One Piece Media and Information

Jerek Dain's Newbie Guide to One Piece

What is One Piece?

I first downloaded One Piece from Animesuki (where its no longer available, since it's now licensed by 4kids [who is destroying the show] - see below for other availability) because I had heard various things about it, namely that it's quite unique, and supposed to be very good. I was never really a big fan of pirates, but having a unique setting was a plus, and this was after Pirates of the Carribean had come out, so pirates seemed cooler than usual. I had only heard second-hand opinions, but combined with being unique, I was interested (I love finding unique things.). So I downloaded the batch torrent from Animesuki of episodes 1-10. I had it on my hard drive for a week or two before getting around to watching the first episode. And wow, that was rather different. My initial reaction was one of not knowing what to think. Did this have potential for coolness, or was it just plain odd? So I left it alone for a few days contemplating whether I should delete it. But, fortunately, I was quite bored at the time, so I watched a few more. Hey, after getting to episode 4 this has started to look genuinely interesting, despite some characters so odd I initially reeled (e.g. Captain Buggy). So I queued up more episodes, and watched some more. A friend from Canada took a trip out here, and I showed him the first episode. I was only still around episode 20 or so, and was still thinking of it as just a "pretty cool series". Once I got up to the 30s I realized I should have watched more earlier, and should have shown more to him, because it quickly began to rise to being my favorite anime. This is part of why I consider the first 30 episodes to be a sort of prologue - in the first 30 there's a lot of gathering a basic crew, and at episode 31 the story feels like it's really kicking off then. The series has since then solidified itself as my favorite anime through its strong and interesting characters (with some very original character designs - which are awesome), great stories, great comedy, and great kicking of ass.

I know I didn't really discuss the storyline itself, but I'm a strong believer in checking something out based on positive reviews and comments (or even just by hearing a title or seeing a single image of it), because I think it makes it more interesting when you don't even know what the purpose of the story is when you check it out (and they do always explain it anyway). I even prefer to skip openings of anime for a while because they often spoil things like who will become regular cast members. But if you really must know the storyline, here's my brief overview:

Click For SPOILER (basic storyline)

Anime vs. Manga

I'd recommend checking out the anime first, for a few reasons. First, you can hear the voices. The voices and voice acting in One Piece are fantastic. And better to know ahead of time what a character sounds like than hope they'll sound different only to be disappointed. Also on the topic of dialogue, the manga scanlations often have names messed up (e.g. "Rufi" instead of Luffy, "BB" instead of Vivi, etc), but since the good group subbing One Piece (Kaizoku-Fansubs) started after the series had gotten pretty far (they had started because of all the other groups doing terrible jobs), they not only can hear exactly how the names are pronounced, but can see what's coming if a character's name or a place name is written in English someplace (which is very common in One Piece, particularly on wanted posters and almost all signs). And of course it's just plain fun to watch something animated and in color, rather than reading it in black and white. :P

Once you've caught up on the anime that Kaizoku-Fansubs has released (episode 110 should be out any day now), if you like it I'd highly recommend the manga. The manga, though it may have translation inconsistencies, has some clear high points. It doesn't have filler and no scenes are dragged out to fit a half-hour time slot, so it has a faster pace to it, and feels more focused on the story because of the lack of filler. The art is very clearly better, since Eiichiro Oda is a fantastic artist, and his style progresses very noticably form the first issues to the current one (it's become less "cartoony", more serious-looking, and everyone in general more bad-ass looking, better action and blood [yes, even the blood is noticably better], and also the females more attractive. ^_^ Better drawn and more, er, developed.). And of course you get to read the story well beyond where Kaizoku-Fansubs currently is. When K-F releases episode 144 it will be the equivalent of manga chapters 218-220. Currently the manga is up to chapter 363 (which will probably end up being around episode 245 or 255, but that's a very unscientific estimate).

How do I get the anime?

Kaizoku-Fansubs is the good One Piece fansubbing group (I recommend ignoring all others), and they have all the episodes available via their IRC bots in #kaizoku-fansubs on the Rizon.net servers (see the section Connecting to #kaizoku-fansubs IRC room with mIRC section below) or their BitTorrent tracker.

Some people have extremely slow speeds with the BitTorrent server at K-F. If you're having these problems they can be fixed by look at this FAQ.

I also have the Kaizoku-Fansubs releases on my FTP, but I recommend getting One Piece via BitTorrent instead, since you'll surely get better speeds that way. My FTP outgoing speed is capped at 30K, and if there's multiple people logged in, speeds per user can drop to single digits.

Stop when you finish episode 115! Before watching episode 116 and on you really should read the manga first. Or turn off your monitor and not turn it back on until the opening is over for a few seconds and you hear the episode starting. Trust me, it's worth skipping the opening. The animators did something painful and added a new opening with major spoilers. So unless you have someone there who's already read the manga and can skip the opening for you for about 15 episodes, or don't mind turning off your monitor or closing your eyes for the opening, it's probably manga time (although come back and watch 116-130 later, they were done quite well). They did this because in Japan it's not a big deal since the manga is ahead of the anime, and everyone reads the manga first out there. Episode 115 is the equivalent of chapters 186 and 187, so you can start on chapter 188, although there was a splash cover arc that started at chapter 182, so you might want to at least back up a bit for the covers. Personally, I like the manga a lot more in general anyway, and the story goes much farther than what's been fansubbed or even animated.

Anime Movie and Specials Order; Filler Episodes

The Movies and TV Specials:
(The Movie Specials are shorts just over 5 minutes that don't fit anywhere, and don't necessarily make any sense, but are quite entertaining. They still can contain spoilers, so watch them at the points I listed, just like the movies.)
The other guides to where the movies take place all just say that "Movie 1 was released in theaters after episode 17", and don't bother to take in to account, that it could haven't possibly taken place until after 18. The movies are not part of the original story, and so they're sometimes hard to fit in anywhere, but here's where they would best fit in the storylines and still make some amount of sense:
Between episodes 18 and 19: Movie 1
Between episodes 53 and 54: Movie 2, Movie 2 Special, TV Special 1
Between episodes 91 and 92 or better yet between 129 and 130: Movie 3 and Movie 3 Special. I have two spots written where this could be because the first spot is closer to when they released the movie, but it's in the middle of a large arc, so it would make more sense to be during the second area.
Between episodes 130 and 131: Movie 4

Splash arcs (these are stories that were in the manga, but only progressed on the splash pages [cover pages], and didn't have dialogue. The anime studio has wisely used these to expand in to entertaining full stories rather than making more garbage filler like the Apis arc):
46-47: Little Buggy's Great Adventure!
68-69: Diary of Cobymeppo's Marine Struggles!

Completely New Filler Added by TV Tokyo:
50-51: These ones aren't too bad. In episode 51 the character "Carmen" being described as sexy was really pushing it.
54-60: The infamous Apis story arc. A.K.A. a parade of garbage. Considered to be the worst filler by far in the series, but unfortunately you can't really skip it because of episode 61. And besides, they can be a reminder of how lucky we are that One Piece is normally so much better.
61: The first half is the conclusion of the Apis arc, and the second half returns to the normal story (with some extra Apis remnants)
97-99, 101: Not as bad as Apis, fortunately, and some funny stuff in them. Drags on a bit though (the travelling period from episode 97 to 101 was a single page in the manga, and took less than a day for the characters).
131-143: Starts with a bunch of single-character crappy episodes (supposedly 134 and 135 aren't so bad, but I haven't taken the plunge and watched them yet). Then there is a mini-arc or two of crappy filler.
• I have heard that the filler gets better as the series progresses (which is good, since there's really no way around filler). Supposedly a recent filler arc (196-206) is quite decent, and some say as entertaining as normal One Piece (which I doubt, but it sounds a lot better than normal). Also, in these later episodes One Piece has clearly higher quality animation.

How do I get the manga?

There used to be a torrent file up of chapters 1-311, but it's down, as well as the site for a group that's still translating the manga. They were taken down out of caution, since One Piece is now a licensed manga and being (very very badly) translated and distributed by Viz. I'm personally boycotting Viz's terrible translation, and many others are as well. Aside from toning it down for kids, they all talk like cheesy pirates from black and white movies, they renamed Zoro to "Zolo" like the shitty version of the anime 4Kids is destroying, some moves were renamed, and it's generally just crap. There are even glaring typos, like how chapter 17 was labeled chapter 16, in addition to the actual chapter 16. That error is even in the graphic novel version. Pathetic. And seeing someone's furious face taking up a whole page and screaming "Darn you!" is just plain dumb. If Viz wants my money, they'll have to stop targeting a once-great manga at 4-year-olds.

So now it's harder to get the manga. One thing you could do is go to the Kaizoku-Fansubs IRC room and ask someone for directions on where to get it, and hopefully some helpful people are available at the time. Check out my Connecting to #kaizoku-fansubs IRC room with mIRC guide to get there.

The One Piece manga is released in Shonen Jump in Japan. It's supposed to come out every Monday, but often they get scans early by a day or two. Translation usually takes 2 or 3 days. At the time of this writing the most recent chapter is 363 which was released in an April 2005 Shonen Jump.

Connecting to #kaizoku-fansubs IRC room with mIRC

To connect to the #kaizoku-fansubs room you have to select the Rizon server. Click the Options button (the second one on the toolbar, right next to the Connect/Disconnect button), and from the IRC Network dropdown choose Rizon. If it's not there, choose All and from the IRC Server dropdown choose Rizon: Random Server. Once you've connected to the Rizon network the #kaizoku-fansubs there is the official one. You can just type [b]/join #kaizoku-fansubs[/b] to join the room. If you're connected to an IRC server and no one or very few people are there, then you're not connected to the right server. The reason it looks like no one is there is because when you try to connect to a chat room that doesn't exist it creates it for you (and puts you in charge of it).

When joining an IRC room always read the room's Topic which appears at the beginning of the chat. It often contains info on what commands are allowed/available, news, and sometimes important rules (which moderators often are quick to kick or even ban for in most chat rooms. most rooms also have bots that automatically kick or temp-ban people for using unallowed commands). Here's an example:

Looks like a mess, doesn't it? Trust me, it'll make sense after a little explanation.

The things starting with !s are common chat commands, which are usually mostly targeted towards newbies (e.g. !triggers, !rules, !newbie, !OPinfo).

@find is a command for searching for specific files that people are serving on their bots, but it's not allowed on the K-F site unless you have a +, %, or @ in front of your name (these signify that you're serving files, a half-op, or op, respectively).

XDCC is the method the K-F bots use for sending files, but requesting lists via chat is not allowed, because the lists are often quite long, and they don't want to use up bandwidth. So you have to see the bot file lists at this page.

K-F|Makino is run by dythim, the guy who runs the K-F site, and has all K-F releases, almost all the manga and more goodies for when you've read all the manga (AMVs, ROMs, PS1 ISOs, soundtracks [yes, even the soundtracks have definite spoilers if you haven't read the manga. Hell, don't even read the soundtrack list until you've read the manga. :P]).

So how do you use XDCC? Well, first find the file you want. Let's say you're starting from the beginning using the K-F|Lapahn bot. The file you want (episode 001) is listed as #01. So you send K-F|Lapahn an XDCC request like this:
/msg K-F|Lapahn xdcc send #1
At the time when I tested this Lapahn was busy with other transfers and replied with this:

So now I could either wait for it send to me (and queue up other transfers) or remove myself and try another bot. Or keep the queued transfer and try another bot for other episodes. Also, mIRC has an option (Options -> Dcc, and Options -> DCC -> Folders) to auto-accept incoming transfers. This way you can queue up a bunch of episodes, and go to bed.

Note that the xdcc send # doesn't always go with the episode number. For instance, at the original writing of this guide the K-F|Jango bot only had episodes 93-97. So typing /msg K-F|Jango xdcc send #1 will get you episode 93. That's why they have the bot listings, so you can see what number you want.