It’s Finally over…

After 4 years the One Piece Wano Arc has concluded in the anime and I have to say it doesn’t feel like it’s been that long, but time does fly fast when you are busy. If we look at some of the numbers for recent arcs like Dressrosa (118 episodes) and Whole Cake Island (95 episodes) it clearly shows that both anime/manga arcs have been longer after the time skip, I’m not sure if is this intentional or not – but there is the level of viewing fatigue happening over here for sure.

Luckily there are fan projects like One Pace that cut down a lot of the excess material and filler from the anime, which is great for people who are going to start the series now. So if it wasn’t clear already Wano Arc definitely is overtly long and I’m sure that’s not just the anime, I think there are segments and parts that really weren’t that necessary in the grand scheme of things. There were a lot of important events here that mattered and that is why I feel it was a more important arc than the aforementioned Whole Cake and Dressorosa arcs – so we can justify to a degree for this arc to be so long.

I’m honestly really curious though how much of islands there are left before we end up on Laugh Tale (The Final Island) and I don’t think there is the proper way to answer that question given that the geographical map of One Piece is all over the place honestly. I have a feeling that besides the very last arc, we aren’t likely going to have anything this long again happening on One Piece.

Stylistic Look of Wano Arc

Now that my pacing rant is over we can actually talk about more of the meat and potatoes of this arc as a whole. I think one of the major things that Toei animation did this season was to create this more detailed and traditional Japanese anime ink brush style and make Wano feel something very different. I believe that there have been a lot of crunch hours and outsourcing to keep such a quality up for so many episodes through the arc and I wouldn’t be too surprised if someone had died from the excess labor due to this.

All things said I think we can say that this quality is very high for such a long-running weekly series so kudos to Toei for their continuous work.

Kaido Was A Boring Villain

Don’t want to rant too much about the arc but it needs to be said that compared to Big Mom or Dolflaming for that matter Kaido was a huge letdown in terms of his backstory, motivations, or just his abilities which were lame. Imagine having over 4 years to build this guy up in the anime and all we get is a vague flashback that doesn’t tell much about him.

Yes, I’m aware that in the manga we get to know bit more about him through the old crew he was part of along with Linlin, Whitebeard, and others – despite all of that usually you want to have all that build-up revealed before the big fight commences.

I’m lowkey bored of writing more about Wano, it WAS OK but not excellent, some storyline segments were totally filler and not necessary as I’ve explained in the video above. If you want wider look into my thoughts the video probably summarizes it better.