One Piece is the best-selling manga of all time - and, going by this first book, I have no idea why!
A kid called Luffy wants to grow up to become king of pirates. Which seems unlikely until he accidentally eats the gum-gum fruit and basically turns into Mister Fantastic from the Fantastic Four, becoming invulnerable to swords and bullets and seemingly everything, as well as strong, in the bargain! He’s gotta assemble a crew and he’s questing for the fabled treasure, One Piece.
Luffy is not an interesting protagonist. There’s nothing more boring than a main character who is as invincible as he is, who can effortlessly overcome any obstacle in his way and has no weaknesses whatsoever. But, like every other character here, he doesn’t have much of a personality either.
I have no idea why the pirates who had the gum-gum fruit in their possession didn’t eat it immediately and turn into Stretch Armstrong themselves given that doing so has literally no downsides. They just had it because Luffy needed to eat it and get those powers and so have these adventures - it’s that contrived. Also, every time the gum-gum fruit is mentioned - and it’s mentioned a lot - it’s called a “secret treasure” but literally everyone knows what it is so I don’t get what’s “secret” about it??
The story is tedious. Bandits fight pirates in a bar with no stakes; Luffy meets Koby, a dorky cabin boy that wants to join the Navy; and they recruit Roronoa Zolo, another invulnerable character, a master swordsman whose weapons are three large swords (which just seems impractical). Together they easily defeat the not-at-all-scary Captain Morgan and his Prince Joffrey-esque son.
That’s the whole unremarkable and unsurprising book. It’s SO BORING! I honestly can’t tell you one good thing about it. Maybe the first book is a dud and Eiichiro Oda’s extremely long series gets better somewhere later on down the line but, if Romance Dawn is anything to go by, I remain utterly baffled as to One Piece’s popularity.
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