I have been taking on the daunting, but worth it, task of getting caught up with One Piece since the fall of my sophomore year. It is a long, daunting task, but it’s worth it, and if you have thought about watching, I would definitely recommend it.

However, at times, it can run on a little bit. In the Wano arc, there is a scene that plays every time they show anything happening in the Flower Capital (a location in Wano) as if you cannot tell where they are. This at times is frustrating, and one complaint some fans of One Piece have is the pacing of it. 

I watched One Piece on Crunchyroll all the way to the Punk Hazard arc. I liked it a lot, and if that’s your preferred method of watching, great! It definitely works. However, if you want a more streamlined and quicker manner of catching up to episode 1,122, then I have just the thing for you.

If you don’t mind piracy (not the sailing kind, the illegal streaming kind), there is a fanmade website that cuts content that is deemed filler and or wasn’t in the manga, called One Pace. 

I picked up watching on One Pace during the Fishman Island arc because it isn’t great and is the worst longer arc, in my opinion (Hordy Jones is such an uninspiring villain to follow up the events of Marineford), and I just wanted to get through it as quickly as possible. I ended up watching the following arc, Punk Hazard, on Crunchyroll. I was then informed by my friends last semester that One Piece would take a break and not release any new anime content until this April, so now was the perfect time to get caught up. 

I decided to watch the stretch of Dressrosa to Wano (445 episodes) on One Pace, and it was worth it. My friends and I would hold watch parties, and my roommate and I would watch a few episodes a night. It took me around two years to get to where I was and, with One Pace, three months to get through those 445 episodes. There are multiple episodes worth of content packed into one episode of One Pace, and while the watch time of those episodes can range to be thirty to forty minutes, it packs so much of the important content into those episodes. 

This does come with a cost, though. A lot of One Piece’s charm is the humor of it, the interactions between characters, and other funny moments. Due to One Pace cutting non-canon to the manga parts to maximize watch times, some of these moments get cut out. I luckily watched with people who have watched One Piece, and they would show me clips they thought should’ve been in it, whereas someone watching for the first time on their own may miss out on this.

Ultimately, if you just want to get caught up quickly, One Pace is a great way to watch and one that I would recommend. I would probably still be in Whole Cake Island had I not started watching it, and I am happy with both the content they fit and the time it took to watch it. One Pace is a great way to watch the series but at the cost of a few minor moments.