Rewatching One Piece in 2025 Isn’t Very Fun

One Piece is, without a doubt, one of the greatest anime series ever created, but even Eiichiro Oda’s masterpiece has a few flaws that make watching it pretty rough. No other anime series could get away with the errors One Piece brings to the table, and that’s a testament to just how great the series is.

After over 1,000 episodes, it looks like One Piece is reaching its peak, but there have been more than a few bumpy moments during the anime’s journey. The series has been airing for more than 20 years, a feat in and of itself.

The remake of One Piece, called The One Piece, looks to address some of these issues and make the series more palatable for a wider audience. The original series, however, still has all of these flaws, forcing new viewers to sit through some pretty frustrating moments.

Watching One Piece from the Beginning Is Rough

No Other Anime Would Survive These Flaws

One Piece has a few errors that feel incredibly out of place in modern anime. Most anime series from the early 2000s didn’t have these errors either, making their inclusion in One Piece fairly confusing. One of the biggest frustrations that comes with watching One Piece is the intro.

Every anime has an intro, but One Piece has two. For hundreds of episodes, the series includes two intros. It’s a largely unnecessary move that feels like it was introduced to slow down the episode’s pacing, which is brutal because One Piece’s pacing is already about as slow as it gets.

Not only do episodes feature two intros, but each episode also features a recap of the previous episode. These three speed bumps turn a 22-minute-long episode into a 16-minute episode, moving the series along at a snail’s pace. One Piece will always be one of the greatest anime ever, but this aspect gets in the way of the series’ success.

Pacing Is Abysmal

Few Series Are Paced as Slowly as One Piece

One Piece didn’t reach over 1,000 episodes by accident. To the franchise’s credit, the series rarely has a filler episode, and each arc adds something significant to the series at large. Because there is so much lore, however, fans starting from the beginning can feel a little anxious as they look to catch up to where the anime is at currently.

It’s no exaggeration to say that One Piece is one of the slowest-paced anime series ever created. Toei Animation, the studio behind One Piece, proved this when they remastered the Fish-Man Island Saga. They turned a 58-episode arc into 21-episodes and included every piece of relevant information the arc put forward.

They cut the arc down by nearly a third, and it was great because of it. If this were the case for the rest of the franchise, The One Piece might be able to turn 1,200 episodes of One Piece into just 500, saving viewers hundreds of hours in the process.