General & Others Why has One Piece failed so miserably in the West?

[JoNdule]

Anime quality light years between naruto and one piece.

Not to mention bleach that from hueco mundo and beyond had the finest animation in all of anime for some good 4-5 years.

One piece anime SUCKS.

On top of the fights not being nearly as cool as naruto, bleach and JJK.

Luffy was a trash main character even before the chosen one asura/indra copycat stuff.

One piece doesnt have a trendy cool one line powerup to break the Internet.

RASENGAN

BANKAI

DOMAIN EXPANSION

Can you imagine anyone in OP having something as cool as that? Of course not.

Post automatically merged: Jan 4, 2024

No one outside of OP community gave a fk about G5 lol, meanwhile that new bankai on the final episode of bleach second final season was EVERYWHERE.

It's hard to follow such a long show with the author blueballing everyone as much as he can, its about time we see the heavyhitters doing their moves.

One piece lack :
Any cool/impactful /iconic power system like Bankai, Ninjutsu,...
Any iconic, complex and revolutionary villain like Aizen,.. "But Doffy is ..." Doffy isn't even among the top 15 best anime villains ever
Any iconic fight bar maybe lucci vs Luffy....Big Maybe
Even the main cast isn't that iconic nor entertaining like Naruto team 7, Goku-Vegeta or Gon x Killua..

 

[CensoredbyWG]

One piece lack :
Any cool/impactful /iconic power system like Bankai, Ninjutsu,...
Any iconic, complex and revolutionary villain like Aizen,.. "But Doffy is ..." Doffy isn't even among the top 15 best anime villains ever
Any iconic fight bar maybe lucci vs Luffy....Big Maybe
Even the main cast isn't that iconic nor entertaining like Naruto team 7, Goku-Vegeta or Gon x Killua..

Powersystem:

One piece power system is boring af which also happens due to oda needing to balance the ultra strong fruits and because he learned from naruto and bleach that introducing metaphysical/conceptual powers destroy the powerscalling.

Pros: somewhat balanced power system
Cons: boring non hyped fights, fight choreography has never been one piece's strong point btw.

Fights:

The issue with the fights all relate to aforementioned one since you have boring powers then you also have boring fights not to mention the amount of Deus ex machinas that oda gives to the maincast on top of main characters learning in 10 minutes what villains needed decades.


Luffy gear 2 and 3 came from NOTHING, asura and DJ same, luffy learning ACoC vs kaido in one night, learning future sight vs katakuri in one night, zoro awakening both CoC and ACoC after seeing it once... its a recurring issue.

Naruto knew very well how to introduce new powers, bleach was FULL of asspulls, but they were at least hype and visually interesting.

Iconic villains:

Naruto was FULL of iconic villains, even tho the best of the bunch(orochimaru) got discarded by the author.

Talk no jutsu was the biggest flaw in the show + kishimoto lack of balls to kill villains and to avoid redeeming everyone, i literally stopped following the series after what they did to orochimaru.

I finished the show, but lost any interest of future installments.

Naruto vs sasuke part 1, neji vs kidomaru, gaara vs lee, deidara vs sasuke, sauske vs itachi, pain vs jiraiya, ichigo vs byakuya, ichigo vs ulquiorra, ichigo vs aizen, kenpachi vs gremmy, kyourako vs lille(despite the Deus ex machina), ichibei vs yhwach... one piece has NOTHING that comes close to it.
Characterization:

One piece characters are one dimensional af, oda gives them a gag to repeat ad infinitum and then goes back to gagging luffy.

Zoro from alabasta is the same zoro from wano, same goes for chopper, nami and usopp.

Sanji and robin are the few that actually change and evolve as the series goes on.

Big mom was characterized well, but oda threw it out the window to turn her into a walking gag.

Doflamingo is the best villain in the show, but also isn't all that.

 

[OneHater]

Saint seiya SUCKS, extremely dated with dogshit fight choreography.

Bleach has dogshit choreography and One Piece too. Saint Seiya has better fights than both shows.

Seiya having to restart Shiryu's heart
Ikki's genjustsu
Shiryu gauging out his eyes to defeat the medusa shield saint
Seiya breaking Aldebaran's stance
Shun using this nebula chains against Gemini
Shiryu being sent to the underworld/hades? twice by Deathmask.
Shiryu tossing his cloth in EVERY match
Hyogya using his master's absolute zero freezing technique against him

These fights were far more memorable and high tension than anything in Bleach or One Piece.

The 5 main saints are also better characters than the MC in Bleech and One Piece.

Seiya > Luffy
Shiryu > Zoro
Ikki > Usopp
Shun > Robin
Hyoga > Chopper

Jabu > Sanji
Saori > Nami

Bleach has a LOT of flaws, specially on it's plot, but you can't deny the influence and hype it has.

JJK is pretty much a bleach ripoff to the extent where the author copies the panel by panel.

But those influences were from Yu Yu Hakusho or Saint Seiya. The only unique thing I remember from Bleach was that Aizen being a really bad villian, "I planned everything from your birth to our fight here. Everything is according to my plan. I am Aizen-sama." He was basically a generic jRPG god.

How many shows can stay a single decade without releasing little to anything while still keeping up a huge fanbase?

There will always be a market for a mid battle shonen and bleach is as good or better than its peers like mid clover.

Not to mention the most interesting and creative power system in shonen alongside naruto's.

No, that would be JoJo's stands.
Bleach has way too many dues ex machina.
JoJo has many dues ex too but a high percentage of fights are won through strategy while Bleach has basically no strategy.

One piece, as you said, excels at narrative and story writing which is where both naruto and bleach disgracefully failed.

To be precise, I would say say lore and mystery more so than narrative/plot. The plot of each arc is about the same as Dragonball and that's to defeat the current big bad after jumping through a few hopes. the straw hat's actions in each arc have almost nothing to do with the overall plot of finding the One Piece, it's all filler.

A show where women have little to no importance, always in mini clothes with gay characters always as the butt of the joke is aimed for the "woke" crowd? Hahahaha

One Piece is about anti-racism, open borders and overthrowing the oppressive world government.

Powersystem:

One piece power system is boring af which also happens due to oda needing to balance the ultra strong fruits and because he learned from naruto and bleach that introducing metaphysical/conceptual powers destroy the powerscalling.

Pros: somewhat balanced power system
Cons: boring non hyped fights, fight choreography has never been one piece's strong point btw.

Fights:

The issue with the fights all relate to aforementioned one since you have boring powers then you also have boring fights not to mention the amount of Deus ex machinas that oda gives to the maincast on top of main characters learning in 10 minutes what villains needed decades.


Luffy gear 2 and 3 came from NOTHING, asura and DJ same, luffy learning ACoC vs kaido in one night, learning future sight vs katakuri in one night, zoro awakening both CoC and ACoC after seeing it once... its a recurring issue.

Naruto knew very well how to introduce new powers, bleach was FULL of asspulls, but they were at least hype and visually interesting.

I disagree. Devil Fruits in One Piece are MORE creative than Ninjutsu in Naruto and comparable to Stands in JoJo.
Every writer (mangaka) has strengths and weaknesses and Oda isn't good at creative high tension fights that maximize the potential of his devil fruits. He switched over to Haki because Oda isn't Araki and he wanted an easy, brain-dead, shonen ki/cosmo battle system. This same issue occurred to Naruto at the end of the story.

Law is criminally underrated. His DF allows him to defeat Logia types without Haki and his abilities allow for super creative fights but he is totally underutilized for looney toones G5.

Talk no jutsu was the biggest flaw in the show + kishimoto lack of balls to kill villains and to avoid redeeming everyone, i literally stopped following the series after what they did to orochimaru.

Yep. I wonder if his editor's pressured him into that path or if that was his choice. He lacked the balls to turn Sasuke into a real villian like Dio and then have Naruto kill him.

 

[Saikō No Kenshi]

Well I'm from Germany. I would say manga popularity is on the rise by a huge huge magnitude....

From my point of view Manga will be extremely popular I'm the next few years.

You can see the development everywhere, merchandise etc.
I see Luffy very very often.

The most popular manga for years was Dragonball. I believe it is now One Piece. Not Naruto, not Bleach and others.

Manga is by now very popular here. In the next years it will be huge very huge.

Btw the west is not only the USA, we don't care about 4Kids dubs etc.

During my Holidays in France I witnessed how popular Manga was there especially One Piece.

You could see old men with Luffy shirts haha.

 

[Levi]

Dbz Naruto bleach death note hell even Pokémon

 

[Akagame]

The anime sucks terribly, that’s part of the reason why.

 

[Gaimon The Pirate]

Character wise Kishimoto claps.

Shikamaru
Gaara
Have better characterization than most Straw Hats.

Gaara of the not relevant in the plot other than being strong sand?
Shikamaru slaps.

On the other hand, characters that are irrelevant:
Konohamaru
Rock Lee
Kiba
Fat boy
Most of the leaf
NEJI (oh no he is dead! Let's hold him a funeral and not for the fodder that died in the war)
And many more

Post automatically merged: Jan 5, 2024

The anime sucks terribly, that’s part of the reason why.

To this day. I dont get why it's so shit.

 

[Dragountless]

The main reason is quality of anime adaptation. For example, it was possible to fit into 250 episodes, and not 1000, how many more there are. Don't drag out scenes for tens of seconds, make good choreography and pleasant musical accompaniment as in Bleach.
A secondary reason is competition. Ninjas, Spirits, Aliens, Martial Arts will always be more popular than "Pirates" theme. Moreover, in the West it is already too worn out, those "pirate stuff" is already boring, especially after Disney films
And, let's be honest, the pirate theme is poorly explored in One Piece. The only good attempts at it were when the author introduced the concept of ship souls (Klabautermann), but he forgot about that too. There are no full-fledged naval battles, raids, boardings here. The pirate theme in OP is functioning like Fortnite skin - which alienated my friend from OP, to whom I recommended this manga as “Pirate themed manga”

 

[Gaimon The Pirate]

The main reason is quality of anime adaptation. For example, it was possible to fit into 250 episodes, and not 1000, how many more there are. Don't drag out scenes for tens of seconds, make good choreography and pleasant musical accompaniment as in Bleach.
A secondary reason is competition. Ninjas, Spirits, Aliens, Martial Arts will always be more popular than "Pirates" theme. Moreover, in the West it is already too worn out, those "pirate stuff" is already boring, especially after Disney films
And, let's be honest, the pirate theme is poorly explored in One Piece. The only good attempts at it were when the author introduced the concept of ship souls (Klabautermann), but he forgot about that too. There are no full-fledged naval battles, raids, boardings here. The pirate theme in OP is functioning like Fortnite skin - which alienated my friend from OP, to whom I recommended this manga as “Pirate themed manga”

I would argue that Naruto has done the same, from ninja's with techniques it became magicians and god powers.
Kunai and tools became largely irrelevant, as even tenten as early as she shows up she's largely ridiculed.
One piece suffers in the US because it's not edgy nor "cool".
Naruto is edgy in almost everything and where not, it still is "cool". Naruto transform into a bloodlusted fox, sasuke is coldsteel the edgehog and becomes a demon. same is bleach. Same is the cool super sayan.
To have a "cool" power up like G2 we had to wait volume 40 of OP, longer than most of DB + DBZ.

And this is also why OP is not interchangeable, because it has a unique theme that if it hadn't come out in a bad period for Jump, would probably had not survived.
If you look at the new "cool" shonen, JJK, KnY, MHA, they have to ALWAYS be cool and cooler.

 

[OneHater]

One piece suffers in the US because it's not edgy nor "cool".

Technically "cool" means "chill or laid back" but obviously you mean "likable" or popular and the problem of One Piece is that it's goofy/childish/cringe/tone-deaf. The story has super violent scenes where luffy destroys people, "I'm going to kick your ass" and goofy scenes when Luffy chases after meat or Sanji simps or Brook asks to see panties. How can you recommend this story to your friends when they'll see Sanji's nosebleeds? This is the number 1 problem by far.... this story makes you feel dirty for reading it.

To be fair, Dragonball also had these same issues at the start but Toriyama's editors told him to make the story more like Hokuto no Ken and Saint Seiya and he was forced to tone down the goofyness and that only started to reemerge during the Majin Buu Arc (e.g. turning people into candy).

It's really remarkable how popular OP is despite being so childish.

 

[Wh1p]

One Piece looks much more like a cartoon than other anime, and pirates are something that the west was already very familiar with. There's nothing really "exotic" about it that would attract people in the west.

 

[Kumathegoat]

I think what you mean about failure is the issue with JRPGs.

They are massively huge in Japan. In the west there are many fans, but it is more niche like.

It lies heavily on reading.

Japanese people read much more than then western people. Adults reading Manga is much better accepted than adults reading comics in the west.

One Piece is primarly an amazing manga, than an anime. So other franchises that do not involve much reading get more fans in the west

Post automatically merged: Jan 5, 2024

How many Dragon Ball or Naruto fans do you know that fell in love with the story reading the manga?

 

[CensoredbyWG]

Bleach has dogshit choreography and One Piece too. Saint Seiya has better fights than both shows.

Saint seiya manga doesnt have fights, just characters doing poses while the enemy explodes in the air behind them.

There is no tension because the Reader knows that the main characters will just "burn their cosmos" and win the fight.

 

[MonsterKaido]

Saint seiya manga doesnt have fights, just characters doing poses while the enemy explodes in the air behind them.

There is no tension because the Reader knows that the main characters will just "burn their cosmos" and win the fight.

Lost canvas fights are pretty good. In original saint seiya , gold saints fights are decent but agree for most part. MCs win because they are MCs. Lost canvas >> original saint seiya.

 

[Gaimon The Pirate]

Saint seiya manga doesnt have fights, just characters doing poses while the enemy explodes in the air behind them.

There is no tension because the Reader knows that the main characters will just "burn their cosmos" and win the fight.

You take that back you mother father.
It was one of the first mangas to create "the powers", what we now call Stands, Jutsu, Devil Fruit, Nen and Curses and so on.

 

[Logiko]

Two things - One Piece lacks real tension and it lacks proper fight build up. In the West we are used to Training Sagas > Beating the New Bad Guy. Just like van Damme movies or Rocky.

One Piece does many things right but it is much more geared towards silly jokes, hidden nuggets, foreshadowing and so on. Except Luffy getting trained by Rayleigh off panel during time skip we hardly get any training arcs with high stakes were it feels like people might actually die if the SHP don't power up, we only get magic power ups.

DBZ trained under Master Roshi, the Cat, Kame/God, Kaiou, Chamber of Time, Beerus/Whis and so on.

Naruto under Kakashi, Jiraiya, Toads, Gai and so on.

And even with all the training many died in DBZ/Naruto. Very few died in One Piece. But of course DBZ cheated with bringing them back with Dragon Balls and Naruto killed off too few important characters but at least Neji, Jiraiya, Hidan, Kisame, 3rd Hokage and so on died.

That is why Marineford is GOATed. Ace and WB actually died. Wano should have had more important characters than Ashura Douji and Izo die. Even Kinemon survived ffs.

Complete missunderstanding of One Piece and storytelling:


1. A story is not "good" because more people are dying. The reason Marineford was so impactfull is not because of the death of WB or Ace, its because of the constant roller-coster of emotions that happened during this very short arc and because of the emotionnal attachment we had for the goal of Luffy, goal that for the first time wasn't fullfiled but completely destroyed.

2. One Piece is ALL about proper fight build up. All of the arc are constructed in a way that make the final fights a systematic and cathartic release of emotions. And it manages to do it every single time without exceptions.

---

Aside from that, One Piece did not fail in the West. Almost everyone knows One Piece now.

 

[Punk Rotten]

It definitely hasnt failed. Its gaining a lot of mainstream traction. Dunno how you can call something a failure when it is one of the biggest fictional franchises worldwide.

 

[Herrera95]

I always liked One Piece more.

But I can understand why...

DB is obvious. It is older. Came first. Same about Pokemon.

Naruto is fast paced. One Piece since beginning is kind of slow paced.

Demon Slayer and JJK came with the new animation hype.

MHA is even that big? Bigger than One Piece in the West?

 

[Cozy Sofa]

Complete missunderstanding of One Piece and storytelling:


1. A story is not "good" because more people are dying. The reason Marineford was so impactfull is not because of the death of WB or Ace, its because of the constant roller-coster of emotions that happened during this very short arc and because of the emotionnal attachment we had for the goal of Luffy, goal that for the first time wasn't fullfiled but completely destroyed.

2. One Piece is ALL about proper fight build up. All of the arc are constructed in a way that make the final fights a systematic and cathartic release of emotions. And it manages to do it every single time without exceptions.

---

Aside from that, One Piece did not fail in the West. Almost everyone knows One Piece now.

Who are you to tell me what good storytelling is or what One Piece is about? I know them both well enough.

No matter what Epic story we are talking about deaths and high stakes are essential. Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter are three examples of recent major successes that all had characters die, especially the first and the last did that well.

Imagine if none of the Weasleys, Cedric, Dumbledore, Snape, Sirius, Moody and so on never died but somehow survived every time by a miracle. It would cheapen the threat of Voldemort tremendously. Now instead we knew even GREAT magicians could get killed, even Dumbledore himself, and the only one that could stop Voldemort was Harry Potter. That creates great tension, builds motive for the main protagonists and also makes them experience despair and develop resolve.

 

[Gaimon The Pirate]

Who are you to tell me what good storytelling is or what One Piece is about? I know them both well enough.

No matter what Epic story we are talking about deaths and high stakes are essential. Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter are three examples of recent major successes that all had characters die, especially the first and the last did that well.

Imagine if none of the Weasleys, Cedric, Dumbledore, Snape, Sirius, Moody and so on never died but somehow survived every time by a miracle. It would cheapen the threat of Voldemort tremendously. Now instead we knew even GREAT magicians could get killed, even Dumbledore himself, and the only one that could stop Voldemort was Harry Potter. That creates great tension, builds motive for the main protagonists and also makes them experience despair and develop resolve.

I mean, the only character to die in Harry potter is Cedric (literally who) and Sirius, Dumbledore death is at the end of the sixth and all the other die in the last book, it's just like Neji's death, it only serves to make the stakes higher, but narratively is extremely cheap.
If I wanted to be scared, Dumbledore should have died in book 4, a proper mentor death that makes you terrified and say, what now. Like Gandalf's death.
And except for Dumbledore, Snape and Sirius, the others are completely irrelevant.