How to watch One Piece

Best for: Almost everyone. This is the default.

The Toei anime is the complete version of the story in motion: 1,174 episodes and still airing weekly, subtitled within about an hour of the Japanese broadcast and dubbed some way behind it. Crunchyroll is the official simulcast home in most territories, though the back catalogue is split into chunks and which chunks you get depends on your country — Netflix and regional services carry portions of it too.

The trade is time. At the full runtime you are looking at 19 days, 13 hours of viewing, and about 91 of those episodes are anime-original filler that adapt no manga chapter at all. Nothing stops you skipping them.

Best for: People who bounced off the pacing.

One Pace is a fan project that re-edits the Toei anime to match the manga's pacing: filler is gone, and so are the reaction shots, recaps and stretched-out fights that pad an episode to fill a broadcast slot. What is left is the same animation and the same audio, cut to the story.

Two caveats. It is not finished — 469 episodes are out, arc by arc, in irregular batches rather than on a schedule — and because it is unofficial it is distributed by the project itself rather than a streaming service. Most people use it for the arcs it covers and switch back to the broadcast version for the rest.

Best for: Newcomers, and anyone watching with people who will not watch anime.

Netflix's live-action adaptation retells the story from the beginning at a much faster clip — whole arcs of anime compressed into single episodes, with Oda himself attached as an executive producer. It is the shortest possible route into One Piece and by some distance the easiest one to hand to someone who has never watched anime.

It is also, necessarily, a compression. Subplots are merged and cut, and it will not catch the anime — the manga has over a thousand chapters and each season covers a handful of arcs. Treat it as a way in, not a replacement.

Best for: Anyone willing to wait.

WIT Studio — Attack on Titan, Vinland Saga, Spy × Family — is remaking the series for Netflix, starting again from East Blue. It is a fresh adaptation rather than a re-cut, which means it can do in a season what the original anime took years of padded episodes to cover.

Nothing has been released yet, so this is not a route you can take today. If the length of the original is what is stopping you, it is the one worth knowing about before you commit to the other three.

Side by side

What order to watch in

Release order, which is also story order. One Piece is one continuous narrative with no side-series to slot in, so the episode numbers are the watch order and there is nothing to rearrange. The films and TV specials sit outside the numbering and outside the plot — they can be watched whenever, or not at all.

Mixing routes is fine and common. If you switch between One Pace and the broadcast anime, or move from the manga to the anime, the converter will tell you which episode picks up from the chapter you stopped at, in either direction.

Should you read the manga instead?

It is the original, it is well ahead of every adaptation, and it is far quicker — the anime spends 19 days, 13 hours on material that reads in a fraction of that. Chapters are published weekly on MANGA Plus and Viz, both of which put the latest chapters up free. The catch is that you lose the voice acting and the score, which for a lot of people are the point.

Frequently asked