One Piece

by Miles Perzewski

If any of you have ever even slightly liked DragonBall, then One Piece is what you should be interested in!  One Piece is so good, it’s not even funny. In Japan, One Piece is more popular then both Naruto and Bleach combined! People just need to give it a try.

My first encounter with One Piece was way back in 2003 when Shonen Jump first came to the US. All I can say is there wasn’t a whole lot of appeal just by looking at it. I never even read it or gave it a chance. Even years later when my friend said how great it was, I still didn’t listen. I think the main reason for all this is it couldn’t even be viewed due to 4 Kids horribly butchering the anime to utter garbage. I had no involvement with the series til FUNimation came along and announced they had acquired the rights to dub (and completely save) the show. This happened in late 2007/early 2008 and is when I became interested in the series.

Watching what FUNimation has put out thus far, I can’t believe how amazing it is. I’m trying to convince one of my friends who loves Bleach to try One Piece, but he just doesn’t seem to want to even try (he says the art is weird). Maybe that’s true; I can say that the art is different. You could say that Initial D has weird art too and I almost didn’t want to read it because of that, but once I did – wow – so good. Maybe you just gotta get used to the art style.

It’s kind of sad that One Piece has never really taken off like it has in Japan. It is so grand that my undying love for DragonBall is shifting to One Piece. It’s very, very heavily influenced by DragonBall too. That’s what the mangaka Eiichiro Oda grew up with. Both series have amazing qualities. I’ve just got to get people to try it. You can’t just watch one or two episodes and expect to get instantly hooked. It really grows and gets better the further you go. One thing that needs to happen with VIZ (who translates the manga) is deal with Zoro. Not cool how they keep calling him Zolo. His name is Zoro and that’s the way it should be. This is much like them changing Majin to Jin in the DragonBall manga for what can be seen as no reason whatsoever. Other than that, FUNimation’s got it right. Zoro all the way for them. Just try it – anybody who’s a fan of any kind of shonen anime or manga is in absolute need of One Piece!