AoTY: One Piece

Hello, it's been a while, hasn't it? Sorry about that, you can blame Twitter for my lack of productivity. Gone are the days where I'd spent about an hour typing up a big rant, or review. Why bother when you can get it done in 140 characters or less? I do feel bad about it though, and as I make my way through my anual "of the Year" post, I'll attempt to be more active in the blog world.

The Anime of the Year for 2009 is One Piece. At least, it would be if One Piece didn't start 10 years ago. Still, it's easily the most enjoyable Anime I've watched this year. Don't panic, I'll do a real "Anime of The Year" list next month, filled with new shows that can actually qualify. I wanted to take a moment to gush about One Piece though.

I remember picking up the show sometime in early 2001. By that time the show had been running for a little over a year. It was one of the first fan subbed shows I downloaded. I remember waiting a painful amount of time to get each episode of Kazaa or whatever P2P service I was using back then and falling in love with the series.

It's a strange kind of love though. See, I tend to watch a chunk of One Piece every couple years. A good 40-80 episodes usually, though one time I think I was so far behind that I watched 120+ episodes in the span of like a month. Whenever the show finishes up a particularly epic arc it would usually go into filler and I would lose interest for a couple years. This last time was no different.

At this point, I'm pretty sure I can safely say that One Piece is my favorite Shonen Jump series. I watched Naruto for a long while, and I still hang onto Bleach. But there's just something about One Piece that makes it stand out. I think it's largely due to the fact that the action stays with Luffy's crew, instead of branching out to a bunch of random side characters that I don't give a shit about. Sure, not all of Luffy's crew are interesting to watch, but I don't really hate any of them.

My favorite parts of the series usually revolve around Luffy though. He's obviously the toughest of the crew, and he's such a great guy. I always get pumped when Luffy gets pissed off over the treatment of his friends or innocents causing Luffy to go balls out, regardless of whatever consequences may come.

I don't want to spend too much time talking about the whole show though, rather I just wanted to talk about the last 50 or so episodes that I just caught up on last month, and why I enjoyed them more than anything else I watched this year.

Spoiler Alert: Mild Spoilers ahead.

Last time I watched One Piece was at the end of the Thriller Bark arc, a pretty great arc that had one of the coolest moments in One Piece involving Zoro and Kuma. I already knew what I was looking forward to in this batch of episodes though: Boa Hancock. I remember seeing pictues of her the last time I was into One Piece and thinking she was easily the hottest One Piece girl. Of course this prompted me to read up on her, and thus I was excited for when the show would catch up to her.

The main arc in this batch of episodes was the Sabaody Archipelago. There were some pretty epic moments in this arc including a pretty powerful ending where Luffy gets separated from the Straw Hat crew. Sadly there weren't too many epic fights, as the Straw Hats found themselves overwhelmed by more powerful forces for perhaps the first time in the series. There were some other great moments though, including the introduction of several powerful "Rookies" with bounties over 100 million.

I would watch about 4 of these episodes in a row everytime I got something to eat, or whenever I didn't feel like playing a game. It took me about two weeks to finish about 30 episodes. Not bad, considering I spend a great deal of time playing games, or watching other stuff with my roommate. I could tell I was hooked on One Piece again though, I'd talk about it with anyone I could, even if they weren't all that interested. Already I was more dedicated to watching these episodes than any other anime that had been released this year. Granted, I had a bulk of One Piece to watch, and new anime is only released once a week - sometimes I would have a backlog of episodes for certain series though.

Anyways...

After the Archipelago arc, I knew it was about time for Hancock to make her entrance. Again, I watched a few of the episodes every once in a while. That was until Boa finally showed up in an episode. I then proceeded to watch the next 15 or so episodes in a row until I was caught up with the current broadcast. Yeah... Needless to say, I'm a big Hancock fan. Not just because she's hot, but she's an interesting character, and I love the interactions between her and Luffy. Basically, she falls madly in love with him, but Luffy being Luffy really doesn't get it. But he is thankful to her, and nice to her as well. Resulting in her acting extremely cute on several occasions.

Granted, this is all a bit different than what I usually watch One Piece for, but I still enjoyed it. And it wasn't as if some epic shit wasn't happening in the meantime. Luffy unleashes a new powerful ability that will likely let Luffy overcome previously overpowered foes. And also the biggest fight in the history of the series is about to exploded as the world's strongest pirates are going to war with the Marines. Finally, Ace returns to the series in a big way, and Luffy is trying to meet up with him as a priority - even over reuniting with his crew members. So yeah - shit got real.

And that's about all I want to say, because I tend to scrap stuff that I got into too much detail about. I just feel that it's pointless to fully explain something, if people are interested, give them a reason to go check it out. As it is, I'm not too happy with how these ramblings turned out. Hopefully I was able to get the message across though. That being: I really like One Piece, it was the coolest thing I watched this year, go watch it. Easier said than done if you've never watched the show. We're on Episode 420 something at this point. So good luck newbies.

I'll be back next month with all those list I like to do, hopefully with 50% less rambling.