One Piece is easier to get into than you might think, even after 25 years

After 25 years, One Piece may seem like a vast ocean for potential new fans, but getting into the myriad adventures of the Straw Hats isn’t the epic undertaking you might think.

For a long time, I was someone who wrote off One Piece due to the sheer amount of it. When I first heard of Luffy and his crew, the anime show and manga were already hundreds of episodes and chapters deep.

Catching up seemed like a lot of work. So, instead, I watched the occasional anime movie and caught bits and pieces, enjoying Eiichiro Oda’s esoteric worldbuilding from a distance. That changed with the Egghead Arc.

Rather than trying to watch all the 1,000-odd episodes before it, I jumped right in at Episode 1,086 to see if the TV show was really all that interminable. And y’know what? I picked it up pretty quick.

One Piece isn’t complicated

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The Straw Hats have arrived at a futuristic island, where an old scientist called Dr. Vegapunk lives. He’s got a price on his head, and he has some knowledge about the world that the general population should know.

Luffy, Zoro, Nami, and their pals get involved, hilarity ensues. There’s not really all that much to understand: the Straw Hats are maverick heroes who tend to become embroiled in whatever calamitous events are occurring anywhere they dock.

It helps that I understand Shonen series pretty well from growing up obsessed with Dragon Ball and Pokémon, and they tend to follow similar beats arc to arc. But even then, it’s just not that deep – or at least, it doesn’t need to be.

Shonen arcs are jumping on points

You can take individual One Piece arcs as their own storylines, picking up bits and pieces of backstory as nuggets are dropped. Oh, Dr. Vegapunk is researching the Void Century, what’s that? A hundred-year period into which research is forbidden. Ah, gotcha!

If I’d been an ardent viewer, I’d know mentions of Void Century stretch back to halcyon days of the first 300 episodes. But you don’t need that information to get what’s happening on Egghead, it just creates more connective tissue.

By pushing against my own inherent desire to go back to the first installment on anything I’m curious about, I was reminded that this is how we used to enjoy television. You’d catch something in passing, a curiosity while flipping channels or when your regularly scheduled programme wasn’t on.

Don’t worry about what you’ve missed

Then you’d see enough to want another episode, then suddenly you’re enthralled and it’s appointment viewing. I hopped on the Pokémon bandwagon by catching the second half of the second episode; I’m not sure I’ve ever actually bothered to watch the very first.

Crunchyroll

The same is true for many televisual obsessions of my childhood: Dragon Ball Z, Buffy, Friends, Digimon, Power Rangers, the list goes on. Finding out what you’d missed wasn’t really a concern because that wasn’t an immediate option in the ’90s or early 2000s.

You waited for a rerun (an inevitability if the thing was popular enough), rented old episodes on VHS (a waste of our limited rental budget), or you knew someone who somehow had access to them already. Minus these options, you figured it out as you went and enjoyed the series regardless.

Finding something you enjoy, then immediately jumping into the pilot and first season, is a contemporary impulse, born from streaming and an abundance of access. It’s a welcome change, to be sure, but I think it’s dulled our ability to hop into something partway and fill in the blanks ourselves.

Canon can just get in the way

Crunchyroll

You don’t need to be canon-conscious at all times. Many long-running franchises aren’t. Most Lupin III installments can be taken as singular capers akin to James Bond, and Gundam and Sailor Moon are pretty easy on newcomers for their majority (latter more than the former, where you could stumble onto some dense future-politics).

Lingering questions can be a powerful motivator for sticking with something, and you can always Google the answer if it’s really bothering you. I was too cognizant of the episode counter on Crunchyroll or Netflix. I let the size of the waves dictate if it’d be a pleasant trip or not.

One Piece reminded me to just unfurl my sails and see where the waters take me. Whether that’s back through history or always forward is up to me, and that’s something we could all do with remembering from time to time.

If you’d like more piracy (of the good kind), have a look at our guides to The One Piece and Netflix’s live-action One Piece Season 2.