Ranking One Piece Arcs from "Worst" to Best!

today november 20th 2021 one piece crosses a threshold that few other series have even come close to joining the likes of pokemon detective conan and crayon shinchan in the thousand episode anime club it's a remarkable achievement both on oda's part and that of the anime staff and today i'd like to celebrate it by running down my personal worst to best ranking of the manga's 31 arcs though worst is a really strong word even the weakest arcs of one piece are still one piece after all crafted with more care and attention to detail than your average or even above average shown and fair and integrated into a sprawling epic storyline far greater than the sum of its parts so to be clear i'm not saying any of these arcs are bad it's just i like some of them a lot more than others is all and today i'm going to tell you which ones in order it's a top 31 list you know how this works i already did one of these for the opening so let's get started already that is after a word from our sponsor 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planet with non-snail-based internet i suppose you could do what i do and use expressvpn's easy one-click app to whisk yourself away to netflix uk and watch your name or it could be spirited away on australian netflix the choice is yours to see how expressvpn puts the whole world at your fingertips and find out how to get three months of service free head to expressvpn.com basement or click the link in the dooblydoo today coming in dead last at 31st is orangetown sorry buggy you know i love you but something had to be at the bottom of this list and if i'm being perfectly honest there's a reason luffy doesn't remember your buggy balls orangetown is a fun little shonen battle arc that shows off for the first time the true potential of one piece's primary power system with a fight between devil fruit users that's pretty kick-ass but that's kind of all it is a big part of the fun in one piece is discovering each new location's unique quirks and storylines but orangetown is just three old guys and a dog being menaced by some pirates sure they're funny circus pirates with cool themed attacks and they do an important job in setting a solid baseline for all the fights that follow but that's the thing buggy's crew is just the baseline every fight that follows orangetown is better and more interesting by design and while it does work as an early onboarding ramp for folks used to more conventional shonen than one piece it also sets an incorrect expectation for first-time viewers and readers that the next thousand installments of one piece will be more of the same and because of that i think that orangetown as fun as it is in a vacuum plays a big role in the misperception that one piece takes a while to get good i put whiskey peak in 30th place for similar reasons the setting and setup for its fight are a bit more fun with a cowboy town full of disguised bounty hunters trying to spring an unsuccessful ambush on the straw hats and in addition to establishing the new baseline danger level of the grand line it does set up baroque works as a persistent threat but the plot gymnastics the arc has to pull off to retcon miss wednesday into a disguised princess are nothing short of whiplash inducing and at the end of the day it's not much more than a big if admittedly fun group brawl now were whiskey peak considered part of a larger 19 chapter transitional arc along with 29th place roguetown and 28th place reverse mountain the three of them combined might have made it a bit higher up on my list they each do important world building and stake setting work and introduce some of one piece's most enduringly lovable characters but since we have to follow the official shonen jump arc designation guidelines which divide chapters up by island rather than storyline each one of them by itself just feels too fragmentary to stand against arcs that tell full proper stories on their own for similar reasons despite how much important frankie is crammed into them i've gotta give 27th place to the post-annislavi epilogue chapters they're not really a story in themselves just part of a bigger one and despite it being substantially longer and having way more narrative meat on its bones hammering home the theme at the heart of one piece that dreams are what defines a man while establishing two of luffy's most important rivals in bellamy and blackbeard the same logic forces me to rank jaya at 26th i love love cricket and the saruyama alliance as characters but their story isn't really resolved until the end of skypia and without that closure jaya by itself is really just about the straw hats fighting some dudes and upgrading their ship of course if we classify arcs as time the straw hats spend on the same island then logic dictates jaya should be considered the first act of sky pia but if i turn this into a video litigating jump's arbitrary arc designations we're gonna be here all day so let's just move on i'm given 25th place to barati and 24th to syrup village the introductory arcs for sanji and usop plus going mary respectively but that's mostly a matter of my personal preference for the more cunning conniving villain archetype that captain curro represents compared to the more bull headed dawn krieg i also shed a few more tears for usopp bidding his kitty pirate crew farewell then sanji leaving chef zeph's nest but usopp's my favorite straw hat so that's definitely a matter of personal bias both arcs tell equally impactful personal stories of their respective crew members while having more fun with the world building than either earlier bid of east blue did and their supporting casts are just plain delightful so they swap places in my personal ranking pretty regularly but they're both small potatoes compared to the straw hat's future adventures and a bit on the slow paced side if i'm being honest on that note return to sabaoti archipelago claims 23rd place by managing to tell a complete story in just five chapters and a pretty fun story at that where the straw hat's efforts to reunite post time skip are continually complicated by a group of dollar store cosplay impersonators abusing their good name for clout it's mostly just an excuse for each hero to flex their new post-time skip power levels before setting up on the next proper saga of their journey but again it's a really fun excuse plot with great hilarious character moments from all of the straw hats real and fake alike especially chopper returns its about e doesn't need to be attached to the next saka to work but even if it does it wouldn't be moving up any further on this list because 22nd place goes to the main arc of that saga fishman island if you're a fan of one piece's art and world building fishman island has a lot to recommend it by its underwater mermaid metropolis is gorgeous and the buildings and stuff around those girls don't look half bad either its history is rich and compelling too as are the characters who inhabit it but the actual story the straw hats go through on that island is kinda just a bunch of exposition punctuated by fights like there is a plot but it's kind of just the standard one piece formula with nothing else added the straw hats arrive at a place things are fine for a bit then there's a misunderstanding and they get chased around by the locals to all the important landmarks the bad guy does a bad thing and gets away with it kind of clearing their names so they chase him down he gets even stronger the fight inadvertently unveils the truth behind some important world-building stuff then finally luffy kicks his ass with a feat of herculean cartoon strength and everything is hunky-dory it's a good formula i wouldn't be a thousand thirty chapters deep in this thing if i didn't like it but most other one-piece arcs just use it better here it just kind of feels like oda's going through the motions as an excuse to plant seeds for future better story lines that setup work does really pay off in the long term and the arc contains some really important commentary on heavy topics like slavery and racism so looking back fishman island was definitely worth getting through but unfortunately there are some stretches of it that you do just have to get through it is largely thanks to that setup work that 21st place the levelly arc is as good as it is it's more a series of vignettes than one cohesive story but to the extent that it has an overarching narrative the events on fishman island are key to it and the seeds planted on that island as well as just about every other location we've visited in the last 900 chapters and change blossom into bombshell revelation after bombshell revelation throughout its tightly packed sixth chapter run the level he may be short but every time i get through reading it i feel like i need a nap okay i'm spending too much time explaining each of these good thing 20th place little garden needs no explanation you got a friendly wrestling rivalry between giant vikings dinosaurs usopp character development also some real fun devil fruit powered baroque works baddies to battle what's not to love little garden is the first island where oda really starts getting wacky with that world building and i will always remember it for that speaking of wacky 19th place goes to long rang long land oda's loving send-up of wacky races and the laugh olympics every single character design in this arc is at the light and sandwiched as it is between two pretty goddamn heavy sagas the light breezy comedy of the davey backfight makes for a brief but welcome relief that comedy is some of the strongest in all of one piece too which is really saying something foxy is a fantastic villain and there's even some important world building that gets done here i also have a pet theory that luffy and shanks are gonna settle who gets to be king of the pirates with a davey back fight and if that happens it might retroactively rocket this one all the way up to my top 10. and speaking of shanks 18th place goes to one of the only places we've ever seen him romance dawn the very first arc of one piece and a brilliantly efficient introduction to its world in just seven chapters it manages to establish our core cast of luffy zolo and nami set up every key world building concept the series will use for the next thousand including hockey and give us through the eyes of kobe and luffy a comprehensive understanding of both sides in the series central conflict between centralized authority and pi radical freedom while also demonstrating how both authority and freedom can be abused in morgan and alvita respectively romance dawn is a brilliant little vertical slice of all the things that define one piece a well-considered meticulously tuned introduction to its world and the only reason it's not higher on this list is that oda's only gotten better at writing with all this practice 17th place goes to amazon lilly our formal introduction to the lovely hilariously narcissistic boa hancock and her adorable crush on luffy also our first canonical confirmation outside the pages of sbs that devil fruit powers do indeed affect the weenus this arc touches on a few heavy themes but only gently as it's again sandwiched between the straw hat's first major defeat and even more bad times and it really needs to deliver some heavy duty comic relief in the time it has and i think it strikes a really great balance between comedy drama and action working as one last fun self-contained adventure for luffy before [ __ ] gets really real coming in at number 16 is the drum island arc our introduction to my precious baby boy tony tony chopper and the first arc in the series that really puts an emphasis on politics over action i mean there is still plenty of action a lot of comedy and some really creative winter-themed critters to be found here but for the first time in one piece beyond there simply being a bad guy what needs beaten up the driving force behind the plot is a broad social movement to throw off the shackles of a self-aggrandizing oppressor and change an island's self-contained society for the better which is what most of the best one-piece stories are about and what the next arc in that saga takes to a whole other level before we can get to that though i've gotta give 15th place to skypia the ark where the straw hats kill god or rather they one of these days pow suck bam straight to the moon a god skypia is great for a lot of reasons the setting is perfectly aesthetically suited to all white manga pages the action continually kicks ass while giving us our first taste of hockey the plot runs through a lot of unexpected twists and turns in both the past and the present and the main villain is one of the most menacing and memorable in the entire series even as he's simultaneously being just kind of a slacker loser but as a jrpg baby who automatically loves laputa and everything remotely like it it's the imagery of ancient decaying jungle ruins floating in the sky that really does it for me i don't even care that much about all the void century lore oda snuck in there okay that's a lie i totally do i'm obsessed with it but even if all of that background art were totally meaningless i would stare at these illustrated ruins forever the art in this saga just makes me feel like i'm on a capital a adventure for similar reasons i'm putting the similarly vined up stonework of zoo in 14th place i'm also a discworld baby see so put a society on the back of an elephant and i'm here for that [ __ ] and a heartbeat also here for carrot who's in the same not a furry butt tier as crystal star fox and i'm here for dog star and cat viper and their whole absurd rivalry bit and all the wanno lore and for the first fight in the series that really gives us a sense of what the straw hats are going up against when they take on one of the four emperors this is just one of the absolute best transitional arcs in the entire series so is number 13 punk hazard which serves as our first proper introduction to both the dangers of the new world beyond the red line and the next level evil of don quixote doflamingo's criminal cartel caesar clown is a mangaleteer monster who plays with poison and experiments on literal children not just out of curiosity or greed but sick delight at the sheer cruelty of it in and of itself but he provides the smile gas that's been central to most of the post-time skip storyline now that i think about it so dofie is all too happy to indulge his sociopathic sadism and the results of his sick chimeric experiments like half of the sick chimeric island they call home are positively chilling when you boil it down this is a pretty basic beat up the bad guy arc but caesar is just so lovably hateable that he alone perhaps aided by some incredibly solid action is more than enough to keep that story entertaining and you know what some of the absolute best moments in one piece simply boil down to watching someone who really deserves it getting some quality clobbering time with luffy that's a solid forty percent of why sabaoti archipelago comes in twelfth other one-piece villains might be pretty awful but at least they can [ __ ] walk for themselves you useless billionaire parasite sorry i just really hate charlos that said another 40 of this story's quality comes from the ark's ensuing demonstration of why giving him what he always had coming was such a bad idea and why the straw hats need to get way way stronger if they're ever going to write the inherent injustice of charlos and people like him existing or just make it more than five minutes in the new world for that matter sabaoti is a wake-up call that shows our heroes exactly how much more they have left to grow and it also offers us our first real insight into the deep unforgivable injustice that drove the villain of one piece's first truly great arc 11th place goes to arlong park another arc where luffy spends a long time winding up a long punch that a real bad dude has had an even longer time coming to him and not just because he and his pirate crew have been terrorizing a peaceful village that never did nothing to hurt nobody is revenge against a human upper crust that cares as little about that village as they do about the fish men if not less now even worse that son of a [ __ ] made nami cry and nobody but nobody makes luffy's friends cry and gets away with it this is the arc where the straw hats finally truly come together as a real crew the crucible in which their unbreakable trust in one another is forged it's also the culmination of many interesting threads left dangling throughout the rest of east blue and our first real clue as to how long a long game oda is really capable of playing with this series and it accomplishes all of that while being utterly thrilling an unstoppable snowball of increasingly chaotic action from beginning to end which is also how i'd describe 10th place impel down with the additional qualifier that the snowball is also rolling through hell blending a prison break story with dante's inferno is an inspired literary touch and the near-non-stop escalation of action as luffy charges recklessly ever downward to his brother's cell is the most intense one piece has ever been to this point hannibal and magellan also make for one of the funniest villain pairs in the entire series but what really makes this arc is the way it brings back some of the best minor threats from past arcs to serve as a sort of air sats replacement crew while luffy's on his own as i said at the top i love buggy and the face he makes when luffy fails to acknowledge his balls is the single greatest panel in manga period he and mr three have great comedic chemistry too but the real star of the impel down show is that greatest of luffy's unofficial bros the non-binary hoe themself mr two bon clay side note it was real cool of crocodile to let bentham use both gender's code names but then why would he not bentham is the realest of real ones after all and it is so much fun finally getting to watch the shape-shifting oh come my way karate master finally team up with luffy even when you know at the back of your mind that fun can't last speaking of fun in ninth place thriller bark all but perfects the one piece action adventure fun formula refusing to let off the gas for even a second as it escalates from scooby-doo shenanigans to chaotic monster fight and mayhem to the biggest brawl in the series to date where all the straw hats get to flex their respective strengths in a united front against a massive evil even super stronger zombie luffy clone and the spooky mystery vibes paired with a more heavily shaded cartoon horror art style unique to the arc give that perfectly tuned default plotline a bold and unmistakable sense of identity and atmosphere all its own outside of introducing the soul king thriller bark doesn't really contribute that much to the overarching plot of one piece until all of a sudden 600 chapters later it does but as a self-contained standalone adventure it stands above every other arc we've talked about so far as the ultimate refinement of the baseline default one piece experience tm if you have a nakama curious friend who doesn't care too much about spoilers and isn't sure if they want to commit to all this story show them thriller bark and by the time it's over they will know one of my nakama calls this ark peak one piece and i'm inclined to agree so why is it only in ninth place then because the next eight arcs go even further beyond that peak if our long park was where i first knew i [ __ ] with one piece hard enough to finish it then 8th place alabasta marked the moment where i truly fell head over heels and love by itself it's an exemplary blend of desert-bound political intrigue and bombastic egyptophile fantasy adventure but as a culmination of 100 chapters worth of build up and 200 chapters of character development it is utterly transcendent all throughout the saga that precedes it and the saga that preceded that the straw hats are hit time and again with a growing sense that the world they're sailing into is much much bigger than the one they knew back in east blue we got a taste of what world government [ __ ] looked like on drum island and of the shichibukai's power back on bharati but here at last the full scope of one piece's world and the forces that control it comes into clear view and along with it the true stakes that our heroes will be fighting for for the rest of the series even if they won't know it for a good while yet and all of that comes packaged with a thrilling emotionally charged and sharply written storyline that forever redefines what it means to be a straw hat funny enough that happens again in our 7th place finisher dressrosa which is basically a dark what if version of alabasta what if no one had stopped crocodile what would a warlord of the sea do with the stolen power of a king how would his people suffer and how would he keep them in line the answer to that last question is particularly evil those who defy don quixote doflamingo get turned into living toy slaves their very existence erased from the memories of their loved ones so they can't ever inspire further rebellion so the people don't even know that they're oppressed doflamingo's dressrosa is a cruel scary place and the luffy katamari that rolls up hill from its gladiatorial arena all the way to its highest seat of power results in one of the most satisfying clobberings in the entire series like hitting charlos crocodile and moria all at the same time usopp absolutely shines in a b-plot about a folksy naive lilliputian tiny folk race staging their own adorable widow evolution and a lot of the people who are willing to follow luffy into the jaws of death by the sagas finale still feel that way after it's done and most of them have their own boats after this the straw hats aren't a crew anymore they're a whole goddamn fleet few arcs more fundamentally change the shape of what one piece can be but sixth place water seven is definitely one of them nico robin's been traveling with the crew for a good long while now but by the end of this her arlong park she finally truly joins them and usopp who's been wrestling with his own relative weakness since they entered the grand line and can't help seeing an ominous metaphor in the inevitable obsolescence of going merry breaks away from his friends in petulant shame only to return to prove them and more importantly himself since they kinda already knew why he belongs on the crew as that's happening the setting of the arc offers fascinating insights into the vital industries at the heart of one piece's world and the talented craftsmen who make sailing its dangerous waters possible and through the city's backstory we see how their vital work is threatened time and again by the shadowy overreach of the world government which eventually explodes back into the present turning the whole damn city on its head right as a tsunami is bearing down to drown it while our heroes joined by the infinitely lovable frankie give chase to the government spooks who took robin in the chaos and that brings us both physically and segwayly to 5th place nslobi which kind of breaks my rule of preferring arcs that can stand on their own since it's basically just the extended climax of water 7 but the thing is the world building surrounding cipher pole and the navy's [ __ ] up court system combined with the emotional drama of scrambling to reach and rescue robin from both cypherpol and herself and let's not forget about all the banger fights that happen along the way from the train heist to rob [ __ ] luchi himself is all just so [ __ ] excellent that it totally does stand on its own even as less than half a storyline usopp shoot that flag is the first time i have ever physically screamed at a comic book and by the end of this arc i felt about nico robin the same way rosa brooklyn 99 feels about that one puppy which kind of made the other ways i already felt about nico robin feel a bit weird but let's not get into that or maybe we should since fourth place is asanji storyline the sanji storyline whole cake island our first taste of what an emperor's full power looks like on her home turf the ark that takes the cartoon logic of one piece's action to a whole new level of extreme intensity in many respects the peak of comedy in the series so far as well delicious social satire layered like a fine cake with the most sumptuous of action icing but also and most importantly it's the transformational story arc that takes what had become in my opinion one piece's most stagnant one-dimensional character and builds him into one of its most interesting and dynamic and it does it by giving him a backstory as a nazi power ranger which seems like a really weird combination until you realize that oda is stealth punting with the juror suffix at the end of every super sentai title and the prefix that begins the word germany this is next level comedy but also next level tragedy whole cake island really is the complete package one piece at its most shakespearean well almost the next two arcs like water 7 and ns lobby are too interconnected and too damn good to split up though i do have to keep them out of order this time in third place the post-war arc with its poignant ruminations on grief and startling revelations about luffy's past with ace is compelling on so many different levels from the fascinating world building of the goa kingdom in which they grew up to the complex nuances of their and sabo's mutual brotherly love it's an absolute tearjerker and one of the hardest hitting moments in all of one piece but it only hits as hard as it does because second place marine ford goes as hard as it does 30 straight chapters of almost nothing but opulent meticulously detailed full page spread after full page spread depicting a full-on war between almost literally everyone we've met in the last 600 chapters and almost literally everyone else with earth-shaking plot turn after earth-shaking plot turn building up to a profound tragedy that resonates through one piece's entire world on both geopolitical and deeply personal levels the summit war is a feat utterly unmatched in the annals of shonen manga storytelling in part because you'd need over a decade of build up just to make the attempt after making marine ford oda truly had nothing left to prove is a mangaka just the rest of his story left to tell so it's kinda crazy that the climax war of the wano country arc has been delivering action of that scale and artistic complexity for over 30 chapters now as a direct continuation of an ongoing story arc already a hundred twisty tourney chapters in the making which already had plenty of top tier fights sprinkled throughout it to begin with and that epic story is accompanied by a shift in art style that reflects its traditional japanese setting beautifully plus it's got world building out the wazoo on both local and global scales and on top of all that it has a well-considered well-delivered pointedly political message about how xenophobia is inherently self-destructive and japan really ought to have more open borders in other words wano does everything that every other great ark of one piece does better than most of those arcs do at the same time and while it's not over yet it would have to end with at least 10 straight chapters of all the characters just [ __ ] themselves for no apparent reason for me to even consider dropping it down to second place wano is a masterwork within a masterwork the undeniable peak of post peak one piece so far but only so far it takes first place for now but i have every confidence that oda will top it before long and just about every one piece fan will back me up on that the rest of this video on the other hand i'm sure will spark a fair amount of disagreement and i'm looking forward to reading your personal arc rankings in the comments below oh and on an unrelated note if you feel like going on a truly wild anime journey that makes one piece look sensible and down to earth you should check out my feature-length roast of three feature-length anime movies that were made by an actual alien-worshiping japanese cult not to toot my own horn but it is the best video i've ever made hands down i'm jeff though professional straw hat fan signing out from the deck of going luffy senpai [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Mother's Basement

Views: 698,241

Keywords: Mother's Basement, Anime, Anime Analysis, one piece arcs, one piece, top 10, every one piece arcs ranked, top 5, one piece 1000, every arc in one piece ranked, wano country, whole cake island, thriller bark, water 7, Alabasta, dressrosa, marineford, enies lobby, one piece manga, grand line review, rogersbase, worst one piece arcs, rob lucci, luffy, one piece 1000 opening, one piece arcs ranked, best one piece arcs, big mom, kaido, doflamingo, luffy vs kaido, one piece film red

Id: qtY9KzkQhxU

Length: 33min 18sec (1998 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 20 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Ok-Philosopher-8105]

He ranked LRLL at 19. Imo, it should still be higher, but I'm still happy. Gave the praise that arc truly deserves