One Piece is, obviously, still not finished. There have been over 700 chapters since the one pictured above, and yet, not done! But, as there is no chance in hell I'm going to try and track this entire series down, we're going to hit it now.
So, One Piece is about Monkey D. Luffy, a kid whose dream is to become King of the Pirates. The last King of the Pirates died over 20 years ago, and, as he stood on the execution platform, announced to the world he left all his treasure in a mysterious location. The notion got started that whoever found the treasure would be the new Pirate King, which kicked off an "Age of Piracy," so there's no shortage of competition. There's also the fact Luffy ate a "Devil Fruit", which, while it made his body like rubber, with all the stretching and inflating that allows, also means he sinks like a stone in the water. As a pirate, sailing the seas, that's a bit of a pothole. So is the fact that he's often an impulsive idiot, in the sense of not learning basic seamanship before setting sail, or diving into the ocean to catch a fish he saw, despite the whole thing about sinking in the ocean.
Luffy travels the world, gathering a crew, each with their own dreams ranging from becoming the world's greatest swordsman, to making a complete map of the world, to finding a fabled place where all the ocean currents intermingle and all the world's fish can be found. They end up fighting pirates a lot, less over treasure than because those other pirates are hurting innocent people. The "Straw Hats" (named for Luffy's hat, a gift from a pirate he admires, who received it from the previous Pirate King) occasionally pursue treasure, but usually end overthrowing a dictator in the process.
On the one hand, it's often silly. The Straw Hats all behave like dorks or idiots at times, or have comical reactions to something ill-advised their captain does or says. Zoro and Sanji will start fighting with each other in the middle of a fight against enemies. They might fight a pirate that looks like a clown and is very self-conscious about his big red nose, or a guy whose Devil fruit lets him take on properties of things he eats, so he eats a house to gain protection, or eats himself to slim down and resume chasing someone through doors.
There are times the crew's disorganized, chaotic approach feels out of place in a tense situation, but it does contribute to that feeling this is not some well-honed, elite tactical unit. This is a friend-group of (mostly) teens trying to find their way through difficult situations on the fly.
Because Oda also establishes, almost from the start, that this world is deeply fucked. Luffy finds his first crew member tied to a post in a Marine base, where Zoro is enduring 30 days without food as part of a bet with the entitled son of the base's commander, as a way to protect a young girl and her mother. The brat runs roughshod over the town because his father kills anyone who opposes him, and fully intends to have Zoro executed as soon as watching him starve ceases to be entertaining.
The further along the series goes, the worse things get. There's a "World Government", but it's only real concern is maintaining the power of the people seated atop the world, in a "holy city" thousands of feet above the seas. The citizens of that city have almost unlimited leeway, including being able to murder other people if they see fit, or claim them as slaves. If a pirate takes over a random island, they don't care. If pirates kill or plunder from innocent people, not their problem. It's notable Luffy had defeated plenty of pirates, Marines, and even attacked the symbol of their judicial system, but it was only once he punched one of the holy city's citizens that an Admiral came down to squash him like a bug.
The Marines (or Navy depending on which translation you see) are ostensibly the peacekeeping force, but they can only help the regular people so long as the Government allows it. If the Government orders an entire island, and all its inhabitants killed, the Marines must either obey or die as well. Pirates can be offered positions as "Warlords", which means they help the Government out when requested, but can otherwise do whatever they want, including overthrow the governments of nations.
Luffy's grandfather is a famous Marine, but we see firsthand how useless he and his belief that he can serve "Justice" ultimately are, when he sits and watches a child he was entrusted with get killed, simply for who his father was. Monkey D. Garp can't bring justice to the worst people on the planet, because they're the ones giving him orders. The system isn't broken, and therefore can't be mended from within, because it works exactly the way the people who set it up want it to work.
Which is how it keeps falling to Luffy and his allies to fix all these situations, overthrowing dictators, crushing people who use others for experiments, for slaves, who starve a population or strike them with drought. When the system was built to be inherently biased a certain way, you won't get anywhere working within its structure.
(You'd think the fact his own son left the Marines to start a literal revolution would have tipped Garp off, but apparently not.)
I don't love everything about the series. Oda leans a lot into "humor" about characters being perverts. Brook, the skeleton in the picture above, tends to ask women upon meeting them if he can see their underwear. Or Sanji's bemoaning the fact someone else go the invisibility Devil Fruit he always wanted, for sneaking into women's baths. The proportions Oda gives most of the women would give the worst excesses of '90s Image artists a run for the money, and that only seems to have gotten worse as the series progresses. There's not really any room in Robin or Nami's torsos for organs, unless they've somehow moved to inside their boobs.
Also, there was a big reveal in the last 100 chapters or so that Luffy's Devil Fruit is not what we had been told it was all this time. Instead, his is a super-special Devil Fruit with a historic lineage that the World Government wants contained. And I know that "the protagonist is actually really unique in some way," is a common shonen thing. Goku's an alien, Naruto's the vessel for an incredibly powerful spirit fox, I feel like there was all kinds of shit going on with Ichigo Kurosaki. But I liked the idea Luffy had what was regarding as a fairly low-level Devil Fruit, but, through his creativity, he could fight guys who control sand or lava or gas or manipulate time.
Plus, it's not internally consistent that the World Government knew the fruit was "disguising" itself as a "rubber" Devil Fruit, but this young pirate shows up, causing trouble with a rubber Devil Fruit, and they don't immediately send out the big guns to stop him? They wouldn't even have to explain why they're sending an Admiral after a rookie pirate with a bounty of only 30 million (it's over 3 billion now,) because they never have to explain. Especially if they pick the right admiral, AKA, the mass murdering Admiral Akainu.
Anyway, I like the series best up through the Ennies Lobby arc. Probably related to my preferences when it comes to superhero team roster sizes, I liked the Straw Hats at a crew of 7. It was manageable, you could, in theory, give everyone some time as the lead, or with a subplot, and everyone would be able to bounce off each other with some regularity. I wouldn't say the stakes were smaller - they were still stopping attempted coups, taking down power-mad tyrants and challenging the Government - but things were a little more focused.
The Straw Hats are up to 10 now, but there's maybe 2 crews allied with them, and an entire fleet that claims to follow Luffy, that I'm not entirely sure he even knows exists? And all that means a lot of time spent on backstories about this character or that character, many of whom I don't care about. The whole thing with Trafalgar Law and Dolflamingo might be One Piece's equivalent to Jean Grey and Scott Summers in the "dooooooooooon't care," category. And that means we might go dozens of chapters without any real focus on a character I do care about.
The series is supposedly in its "final arc", but I feel like I've been hearing that for 5 years. Oda seems to have so many plates spinning at once I don't know how he's going to bring things to a conclusion. That's his problem to solve, though there have been enough things he teased early in the series that paid off or turned out to be significant later, that I suspect he's had it largely worked out for a while.
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