One Piece: How to Remain the Best Manga Even After 20 Years

20 years have passed since the beginning of the adventure of Monkey D.Luffy and his quest to become the pirate king. Tons of characters have been meet, tons of places explored, and a whole lot of awesome powers have been showed. But this are things that could be said for a lot of others manga, so what its the difference with the others? Simple, One Piece continue to improve himself, introducing awesome new characters, but never forgetting the one we already know and love.

The manga is approaching chapter number 1000, but the story its far from ending. How is this even possible? In the beginning the idea of Oda-sensei was to make a manga of about 300-400 chapter, but then the public became so invested with the story that Oda decided to increase the lenght of the story. Then, when the manga approached its 400 chapters, Oda declared that the story was done for the half part, so in teory it should have ended at chapters 800. But this wasn't the case. Again, as he continued to write the story, he decided that much more could be added to the crew travels, and he decided to amplify the story. In recent times, in an interview he claimed he was done for 3/4 of the story. Should we believe him? In my opinion, no. One Piece has a ton of things left to unravel, so Oda should take all the time he needs to complete his masterpiece, and we as reader can only be happy to see One Piece continuing at such an high level.

Shōnen is the most famous category of manga ever made, and Dragon Ball first and One Piece later are the two most popular Shōnen. With Dragon Ball being the father of modern shōnen manga, a lot of mangaka have started creating their own story. For the longest time, the main antagonist were One Piece, Naruto and Bleach. Each of them are loved by the public, and the crown for the best successor changed place almost every month. But this has happened for only some years. If you ask a fan on the Shōnen genre now what he thinks is the best manga out of those three, the 95% of people will answer One Piece, but in the past no more than 40% would have answer the same. But what is the reason?

Someone could answer: Naruto and Bleach are both finished, so they can't be improved no more. Wrong answer. A story can be told in one page, but can also be told in thousands chapters. The important things is knowing when to stop. Naruto and Bleach didn't understand it, and so their rating dropped. The majority of readers who have read all the three manga will tell you this: Naruto and Bleach had a better start. And its true. But then they started to forget their origins, and they keep on adding only more stuff, but less is often more. Most of the protagonist of the earlier stories of Naruto and Bleach stopped showing,and new characters were added constantly. One Piece understand the importants of the origins, and we always see our favorite characters, never left in the shadows for more then some months.

With the end of Naruto and Bleach, new shōnen manga have started to appear: Seven Deadly Sins, My Hero Academia, and a lot more. But as they keep growing in popularity, they still have to fight with One Piece in order to obtain the spot of best manga. And there will never be a most difficult fight. 23 years have passed since the beginning of One Piece, and many more will pass until he will reach its end. When the time will arrive, One Piece could really become the best manga ever made. Until then, lets keep on watching Luffy and his crew in their journeys.