Wait. I'm Confused. Who's on the Cruise Again?

Review: One Piece
Updated: 2/9/03

Anime/Manga/Games/Doujinshi/Fandom

Reviewed by: NotHayama

Title rating: PG/PG-13 for official content (violence as well as some underage drinking and smoking), fandom ranges from G to NC-17 as some fanartists simply have no scruples

-143+ anime episodes on Japanese TV (1998-present), still running
-27+ manga (1997-present), still running in Weekly Shounen Jump Magazine
-OVA, 4 movies
-8+ video games on various consoles
-Card game

Since watching the first 52 episodes of the anime One Piece, I've decided that I want to be a pirate when I grow up. You get to sail around with your friends having adventures. You don't have to go to class or do homework, and you can sleep all day as long as there are no bigger, meaner pirate ships to fight. One Piece is better than historically accurate--it's like the games of pretend you played as a kid, only written by a talented adult instead of you and your punk-ass little friends beating each other up on the "pirate ship" (cardboard box).

The premise of the show is simple. Rufi (Luffy, Luefy, Rufy, etc.) is a boy who wants to become the Pirate King, a title given to he who finds the legendary treasure One Piece. He's definitely made to be in the running, too--after eating a Devil's Fruit (a legendary fruit that gives its eater special powers) as a kid, his body turned into rubber, allowing him to stretch his limbs to ridiculous lengths and bounce back bullets and other death-inducing weapons. Now, as this super-powerful rubber man, Rufi sails around the ocean to find crew members, have adventures, and beat up bad guys. The series is set up so it could go on forever: the treasure One Piece is at the end of the Grand Line, a long strip of ocean with an unspecified number of islands to stop at and a huge number of increasingly difficult villains to fight on them. Even with 27 manga tankoubon and well more than a hundred television episodes released in Japan (and both manga and TV series still going strong), the anime of One Piece still isn't yet available in the U.S. Although the series has been bought for a North American release by Funimation, they haven't announced any dates yet and their official website is strangely free of any One Piece news.

Anime

The anime is done by Toei, the studio responsible for such long, successful, and marketable series as Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball. For those of you who just rolled your eyes at the idea of another Dragon Ball, don't worry. While One Piece is similar in length, success, and marketability, that's where most of the similarities end.

One Piece has a lot of things going for it that appeal to an older audience. First off, the cast of characters is fantastic. The main cast consists of the six (and counting) members of Rufi's crew: Rufi, Zoro, Nami, Usopp, Sanji, and Chopper. While most viewers like Rufi, Zoro, and Sanji from the start, solo girl pirate Nami and Usopp the useless guy with the nose are quite annoying when they're first introduced. However, Nami's character problems are mostly solved during a backstory arc some 25 episodes later, and somehow through the course of the series Usopp's annoying aspects stop being constant irritations and become amusing and appropriate parts of his character. Plus, Usopp adds a certain uncertainty to fight scenes--Zoro and Sanji can solve most of their problems by slicing or kicking respectively whatever's in their way, but since Usopp's main fighting technique is running the hell away it's more interesting to see what he's going to come up with to win (and his wins are more of an accomplishment since they're so rare).

Rufi suddenly notices he's on TV.

The crew members each get a lot of character development, enough so they can all play lead when needed, and their own flashbacks to boot--not to mention that some of those kiddies have substantial amounts of angst to deal with. Still, there's no sitting around to brood or whine, like a certain anime I could mention. Emotional scenes are done really well, without excessive melodrama, and there are some very convincing crying scenes (One Piece has a whole lot of crying men). The voice acting is also quite good. Mayumi Tanaka, the seiyuu who plays Rufi, is particularly awesome.

Something must be said about Tonytony Chopper, the shapeshifting reindeer/medical doctor who appears around episode 80. Generally, I hate animal sidekicks. They aren't funny, they're nauseatingly cute, and they take time away from the interesting, important, human characters. Needless to say, I was not looking forward to his appearance in the series ... but I ended up having to take back all my whining. Although Chopper looks like a round bipedal reindeer, his character is as well developed as any of One Piece's human characters, with a complex backstory, a deep, sympathetic personality and lots of the amusing character quirks that Eiichiro Oda loves giving his characters. Plus, his voice actor is Ikue Ohtani, whom I absolutely love. Those of you who have seen up to Sanji's appearance in the anime know her as the voice of baby Sanji.

The One Piece story follows a strict formula. 1.) The main characters reach a new island or port. 2.) They meet the residents, and find out that there's some problem there. 3.) Solving the problem requires that certain bad people get beaten up. 4.) At first, it looks like the heroes are no match for the villains, and they get horribly beaten and skewered. 5.) Then, with the last ounce of their strength, they get back up and defeat the villains, usually with some accompanying statement about friendship and bravery. Repeat this until all the male characters have had a one-on-one fight, then the crew leaves the town to start over. This may sound boring, but that's certainly not the case: there are tons of unique variations on the problems and fights, character pasts are not usually what you'd expect, and there are a few wild card people that aren't on a specific side who come and mix things up a bit.

As with almost all long anime series, there are filler episodes. Luckily for us these are not nearly as bad as most of the fillers I've seen in other anime. One Piece fillers are generally pretty funny, and while they have some inconsistencies with the rest of the plot, at least the people stay in character. Besides the movies and a short TV arc involving a little girl and a dragon there are only a few fillers in the series, anyway.

Riverdance--only with much, much more pain.

The very first animation of One Piece came out in 1998 as a half hour OVA only available through a mail order giveaway in Weekly Shounen Jump. Understandably, it's almost impossible to get in this country. I can't review it because I haven't seen it, but the plot seems to be fairly standard filler material. Four movies have also been produced, with more to come I'm sure.

The only One Piece movie I've seen to date is the third one, Rare Monster Island. The crew lands on an island full of weird animals who decide they want Chopper for their king; it's basically an extra-long filler episode. The plot isn't anywhere near as good as any of Oda-sensei's storylines, and Chopper is more annoying when he's being written by a filler staff. It's not horrible or anything, but it's pretty skipable for anyone who isn't a really hardcore One Piece fan.

Manga

The One Piece manga is written and drawn by Eiichiro Oda and currently runs in the magazine Weekly Shounen Jump. It's also being translated for the English version of Shonen Jump published by Viz. Any repeat readers of this review may remember that I was less than happy with Viz's intended release schedule, but having actually read the first few volumes of Shonen Jump I'm going to have to take back most of my angry comments. They're currently publishing two chapters of One Piece in each monthly issue, which is about half as fast as the manga's coming out in Japan (this is quite a bit more One Piece per volume than they originally announced). Shonen Jump is selling really well from what I've heard, and they've mentioned success may lead them to further expand or even publish more often. I'd love to see a bi-weekly English phonebook manga. Biweekly English phonebook manga! Even just typing that feels good.

The manga has a few sections that were considered too gross or too much of a bad influence on children to make it into the anime. These include some underage smoking, a guy who ate his own leg, and 7-year-old Rufi stabbing himself in the face because scars are cool! The animation directors were probably smart to leave out that last one in particular. I can just imagine the headlines in Tokyo: "8-year-old Boy Stabs Self in Anime Reenactment."

When the crew runs out of food, a popular method of hunting is to open their mouths on deck and hope for low-flying gulls.

The art in the manga is very nice for the most part. The style is very simple (understandable with weekly Jump deadlines) and uses practically no screentone. The artist is really good at perspective, and there are a lot of shots from cool angles. Occasionally it's hard to tell what's going on in action scenes, but this generally isn't too big of a problem, and the comic timing and slapstick are great. The character designs are strange, to say the least. Eiichiro Oda really likes giving his characters odd features: his main cast sports one 6-inch nose, one facial scar, some naturally green hair and a very curly eyebrow. His side characters and villains are even weirder. Among them are an octopus man in a Hawaiian shirt, several guys covered in stitches, cat-themed pirates, an evil clown, and the illegitimate son of Michael Jackson and Elton John. Oddly enough, while Oda-sensei can draw hundreds of male characters who are distinguishable from each other at a glance, almost all his female characters look exactly the same. Really, the only way to tell them apart is their hairstyles, and by the episode 52/volume 11 mark, he's used all the normal styles I can think of and moved onto the bizarre (such as a pink ponytail mullet).

One Piece has spawned more than 8 console video games for assorted systems; PlayStation, GameBoy Color, and those mysterious Japanese handheld systems, the WonderSwan and WonderSwan Color. Grand Battle and Grand Battle 2 for the PSX are fighting games, and the other titles are usually types of RPGs (role-playing games). There's also a collectable card game. When a series is as successful as One Piece, it's no surprise that corporate bigwigs try to make as many spin-offs as possible, so expect even more games in the future.

One of the newest One Piece games came out several months ago in Japan for the GameCube, and has actually been bought for an American release! It's apparently similar to Super Smash Brothers, but with a strategy element (you're trying to be the first to get treasure back to your ship or something). It has gorgeous cel-shaded graphics and 1 to 4 players with team play available. The release date is yet to be announced, but from what I've heard this game should be really cool.

Zoro protests the "very insulting" likeness of him on the Playstation.

On the official Jump website there is this weird One Piece typing game which kept me amused for a little while. The directions and dialogue are all in Japanese, but the actual game is for the English keyboard. It's something to mess around with if you're really bored.

Doujinshi

It never ceases to amaze me how many sexual relationships Japanese fan comic artists can pull out of the most innocent sources. One Piece is a show where the main theme is friendship, and they make it very, very clear every single episode. None of the main characters are in any kind of romantic relationship, and as much as Sanji would love to get some, it's not going to happen anytime soon. Plus, the character designs are weird--no ridiculously lovely bishounen in sight. So I was surprised to find that at about 9/10 of the doujinshi out there have some sort of shounen ai content, and a good portion of those are very inappropriate yaoi. If you don't like shounen ai or yaoi, I wouldn't even bother looking. If you don't mind it, and can keep a straight face at the out-of-characterness when Sanji and Zoro burst out into shoujo spheres and gaze longingly into each other's eyes, check out this page for information and cover scans, or go to jp queen to buy stuff. A WARNING about jp queen: they aren't exactly careful about the content of the pages they scan in, so some innocent surfing can reveal some unexpected porn pics. They also have a history of mismarking items as clean when they definitely are not.

And the number one sign that the apocalypse is near: Usopp Yaoi Doujinshi. I always thought that one of the constants of the universe is that Usopp isn't getting any from anyone, but apparently I was wrong.

Fandom

The English One Piece fandom is fairly small, but if you dig enough on the internet there are some good sites. The best general info site I've seen is Destination: Paradise. This site has a ton of information about everything One Piece, and my review would have been impossible without it. It's particularly good if you want information on some of the more obscure One Piece stuff out there, including movies, games, artbooks, etc. There is also an excellent links page with a ton of One Piece sites, English and otherwise. My personal favorite parts are the translated interviews with the manga artist found on the bottom of the author page. Eiichiro Oda is an odd guy with a good sense of humor and the mentality of a little kid, and it's a lot of fun to read what he's written and said.

The most fun One Piece page I've found is Rum, Buggery and the Lash (PG-13 for adult humor). They have a very nice image gallery (the top pic's from there), and a bunch of entertaining extras and jokes. Definitely check out their altered pictures and bumper stickers. Oh, and this is one of the coolest music videos I've ever seen, hosted on animemusicvideos.org. The song is Captain Hampton and the Midget Pirates by the Aquabats. It's got some great lip-synching and timing, and the animation matches the song really well. I hope that when Usopp's voice gets dubbed into English he sounds like that guy from the Aquabats (faux British accent and all).

Quite clearly, we are on the cruise.

One Piece is a must see for everyone who hasn't had their inner child surgically removed. I'm giving it 4.5 stars out of 5 for making a roomful of college students sit in rapt attention, burst out laughing, and sing along with the theme song every single time. And if any of you know of a colorful pirate ship with a kick-ass but lovable crew that's looking for more members, please drop me a line.

Lianne: 5 stars. I give up. I'd give this show my essential organs if it asked.

Bad Jew: 4.8 stars. Do you want to know why this show is so good? Because Nami's a cartographer! Geometry makes any show great.