So I’ve been a One Piece fan for the better part of 20 years. I started watching it in late high school/early college, as the anime was going through the Skypeia arc. I kept following the anime since, though at some point (maybe Impel Down? I don’t exactly remember) I switched from anime to manga. So yeah, I’ve been in this shit for a while.

When this was announced, I figured it was probably one of the worst candidates for a live action reimagining. And, having seen previous Netflix attempts (namely Death Note and Cowboy Bebop), it was clear they were very competent at completely fucking up anime adaptations. But I love One Piece, and figured I’d go against my better judgement and give it a chance anyways, even as trailers came out and it didn’t look good (legitimately the trailers were not solid).

So let’s go and see if I was right, or if, for once, an american live action adaptation that’s actually good actually happened.

What I liked

The fact that this is actually One Piece, and not something else wearing a One Piece hat. Like how the Netflix Death Note was just some random shit with Death Note in the title, rather than actually Death Note. So this show features the characters of One Piece, doing what the characters of One Piece would do, in a world that looks like the world of One Piece, with powers and stuff that characters in One Piece would have. Do you know how fucking refreshing this is? You know, the people who made this… actually are people that enjoy One Piece, and cared about doing justice to the story. This is what I liked about it. I was very much not expecting that, especially after seeing the trailers. They respect the property, they respect the fanbase, and they even respect the original creator. So many reboots and adaptations and shit decide that the fans are bad and the original creator is bad and that the thing being adapted/rebooted is bad and that it should be completely changed with no respect at all for anything… this does not do that. We haven’t seen the actors lashing out against fans or anything either, which SHOULD be the bare minimum, but at this point is actually amazing to see.

The characterization is pretty much perfect for pretty much all the characters. While Oda was kinda figuring out Luffy while the East Blue arc was running in the manga, here we get something more akin to how Luffy ends up a bit later on, though clearly still growing into that role, but in a way that’s pretty natural. The way Mihawk talks and acts, perfect. Zeff being unusually rough against Sanji to get him to follow his dreams. Alvida is an evil bitch, as she should be. Buggy is a freak, but a scary guy nonetheless, despite also being a bit of a ridiculous goof (also I think he should become the King of the Pirates). Koby is in his “learning how to be free” arc and doing it well. Even Helmeppo starting as a narcissistic asshole but slowly growing a conscience. Mostly no character is spared from being represented correctly. Heck, some I think are even portrayed better, like Kaya. If there’s any problems here, I’d say it’s Usopp not really getting much to do here and I hope he will get a bit more in future seasons, and Zoro was a bit weaker than expected (I still liked him, but this Zoro leans a bit TOO far in the stoicness, when orignal Zoro still had goofy moments and displayed actual emotion). Also Garp is way too fucking serious, dude’s a 100% goofball in the original, they need to loosen him up a bit before we get to Enies Lobby.

I love how accurate the characters actually look to their manga looks (more on the subject later though). They all wear clothes that the characters have worn in the anime and manga (with correct colors based on some of Oda’s color illustrations), have similar hairstyles and they don’t shy away from the hair colors either… they do take some liberties here and there, but generally, nice. I’d say there’s one side character I wasn’t happy about. I also have to appreciate the practical effects for the fishmen, it does end up looking decently natural… though not all of them survived. Some of the characters were purely amazing though, especially Zeff and, somehow, Mihawk. Mihawk literally just jumped right out of the anime, the casting, costume and weapons are absolutely amazing. Shank’s crew is also solid, I instantly recognized everyone. Even something dorky like giving Garp his dog hat or Nezumi his mouse hat is something I thought would’ve been considered too goofy to actually do, and yet they still did it.

There’s a bunch of little references to future stuff here and there. For example there’s a point where you can see wanted posters for Foxy and Bellamy, characters that pop up way later in the original story. This just shows care for the original creation and something that the fans would clearly enjoy. Even something like the Zoro intro scene having him fighting Mr 7 from Baroque Works is fairly niche knowledge, it is something that actually happened before the events of the manga, and he even looks like the goofy drawing Oda made of him in an SBS chapter (so that explains why this Mr 7 looks different from one you may know, the current one is the replacement for the one Zoro killed… and he’s just a minor character anyways). AND that establishes the existence of Baroque Works before they’re close to relevant, which is a cool bit of writing. Even some of the music comes from various parts of the anime, something modern reboots like to either not do, or use as a joke to shit on the original story. Bits of Bink’s Sake and We Are! show up and there’s probably others. There’s a part where Nami reads the story of Noland. I’m sure there’s a bunch of little stupid things I didn’t quite notice or just felt like they made sense in the current scenes (like random mention of islands like Mirror Ball Island from the Jango dance party thing).

I’ll put this in the “like” section, I think the fight scenes were pretty okay. Because of the CG involved, we don’t get Luffy to use his gum-gum powers much outside of fights. Normally he’d goof around with them a ton and he kinda doesn’t unless there’s a fight happening. The reason I’m putting the fights in “like” is that, even though they’re not as good as in the manga or anime, and straight up are missing important elements like fishman fighting in the fucking water to have a bigger advantage… or the fishman not seeming particularly stronger physically than humans except for Arlong (Kuroobi seems to just be a good fighter, rather than being stronger due to being a fishman in addition to being a good practitioner of fishman karate)… they’re still entertaining fights. The fight against Arlong was good here, but at the same time it was WAY better in the original story because Arlong does some really cool things in the anime that he doesn’t do here because Luffy does have some advantages that Arlong originally needed to work around to be able to damage him. Lots more biting and torpedoing and using his own teeth as fist weapons.

What I didn’t like

The visuals are not great. I know I praised some aspects of the visuals already. Some of the special effects, no problem. The sets, great. The costumes and overall look of the characters, mostly no problem. But the colors. One Piece is colorful as fuck. Even in the manga, it radiates life and brightness. So why is this adaptation so fucking dark? Most of the scenes are filmed in a dark room with basically no lighting, it’s pretty wild. The whole show feels like it has a dark brown filter all over it. I just really don’t like that. It’s a point that I hated in the trailers, and it still annoyed me as I watched. Like, why’s the screen pretty much always completely dark. Crank up that saturation setting and buy a fucking ring light or something, holy shit.

One thing that is not specifically bad but it was just weird to me is the visual style of One Piece not really being present. While the sets are very solid (even though I’m not a fan of Merry’s head here), there’s one thing that is obviously hard to replicate… and that’s the fact that One Piece characters look fucking weird. So many characters are ridiculously large or tall and scrawny or just shaped strangely with limbs that are way too fucking long or way too fucking short, in a way they just straight up could not replicate here. No camera tricks or anything to try and make it look more One Piece-like, it’s just normal looking people… looking normal… Again I totally get why, it’s just not realistic to copy the overall look of One Piece characters with real people without CG, but it’s something that I feel is very important to the manga and anime that is completely missing here. It makes me wonder how they’d handle some future characters, like Big Mom (or giants in general).

Where the fuck are Sanji’s curly eyebrows? It’s strange because the casting is basically perfect, the dude looks pretty much exactly like Sanji, acts perfectly, and learned how to do his attacks, but the eyebrows need to be a thing. Did they just forget to do it? I can understand why we don’t have Usopp’s nose (it would look ridiculous, unfortunately), but the eyebrows… There’s no excuse.

One thing that is desperately missing from the show is the Straw Hats goofing around on the ship. I know this is a minor thing as far as the plot of the show, but Usopp and Luffy acting like idiots and the crew overall bonding in-between the adventures on different islands is still something really important that should be present. There’s a levity to the situation in the original story that is just not present here.

I really wanted to see how they would deal with Don Krieg, considering the original 4kids adaptation changed his poison spikes to poison suction cups. But this brings me to a point of contention, and that’s the fact that they did, indeed, change aspects of the story. The Don Krieg example is the second most obvious, as his part of the Baratie arc is completely cut out. Instead he’s just killed off-screen by Mihawk (you see him for a couple seconds). Gin shows up for like 2 seconds, but it’s pointless since Krieg isn’t coming and he fucking disappears anyways. Instead, a bit later, Arlong pops in and fights Luffy, which is not quite as good a replacement.

But this whole Don Krieg thing is something that applies to many little things in the show. The Usopp Pirates, who are 3 kids that followed Usopp as their captain on Syrup Island, do not show up. Neither do Mohji (he’s a background character for a few seconds, that’s it), Richie, Johnny, Yosaku, Pearl, Jango (Jango used to be one of my favorite One Piece characters) or Hachi… and I’m probably missing some. The people in Nami’s village have no idea about Nami’s sacrifice to try and save them until she just straight up tells Nojiko. Luffy doesn’t actually learn about Nami’s backstory in the original story (at least at the point he does here, we can assume he learns about it after fighting Arlong), which makes the scene where she finally asks for Luffy’s help way better because Luffy’s trust in her didn’t require knowing that stuff. Arlong is somehow buffed from his original appearance despite having way fewer attacks (compared to having to use cutting and stabbing attacks originally to be able to really damage Luffy). These are all, overall, pretty small changes. I do think the overall storytelling is way better in the original series because of all the details that are missing here, but I also don’t think a lot of the smaller changes are that important, and there are some things that legitimately help the story a bit..

I do understand why some of these changes happened of course, and some I truly don’t mind. They needed to cut some of it for the sake of better pacing (since they were basically compressing 44 anime episodes into 8 slightly longer episodes). Like, Nami meeting Luffy and escaping with him in the first episode with the map, instead of meeting on Orange Island, no problem with me.

One thing that I realized as I was writing this is something that is a bit concerning if there are more seasons… And that’s the fact that everything happens in small enclosed areas inside buildings. Orange Island? All happens within Buggy’s circus tent here. The fight against Kuro and his group? 2 different rooms in a mansion. All the shit on Baratie happens inside the restaurant, combined with one very small platform outside of it for the Mihawk fight (things were certainly larger scale in the anime with Krieg). Most of the big fight against Arlong happens inside Nami’s room in the castle, despite having a lot of other stuff outside of it before that originally (and the pool and stuff outside of the castle is also way smaller, could definitely not fit momoo in there)… I dunno, it’s a weird thing. Again I understand it, because of course doing things in big open areas would require more budget for CG and effects and just space… but there’s some bigger stuff that happens after the East Blue saga, we can’t just be inside someone’s house the whole time when there’s giants and large scale wars and shit.

The Garp thing

I talked about Don Krieg being removed and how that was the second biggest change in the story in this adaptation. This here, is the biggest by far.

In the original story, the first time Garp shows up is in a cover story in the manga, during the Arlong Park arc (where he’s shown taking Morgan into custody). Then there’s a part where he’s taking Koby and Helmeppo under his wing to train them (which is a cover story in the manga, but actually adapted into 2 episodes in the anime 69 episodes into it). The first time he encounters Luffy in the main story (not in flashbacks)… is after Enies Lobby.

So stuff we learn about Garp and Luffy something like 315 episodes into the anime, is something we learn about them, like, 2 or 3 episodes into this live action version, and Garp has a really heavy presence here, chasing after Luffy throughout every episode. This is certainly a strange choice, that I’m not entirely sure how I feel about. I do think it’s funny that, if you’ve been getting into One Piece and haven’t made it to Enies Lobby yet, you get that completely spoiled to you if you watch the live action in-between your progress through the series.

I overall don’t think it’s bad that they did it this way, giving Luffy an overarching antagonist here that had some good meaning for that point in Luffy’s development. But I also don’t think it was particularly needed either. Like, maybe they could’ve cut some of this shit and maybe saved enough time to include Loguetown and end the season by showing the crew facing Reverse Mountain, ready to get into the Grand Line for season 2 (now that shit will have to happen during season 2, so who knows if they can even finish Alabasta in season 2).

That said, I do think including Garp in the intro where Gold Roger is being executed is absolutely fine, even with what we know now regarding the God Valley shit.

Oh and this is an aspect of the show where Oda apparently needed some convincing about since it’s so different from the original story. But in the end it seems he was okay with it.

Overall

This is actually really close. With very few slightly questionable casting decisions, some questionable story decisions and holy shit crank up the saturation… This is almost great. It really does show that the people who worked on it actually gave a shit, something that rarely happens nowadays in mainstream entertainment. And they had direct comments, recommendations and approval from Oda himself… certainly an improvement over the original creator of Cowboy Bebop saying he hates the live action version of that show.

There’s still a lot of improvement that could happen. The crew needs to be friends and goof around more, the visuals need to be better, get Zoro to act a bit more like Zoro, and they need to alter just a bit less of the original story (removing things that aren’t super important is fine)… oh and they need to somehow increase Nami’s breast size every few episodes because that’s just something that happens in the manga and anime.

I think this is an good base that can get even better in a second season. I’m honestly surprised this isn’t completely unwatchable. I was dreading this when it was announced, but somehow they made something pretty good.

This is a good starting point to get into the series, from here you can transition into reading the manga or watching the anime, then wonder 450 chapters in why it’s a surprise to the Straw Hats that Garp and Luffy are related.