Toonami

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I did marathon the anime first, and then came to the manga after that. I feel that the anime was fine until it got ridiculously slow-paced with Water Seven and onward. The manga is certainly the better overall experience, though.

Anyways, I wanted to point out how funny it is to hear GSF complementing OP after bashing it for years just because he thought it looked stupid. My how the times have changed.

[LumRanmaYasha]

I still enjoy watching the pre-HD episodes of the anime (aka episodes 1-206). The episodes after that I find hard to watch these days because of their slow pace and increasingly worse animation and production values.

[gunswordfist]

I did marathon the anime first, and then came to the manga after that. I feel that the anime was fine until it got ridiculously slow-paced with Water Seven and onward. The manga is certainly the better overall experience, though.

Anyways, I wanted to point out how funny it us to hear GSF complementing OP after bashing it for years just because he thought it looked stupid. My how the times have changed.

Why does your good memory work when I do not need it to? One Piece's designs really have grown on me in just weeks. I genuinely like the show's look now. It helps that it's not being viewed on shitty '00s Saturday morning network television quality and no criminally bad Sanji voice acting. Seriously, his 4Kids actor needs to literally be jailed. Just throwing that out there.

Anyway, hell I might be reading the manga by this time next year.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Yeah, I do feel like 4Kids is responsible for some irreparable damage in terms of how tons of people perceive the series, regardless of FUNimation's quality dub. It's the same as how people perceive the entire Dragon Ball franchise based on the very lopsided quality of DBZ in combination with very badly done early English dubs. It doesn't matter that FUNimation got it done right with Kai. The damage was already done.

[gunswordfist]

All true.  In One Piece's case weirdness mixed with bad video quality and even worse voice acting was NOT a good combination. It wasn't even laughably bad, just bad.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Also a couple of notable things about One Piece:

-Oda had the basic outline of the story planned out from before starting it, thus this is one of the few long-running shonen where it's not actually all just being made up on the spot. A lot of plot points that may seem random or irrelevant or that you may not have even noticed early on have a tendency to come back for big payoff scenes hundreds of chapters/episodes down the line. And it's not retconning either, since Oda specifically puts visual or dialogue clues in earlier scenes.

-Along Park is the first really good arc, IMO, so it's a bit of a slow burn to that point, but then comes stuff like Baroque Works, CP9, and the whole Whitebeard War saga, which are among the greatest story-lines in all of shonen manga, IMO.

-And then the series goes downhill after that, so 3D2Y may be a good jumping off point if you don't want to be reading this series forever.

[LumRanmaYasha]

It's definitely not as good as it used to be, but it's still fine for the most part. Fishman Island sucks, but I thought Punk Hazard was good and it's held up for me on re-reads, and while Dressrosa has been inconsistent it's still had it's good moments. It's hardly become drop-worthy bad, imo.

[gunswordfist]

I remember hearing you say Oda planned out the series before it started, which is as crazy as it sounds. Of course, I still wish more/all mangaka did that with long running series, though.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I think it's still a bit too lopsided in quality. Dressrossa is better than the last two arcs for what it gets right, IMO, but stuff like Rebecca's sudden dependence on her father for protection, botching up Sabo's big reveal, having Big Mom intervene only to do nothing with that plot point (that's one that Oda should definitely have paid off sooner if he was going to bother even introducing it in the first place), and Usopp's horrible OOC moment just don't sit well with me. That last one in particular I still haven't completely forgiven Oda for. I believe his amazing scene several chapters later was like an apology letter from Oda to the fans for that whole fiasco.

Also, I think that we can both agree that Dressrossa has been going on for too long, now. Let's get to the Big Mom, Kaido,  and Vegapunk plots. The last one in particular has been built up for a while, and popular fan theory is that VP may actually be a good guy who ends up helping the Straw Hat Pirates in some way.

[Spark Of Spirit]

I wonder if he planned the uneven quality that far in advance? 

But, yes, the 4Kids dub did a LOT of damage to the series. I actually sat through the dub when it was on in order to watch the series legally, and it was really tough. And the dub didn't get better as it went along, it actually got worse. The voice acting in Alabasta is some of the worst dubbing I've ever heard in my life. That said, Zoro was pretty good. But then, he was the only voice actor who had seen the show before. The other actors were encouraged not to watch it and as a result completely whiffed their roles.

It was a shame when FUNi finally got the dub on Toonami that they pulled it not long after. It just wasn't enough to bring people back.

[LumRanmaYasha]

Yeah, Marc Diraison's Zoro was easily the best performance in the 4Kids dub. The worst, of course, was Sanji's. I still don't know what they were on when they came up with that voice for him.

I think it's still a bit too lopsided in quality. Dressrossa is better than the last two arcs for what it gets right, IMO, but stuff like Rebecca's sudden dependence on her father for protection, botching up Sabo's big reveal, having Big Mom intervene only to do nothing with that plot point (that's one that Oda should definitely have paid off sooner if he was going to bother even introducing it in the first place), and Usopp's horrible OOC moment just don't sit well with me.

I agree that those were all very misdone moments (Ussop's in particular genuinely infuriated me and still leaves a bitter taste even now), but I still find enough good storytelling like Law and Doflamingo's backstory and certain moments here and there like the coliseum stuff before Sabo's reveal, Franky's fight with Mr. Pink, and a lot of the recent conclusions to the battles with the Donquixote executives to be enjoyable and well done. I haven't been able to get excited about reading OP for a while, but there's still been good parts to this arc that I can appreciate, and the bad aspects haven't completely undermined those for me.

But yes, I agree it has gone on too long. At 80+ chapters, this has been the longest arc in OP so far and I'm glad to see things finally winding down. I would like to get back to the other plot threads as well, especially the Big Mom thing (it baffles me that Nami, Chopper, Brook, and Sanji have been written out of the series for over a year at this point.)

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I wonder if he planned the uneven quality that far in advance? 

Well, if the manga ever gets back to its former level of quality, then that'd mean that Oda just pulled the comic book equivalent of "New Coke to Classic Coke," which would have to be a plan.

Of course, he did originally plan for OP to last for 5 years, which would mean that it would have originally ended in 2002 or 2003 at the latest. So, he's only overshot his estimated runtime by about....12 years....so far....

Yes, perhaps the fact that the series has been running for over three times longer than he originally anticipated may have something to do with these likely unforseen drops in quality.

[gunswordfist]

O.o The series started in the 90s? that I did not know.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

As for Dressrossa, I did say that I enjoy it for the moments that it does get right, such as the ones that you mentioned. The reason that I call the quality lopsided is because of the moments that really bug me, such as the ones that I mentioned in a previous post.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

O.o The series started in the 90s? that I did not know.

The serialization of the manga began in '97 (the first version of the original one-shot was in '95 or '96). Until that point, Oda got part-time work as an assistant artist to other mangaka, including Nobuhiro Watsuki on Rurouni Kenshin, which has the now iconic Straw Hat Pirates logo appear in the manga as a tribute to the then newly launched One Piece.

The anime began airing in '99, but in '98 there was an OVA adaptation of the original one-shot, where the lead female character was voiced by Oda's (now) wife.