One Piece Season 2 Is Perfect, Proves Netflix Already Has A Replacement For Stranger Things

By Jonathan Klotz
| Published 8 seconds ago

Stranger Things may be over, but Netflix doesn’t have to worry about finding a replacement. One Piece Season 2 is proof that the streaming giant has the next big thing already ready to go. The first two episodes of the new season, subtitled Into the Grand Line, prove it’s not only the best live-action anime adaptation of all time, but one of the best shows of this decade. The new season is bigger, better, and by compressing the anime and manga arcs into one or two episodes, the pacing finally matches Monkey D. Luffy’s boundless enthusiasm. 

One Piece: Into The Grand Line Picks Up Right Where Season 1 Left Off

“The Beginning and The End” starts off the season by bringing the Straw Hat Pirates, their captain Luffy (Inaki Godoy), the navigator Nami (Emily Rudd), the greatest swordsman alive, Zorro (Mackenyu), the sharpshooter Usop (Jacob Romero Gibson), and master chef Sanji (Taz Skylar) to Loguetown, the last vestige of civilization before entering the Grand Line. Immediately, Netflix’s budget is on full display within the wildly colorful city where everyone, from a fishmonger to a swordsmith, looks like they stepped off the set of a completely different series. Even in live-action, One Piece looks like an anime, and the over-the-top shonen plot has been mostly left intact. 

Returning villains from Season 1, Buggy (Jeff Ward) and a slimmed-down Alvida (Ilia Isorel Paulino) ambush Luffy while he’s visiting Gold Roger’s execution site. Luffy finds himself bound and on top of the execution site with his life on the line, and in the face of death, he laughs. He can’t help but proudly announce that he will become the King of the Pirates. Nothing, not even a blade to his throat, can dull Luffy’s enthusiasm for and love of life. It inspires some, and, in the case of the newly introduced Marine Captain Smoker (Callum Kerr), it terrifies him. Smoker recognizes that Luffy is the heir to Gold Roger. 

In the anime, he’s an exaggerated character in an exaggerated world, which is why, when fans knew Season 2 would adapt the “Reverse Mountain” arc, there was some concern about how they’d show a river flowing up a mountain and the giant whale lurking at the bottom. Episode 2, “Good Whale Hunting,” is all the evidence anyone needs that One Piece succeeds where most adaptations falter. It steers into the ridiculousness with all the joy and reckless abandon of the Going Merry’s crew heading straight down Reverse Mountain. 

The New Gold Standard For Adaptations

The beauty of One Piece is that it’s the type of series that defies Netflix’s unofficial “second screen” viewing policy. It’s why Stranger Things Season 5 rehashed the plot over and over again, and characters delivered blatant exposition to one another. There are brief asides, such as Zoro’s comment about how Laboon must be a girl whale after Nami points out the uvula, or Usop’s excited retelling of his adventures to Kaya through a messenger snail, that, well, seems to be a bit exaggerated. Eichiiro Oda, creator of One Piece, worked on the series to the extent that every single change, character outfit, casting choice, and even lines of dialogue, had to receive his approval, and it shows. 

One Piece looks like the anime, it sounds like the anime, and it possesses the spirit of the anime. Fans of The Witcher will look at this series and think about what could have been if that series had received a fraction of the love and care devoted to One Piece. As with the first season, you don’t even have to have seen the anime or read a single page of the manga to appreciate the show on its own merits. It’s an entry point to the world of anime without the burden of going through over a thousand episodes. 

Netflix released every episode of One Piece: Into the Grand Line on March 10, so if you want, you could binge the entire adventure in one go. You could also take your time and savor another trip to the world of pirates in search of legendary treasure. However you choose to watch it, make sure you do, because One Piece may be the most popular anime in the world, but with the success of Season 2, it’s going to become the next big thing.