Over the years, the One Piece anime has suffered a wide variety of problems, but the Wano arc has gone a long way toward fixing its biggest issues. The manga has long since been a major success around the world, with One Piece becoming the most successful manga of all time and the second best-selling comic book series in history overall after Superman. The anime hasn’t been met with the same level of praise, but the current arc has shown a clear effort to change that.

For years, the One Piece anime has received large amounts of criticism from people for a perceived lack of quality. Not only have the art and animation been wildly inconsistent and often flat-out bad, but the pacing almost always slows to a crawl; sometimes the One Piece anime will have excessive amounts of filler, and other times episodes will be padded out so that only a single chapter of the manga is being adapted at a time. These problems got progressively worse as the years went on, and eventually, it became very common for the anime to be written off entirely in favor of the manga being the prime way of experiencing One Piece.

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None of these problems have completely gone away, but starting in 2019 with the Wano arc, the One Piece anime has done a lot to alleviate its issues. For starters, not only has the art style been changed into a much crisper version reminiscent of Dragon Ball Super: Broly, but both it and the animation have been more consistent with a much higher frequency of sakuga, or moments of an anime's art and animation drastically increasing in quality in order to emphasize a particular scene. The anime still has problems with pacing, but now it’s balanced out with moments of stellar animation that are able to enhance the overall experience as opposed to dragging it down.

Luffy's Red Roc

The Wano arc’s quality is owed to the people at Toei Animation, but one person in particular who deserves credit is director Megumi Ishitani. While Ishitani is relatively new to anime, every episode she has been in charge of has received high praise not just for having great animation, but for using visual and directing styles that add a level of flair that an anime like One Piece usually doesn’t have. Episode 982 was notably commended by the director of Netflix’s Castlevania series, which is another show that’s been praised for its visuals and animation (via Twitter), and Ishitani’s most recent work on episode 1015 has been lauded as a visual masterpiece by audiences. The Wano arc has already featured many moments of incredible animation and direction, so Ishitani being able to make those stand out even more is a true testament to her abilities and what she brings to One Piece.

Thanks to what appears to be a complete overhaul in production, the One Piece anime has reached a level of quality in the Wano arc that it hasn’t had in years, and both interest and overall reception have increased right along with it. The old problems with the One Piece anime still persist to a certain degree, but those problems are nowhere near as bad as they used to be. Overall, the anime has reached a point where it can be viewed as just as essential an experience as the manga.

More: Netflix's One Piece Must Make Big Anime Changes (To Avoid A Fatal Problem)

One Piece releases new episodes Saturdays on Crunchyroll.