User blog:Kaido King of the Beasts/Future of the One Piece Anime

Last week I talked about openings, but given the episode that just aired I thought it would be good to talk about the actual content.

As I said before, I got into the anime rather recently, around late May. But as soon as I got into it, I soon found myself in the midst of the sea of complaints. Thus, I had to find out for myself: was the One Piece anime good or bad?

Note that I mean the current Dressrosa Arc anime, not anything earlier than that.

The Bad
As most of us know, the entire anime situation was brought on by Toei once they found themselves ~40 episodes behind the manga. That's ridiculously close, and given Oda's work schedule they'd catch up pretty quickly and get screwed over. So the only way to avert the crisis before the Dressrosa Arc ends and they can plunge into filler do more stupid stuff is to do an episode-a-chapter format.

However, most chapters aren't packed enough to equip a 20-minute episode, and so Toei attempts to stretch it out by adding minutes of recap, pointless filler, and staring contests. However, this does not create good episodes, and I often closed the anime site with mixed emotions. Was it really worth it to spend 20 minutes watching pointless stuff?

The Ugly
Episode 697

The...Good?
After the atrocity of Episode 697, and with the Doflamingo confrontation/Corazon flashback right around the corner, I wasn't very hopeful about anything. But I heard that the next few episodes would be good improvements, so I stuck with it.

The next three episodes weren't perfect, but they were good enough to make me interested. Then came the Corazon flashback. And that is when I was blown out of the water.

There was just as much emotion in the two beginning flashbacks as there were in the manga. Law's and Doflamingo's sufferings were not just them staring at their torturers for minutes on end. And the scenes on Minion Island were just as beautiful as those in the manga, possibly even better. Plus, we got more X Drake and more fights, probably the best filler I've seen in a while. Basically everything was incredibly faithful to the manga, and even the extra scenes seemed to make the whole thing better, a real rarity.

OK, I'm done fawning, although I stand by everything I've said so far. Now let's get to...

The Future
I'm not looking forward to next episode at all, because it's just going to be recap of the present like the manga was. The episode after will be great regardless of stalling, due to this scene, but how will the anime go in the future?

Obviously the quality of the future episodes pretty much depends on the budget and Toei's direction and it's pretty much up in the air

Will future episodes be as good as the past few? All of them will be amazing Most will, a few won't Some will, some won't A few will, most won't They will all SUCK

The other important question is, what will the anime do after it gets through the Dressrosa Arc, however long that will take? I joked that it would make the same mistakes as Dressrosa, but I don't want them to. Even though filler usually sucks, I want Toei to do enough filler so the manga can build a decent headstart. I'd prefer a filler episode that runs smoothly to a canon episode with staring contests.

What do you think about the anime's future?

After Dressrosa, the anime should Do lots of filler Do the same 1 chapter per episode format Catch up to the manga and die hue hue hue

What do you want the anime's future to be like? Run by Toei until the series ends, hopefully they'll get their shit together Get passed on to a new company (hit or miss really...) Get rebooted by a new company (also hit or miss) Get canceled