Netflix’s One Piece grinds down the greatest manga ever until it’s just content

polygon.com:

Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece might be one of the greatest comics ever made. It’s certainly one of the most comics ever made. An over-the-top action-comedy about Monkey D. Luffy, a boy with stretchy powers and a dream of finding the mythical treasure One Piece and becoming King of the Pirates, One Piece is equal parts Looney Tunes and fantasy epic at an incomparable scale. With 1,090 chapters published across 106 volumes telling a continuous story begun in 1997 — accompanied by an equally long-running anime adaptation with 1,073 episodes under its belt, multiple animated feature films, video games, and a handful of stage plays — One Piece’s volume is matched only by its popularity as the top-selling manga of all time, by a huge margin.

As a result, Netflix’s live-action One Piece adaptation has a litany of expectations to address. There’s the normal weight of immense fan anticipation, but there’s also all manner of complicating factors by which One Piece will be judged: as an American adaptation of a Japanese work; as the latest in a string of usually disappointing live-action takes on manga and anime; and, most importantly, as Netflix’s latest attempt to bring a beloved anime to live action following the disappointment of Cowboy Bebop.

If your first question about the live-action One Piece is about how it compares to the live-action Bebop, the answer is that it’s easily better, but also that maybe that’s an unfair comparison. Tonally, One Piece is a far more straightforward work — much like the source material, Netflix’s One Piece follows Monkey D. Luffy’s (Iñaki Godoy) quixotic journey to become King of the Pirates with nothing but the clothes on his back and the powers he obtained as a boy when he ate a mystical fruit that