One Piece Review Introduction – Setting SailBlog Post Title One

What seems like an awful long time ago, while I was still in middle school, I used to scarf down all the manga on totally legal websites I could so I wouldn’t be in the middle of a series in case they got shut down. After one of these binges, Probably my 5th read through of Soul Eater, which I may write up a review for sometime, I saw One Piece sitting on the front page. Of course I had heard of One Piece, I had grown up during the prime of the “Big 3” discussion after all, but it was never a series where while I stood there looking at the disjointed volumes sitting on the school library shelves, that I decided to pick up. So in that moment, I click it and start reading. I admittedly, didn’t read much. I read around 20 chapters, didn’t click with it and put the series down. For years I always told people I tried it, but it wasn’t my thing. It wasn’t Dragon Ball, people took what I said and understood. I would keep that opinion for years.

I am now out of college as I am writing this, and as of this moment, I have emphatically reached chapter 800. Nowadays I have less sketchy ways of reading manga, the Shonen Jump app offers a pretty good deal of a subscription service, especially with how fast I read. I’ve reread Dragon Ball countless times, found new series like Black Torch, rediscovered strories I never finished like Claymore, introduced myself to older classics like the Yu-Gi-Oh mangas, and kept up with favorites like Blue Exorcist and the newer Dandadan. In between all these series, I’ve found myself to be more experimental than I was in my youth, trying different types of series that I’ve come to love, like Hikaru no Go and Blue Box, but last year I decided that, instead of trying new series, I should revisit some I didn’t like, This started with a full read of Naruto, which I may make a whole series review later on, I don’t think I care enough about it for a series of reviews. After slogging through Naruto, I decided, after a little break, they are both long series after all, I would tackle One Piece again.

I really didn’t expect to like it as much as I did, I expected to like it more, probably finish it, and keep with it, but there must’ve been a reason I didn’t like it. Right? It was after I got past Skypeia, I had read more than 300 chapters at that point, that I thought about that question. Why didn’t I like it, and why do I like it so much now? I was leaving for a trip at this point so I took a break from reading and pondered in my free time away from family and events. I eventually landed on it must be that I’m more patient, or perhaps I know more about where its going which causes me to be more patient, perhaps both. When I tried to read it in middle school, it was face value, I couldn’t see where it was going and it bored me, I just read “go to island, find person, fight bad guy, recruit person, go to next island” and didn’t stop to consider that that was merely act one, it was set up and I never realized. Now, a more experienced reader, with more patience, I breezed though that beginning portion, not hitting the wall that I hit as a kid. I just wasn’t ready for One Piece. But now I am, and I’m loving it. I’m going to break the review down between the “Sagas” since I don’t have a lot to say about some of the smaller arcs, but don’t want a giant wall of text that a review for the whole series would become. I am writing this introduction in the night of May 24th, and I’m going to start the East Blue review the next day, hoping to get a review posted at least once a week, but these first few may come faster as I want to get everything down before I start forgetting. I truly hope you come sailing with me to find out about the One Piece and the journey that takes us there!