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Areas One Piece Lacks In and Can Improve In The Final Saga
Voice of One Piece: What Can One Piece do to Perfect its Storytelling
There are many areas we can highlight where One Piece succeeds, especially its world-building, and you can’t do everything. Though it does become an issue at times when we’re just running instead of giving more emotion or tension to moments or characters.
But aside from small things, what did you really (or still) expect from One Piece from the fantasy (or even sci-fi) story that it is, do you think it goes all the way? Or does it truly take the themes and depth of what it meant to be a pirate and express/establish that, aside from the obvious Shonen tropes and archetypes?
I think one thing I’ve always wanted is for One Piece to use arcs to branch out the Straw Hats similar to Game of Thrones-esque characters. I’ve always wanted each SH to have their own character arc on each island so it fits their grand journey more. And while Oda does this here and there, it feels like SHs have had less focus, unfortunately, especially when weak characters such as scabbards are getting more attention. I think Momo paid off, especially with 1055, but the rest of the Scabbards have been poor and even disgraced with how little depth was given to the two deaths, which leads to my next point.