goes for my emulation handheld, I swear to god get an emulation handheld. Get a cheap one. Just make sure you get a brand-name SD card, the cheap ones die. Get a bunch of Pokémon romhacks on there. Or play Final Fantasy VII. Or fuckin’ uuuuuuuh play Irritating Stick. Play Little Nicky for the Game Boy Color. It’s better than your phone. I don’t even log in to Reddit any more, I just look at whatever’s on the front page and like… Why is every seventh or eight post somebody’s dead pet? That is so fucking depressing. Jesus christ. Like I get it. I have a cat. Here hang on. Look.

See, I have a heart. I have empathy in my heart. I can empathize with people experiencing the loss of a loved one. But holy shit. If I want to scroll on the front page of reddit I have to share in the emotional weight of a dozen strangers’ individual fifth worst day of their lives and I’m just like… This ON TOP of all the headlines about war and sex crime. Anyway next time I’ll probably talk about another anime or something. Get at me on Discord if you have any questions or requests. Mwah~