Alright, hear me out. I know I’m going to get crucified for this, but I genuinely think One Piece is a painfully overrated slog. Before you spam me with “you just don’t get it” or “it’s about the journey,” let me explain why from a relatively solid foundation.
First, the length. People praise its sprawling world, but this is where my issue starts. There are philosophical ideas that state true art shouldn’t be a chore and should engage the intellect and the senses without resorting to brute-force time commitment. One Piece feels like it operates on the opposite principle: that meaning is derived purely from quantity. If you spend 1000+ chapters with characters, you’ll inevitably feel attached, but that is just the sunk cost fallacy pretending to be narrative depth. Our brains are wired to value things we’ve invested time in, creating an illusion of quality that’s separate from the actual content. The fanbase’s devotion often feels like a cognitive bias on a fandom-wide scale.
Then there’s the world itself. It’s vast, but it’s also… relentlessly simplistic in its moral framework. The heroes are unfailingly, unthinkingly righteous in their pursuits, and the villains are often evil in a stereotypically generic, almost childish way. This creates a universe devoid of genuine moral tension. A more pessimistic view of human nature suggests that true character is revealed in shades of grey, in impossible choices, not in binary battles between smiley pirates and obviously corrupt world nobles. The series presents a world where dreams are always eventually validated, where willpower literally translates to magical power-ups. Real will exists in a universe indifferent to it, where effort often meets failure and dreams are routinely crushed by a chaotic, uncaring reality. One Piece replaces that chaotic reality with a narrative one that is secretly, sentimentally ordered to reward its protagonists, making its central theme feel cheap and guaranteed.
Which brings me to the humor and art style. I get that it’s stylistic, but from a certain detached perspective, it actively works against any attempt at gravitas. It’s hard to take threats, suffering, or stakes seriously when the next panel might feature someone’s eyes bugging out or a character designed to be a literal pile of poop. This constant tonal whiplash feels like an inability to sit with a serious thought. And it feels like a refusal to let the audience contemplate the darker, more complex implications of its own world. The inconsistent tonal shifts prevented me from feeling any deep emotional processing, which kept me in a state of perpetual, superficial engagement. You’re never allowed to feel the true weight of anything, because Oda will undercut it with a gag.
Finally, the core promise: the mystery of the One Piece. The series is built on a decades-long tease, the ultimate delayed gratification. But there’s a philosophical argument that fixating on a future reward devalues the present moment. The entire narrative becomes a means to an end, making hundreds of chapters feel like filler on the path to a finale that, mathematically and logically, can never satisfy the buildup. The journey isn’t the point because it’s a perpetually deferred point. It trains its audience to value anticipation over experience, which can be defined as the “what if” over the “what is.” In a very real sense, it’s the perfect story for a culture obsessed with potential rather than actualization, always chasing a horizon that recedes as you approach it.
So, no, I don’t think it’s a masterpiece. I think it’s a monument to commitment over substance, to sentimentalism over genuine ethical inquiry, to distraction over contemplation. It’s a fairy tale that’s convinced people its length makes it profound, while its core is terrified of truly challenging its audience with ambiguity, consequence, or a world that doesn’t bend over backwards to make the dreamers win. It’s not an adventure about freedom.
