- #10
Morayne said:
CG-Silver said:
One Piece is good. Has some mediocre arcs but the adventurous feel is very enjoyable throughout.
The older arcs actually get better the longer the series goes as the later events were foreshadowed in the previous arcs and make connections to them. Everything feels interconnected. Only Oda is able to pull this off. And One Piece has maybe the greatest foreshadowing in the entire manga genre, your respect will grow a lot as soon as you find it out. Sadly, too many people only "read" the manga to get from one page to another and will miss the majority of greatly built foreshadowing in OP. While character development isn't a focus on it, it's still there, the strength of One Piece lies in world building, myster creation and unpredictability.
Unpredictability? Did we read the same thing? One Piece and unpredictability in the same sentence is just wrong. From what manga do you think Fairy Tail has inherited its flaws (one of them being predictable)?
90% of flaws you find in One Piece, you will also find them in Fairy Tail, because it tried so much to be like One Piece. The problem is that Mashima forgot about the qualities of One Piece and ignored it and added Fanservice instead. So basically Fairy Tail is One Piece without the good world building but with more shitty writing instead.
Yes, unpredictability. Of course, right now as you've certainly read a good amount of the series as myself and already know what happens it can't be compared correctly. But when you read a new chapter and try to foresee what is going to happen it's very hard to predict what will happen. Oda plays a lot with villains, characters, sudden allies and introduces characters at parts that he will re-use for the future or even brings past villains as new allies in. While the arc scheme is often similar, it always plays out very differently. No one could predict things like Ace dying back then, strawhats completely losing on Shabody, Shanks appearing on Marine Ford and such or Raftel being in the centre of an X where the lines of the 4 islands match as in a "X marks the spot kind of way". I've been reading since 2005 and followed some forums too. When you didn't have the ability of reading all chapters in a row, stuff was very unpredictable. Many chapters are unpredictable in what's happening because Oda has a good overview of what will happen in it and loves to spread out multiple arc strings for various characters to (kind of) mislead the readers. He does this a lot and very well too. While twists and deus ex machinas in FT feel not only forced and pulled out of the ass, Oda's twists and deus ex machinas make sense when you think about them or will make a lot of sense in a later chapter. Have you ever stopped at a chapter and tried to predict what will happen, instead of immediately reading it? FT is so predictable because Mashima never tried to risk anything. Every time he pulled a big cliffhanger he never pulled it through, while Oda takes risks in his series like killing Ace or letting the whole crew getting beaten by Aokiji back then. Foreshadowing also plays a big part in the unpredictability and my respect always grows a bit bigger for Oda when he is able to make connection to something long in the past, like Ace's tattoo with the S and Sabos pirate flag as a tribute to him.
