IS HE JUSTIFIED?

If you like tora dora I bet you'd love twilight

But really, I can't engage myself in One Piece anymore. Oda has repeated his method of story telling in order to extend his story to meet popularity. However, this has resulted in him showing the same hook too many times. Oda's formula is basically to make the pirate team focus on short term goals by traveling to one island at a time where a different short story is to be told concerning racism, friendship, corruption, and justice. This runs parallel to him running the long term story that begins to intersect with the short term as the world government, special nobles, the sichibukai, and the great pirate kings play out and have plans that overlap the crews journey from island to island lending Oda the ability the time to work on the long term. The long term story is the true story. The true story in the sense that it is the story with the most relevance after one hundred chapters have passed.

It doesn't take long for people to realize that residents of island X, Y, or Z are not important beyond being used as points to progress the plot. Luffy is always moving on to the next island in order to meet reader's expectations and hasn't really backtracked to any of the islands he has previously visited because that's not his goal. Make no mistake that One Piece is good, however it's shonen good. Given shuisha's business model, One Piece would be the poster child of someone running their corporate policy to optimal levels. The meat of the story is being spaced by large amounts of padding to draw out content which makes it incredibly disengaging to follow. Without a doubt a lot of manga that become anime adaptations have excessive amounts of padding. One Piece has a great hook and is able to draw in readership during lulls of the story with bits and pieces of the true story coming into play. However, One Piece has so many pieces of true story in play that it could last another 1,000 chapters if they continue with their current plot pacing. I believe that its popularity is its own demise because if a story is that popular, then the editors will pressure the mangaka to continue. The story must go on.