Classic anime often use simple plots to strike the deepest parts of the audience's heart.
As for how a simple plot pulls off that effect, that comes from the creator's talent.
At least tonight, among the tens of millions of One Piece fans in Japan, child or adult, a slice of hot-blooded ACGN fans came away from the Zoro and Mihawk fight more moved than frustrated.
The writing of Zoro had struck their hearts again.
The episode wasn't done yet.
Mihawk saw Zoro's resolve and his backbone, and with the Black Blade, he brought down a fierce strike from the front, left shoulder to right abdomen.
Luffy watched with his eyes wide in rage, but because the duel between Zoro and Mihawk was a fair one, he could only hold still and stay out of it to keep from tainting Zoro's fight.
In this battle, Mihawk had now acknowledged this young swordsman from the East Blue.
Don't die. Young man.
The chefs and crew of the floating restaurant Baratie, the remnants of Don Krieg's force, and all his subordinates.
Every one of them watched the famous Pirate Hunter Zoro of the East Blue fall in his battle against Mihawk.
Don't worry. That man is still alive. Mihawk said to Luffy.
Relief moved through Daiki at this beat.
Still alive.
A solemn and stirring BGM began to play.
That sense of stirring romance, the one Daiki only felt watching the One Piece anime, rose up in him.
It's too early for you to die. Mihawk said, looking at Zoro, who had fallen into the sea and been pulled out by Luffy and the others, still holding on by a thread.
I am Dracule Mihawk. See yourself, know the world, become stronger.
Daiki's fists tightened on their own.
No matter how many years pass.
I will be waiting for you at this peak. Surpass this sword. Surpass me, Roronoa Zoro.
That sense of tragic romance, the one that brought tears to Daiki's eyes while heating his blood, surged in his chest.
Zoro had given everything and only managed to make his opponent state his full name. Victory was still a world away.
Even so, it made him want to cry.
The dying Zoro gave his answer too.
Tears of defeat flowed from the corners of his eyes on their own as he raised the sword in his hand with what strength he had left.
I will not lose again. Until I defeat him and become the world's greatest swordsman, I will not lose again.
The weight on the words coming out of Zoro as he lay on the ground holding up his sword was no longer the same weight those words had carried across the previous episodes.
A lot of the time, when anime characters talk about what they want to do or what their dreams are, the audience feels nothing, or finds it a touch laughable.
It's like a child saying they want to be the richest person in the world when they grow up. It's flimsy, and you can't feel any resolve in it.
In One Piece, though, fictional anime that it is, Daiki could feel Zoro's resolve, his humiliation after defeat, and his refusal to give up, through the animation.
As the most popular Straw Hat Pirate in the One Piece anime besides the protagonist Luffy.
The character of Zoro appeared in episode two, and his characterization had taken over twenty episodes to set in.
The character writing on Zoro at this point.
Was not going to fade for the next twenty years.
The ED theme started.
A wave of One Piece fans in Japan sat with the afterglow of the plot, and then.
They flooded into the major forums.
"Absolutely love tonight's episode."
"This had a forty-year-old middle-aged man crying. This is what a hot-blooded shonen manga should look like. What have I been watching before this?"
"Is this really an anime by Shirogane-sensei? How is the art style this different from Hunter x Hunter, Attack on Titan, and Demon Slayer? But the characterization is top-tier."
"I used to think that One Piece's one-island-one-incident plot structure would get boring fast. Now I'm sold. Shirogane-sensei isn't writing incidents at all. He's shaping characters through these individual arcs."
"The character portrayal is genuinely incredible. It's been a long time since I've seen an anime that could move me this much with one or two episodes of character work. The plot is dead simple. I'm still hooked."
"Is this also Shirogane-sensei's growth? From 5 Centimeters per Second back then to One Piece now. The style shift is huge."
"First, I apologize for thinking One Piece was childish and bashing it for that reason two months ago. One Piece is childish, yes, but the child inside me hasn't died yet, and I still shed tears for stories and themes like this."
"I won't be sleeping tonight."
"Roronoa Zoro. I usually can't remember anime characters with foreign names. For Zoro, I'm not going to forget this guy for twenty years."
"I'm looking forward to the plot after the Grand Line. The East Blue arc is already this strong. What is the Grand Line going to be?"
"Can Zoro be the protagonist? It's not that Luffy isn't good. I just like Zoro more."
"Same. Hope Zoro gets more screen time."
"On the flip side, Sanji, the protagonist of this arc, has no presence at all. Luffy obviously wants him on the ship. Past watching the battle from the sidelines and the perverted and short-tempered character traits, there's nothing remarkable about him yet."
"Don't panic. Don Krieg's arc isn't ending for several more episodes. After Zoro's plot wraps, next is Luffy and the seafaring restaurant crew against Don Krieg."
"This anime has so much foreshadowing. Just twenty-odd episodes in and there's already the promise between Luffy and Shanks to return the straw hat."
"The duel promise between Zoro and Mihawk, the snippets about the Grand Line from Zeff, Nami stealing the ship and running, the likely reveal of the Arlong the Fishman plot. To enter the Grand Line at this pace, forty episodes might not be enough. This is still the starter village. Can this anime finish in four hundred episodes?"
"Didn't they say this anime would serialize for at least ten years? The length should be over five hundred episodes, right?"
"What are you thinking? It said serialize for ten years. It didn't say air weekly without break for ten years. For a long-runner like this, it's normal to air fifty or sixty episodes, then take a one- or two-month break to let the production team rest before continuing.
For a weekly anime, especially one with One Piece's quality, holding the line on quality across uninterrupted serialization is too hard. Being able to put out four hundred episodes across ten years would already be impressive."
"Huh?"
"What 'huh'? Aren't four hundred episodes enough for you? You don't think a pirate anime about a world-traveling adventure could be serialized for a thousand episodes, do you? What are you thinking? No matter how strong the work is, if it's serialized that long, the show ends up tedious and unwatchable."
That night, a wave of fans in Japan gave the latest episode of One Piece very high praise.
A lot of fans were also interested in the length of the One Piece plot.
Everyone could feel the potential for malleability in One Piece.
In theory, as long as the creator had inspiration, the story could keep going with no end.
Even the most optimistic among them could only picture a hot-blooded long-runner reaching four hundred chapters in length.
That wasn't a surprise.
How many characters can the best anime creators in the Japanese industry introduce inside a single arc, and how many chapters of battle can they show?
An arc that can put four or five vivid characters at the center and run twenty chapters without falling apart is already the work of a very capable creator.
But One Piece.
After entering the Grand Line, a single arc covering forty episodes of anime, with thirty or forty major and minor supporting characters carrying distinct portrayals, and the storytelling holding off from going formulaic, is a regular occurrence.
Major arcs like the Skypiea arc, Water 7 and Enies Lobby, the Marineford War, and Wano Country come close to one or two hundred manga chapters each. The amount of plot in a single arc of One Piece runs longer than the complete output of 99% of Japanese serialized manga.
A top-tier mangaka would see their stories fall apart when depicting plots of that length, unable to manage the story or the characters at all.
But One Piece has held this shape across decades of serialization.
The people of Japan couldn't picture the plot model of One Piece after the Grand Line yet, so the kind of judgment they were making was reasonable.
After the latest One Piece episode aired and fans discussed it all night, the next day's online conversation in the Japanese anime industry still mostly revolved around the character Zoro, even though the work scheduled to air tonight was Naruto, and tonight's plot was the opening match of the Chunin Exams final round.
Zoro's heat wasn't drowned out by Naruto-related topics in the slightest.
At home, his wife Miyu couldn't hold back any longer. As someone who liked to follow Rei's anime alongside the fans, she leaned on threats and bribes to get Rei to hand over the manga manuscripts and storyboards for the next ten chapters of One Piece.
She spent the whole day getting through the rest of the Baratie arc and then easing into the Arlong Park arc.
As for the setting drafts for the upcoming plots of Naruto and Bleach locked in Rei's study, she managed to hold back from those.
She did look at Rei with an odd expression now, though.
"Rei, your earlier works were popular too, but I felt I had a shot at making something that could match them. One Piece, though, gives me the feeling that it's a hard one to surpass."
"That's normal. One Piece is the work of a genius." Rei laughed.
A mangaka who can produce a manga, get it serialized, and have most anime fans know about it already qualifies as a manga genius. Getting that far puts you in the one-in-ten-thousand tier of the industry.
The genius Rei was referring to was a genius among geniuses inside that pool of top-tier talent.
The world-building, the character designs, the plot, the themes. Being able to put out the Egghead arc after a thousand chapters of manga, after countless One Piece fans had piled on about the Wano Country plot, and use the story to drive home the pursuit of freedom and the themes of oppression and resistance into the audience's chests.
Even with the heavy flaws in its later stages, the work doesn't lose its standing.
One Piece doesn't fall behind in any one category. It's a top-tier construction inside the anime circle, so it makes sense that Miyu would land on this thought.
"Is this a form of self-praise? You have no shame." Miyu laughed at him.
"No. I'm just stating a fact," Rei said.
"This work. Not only One Piece, but Naruto and Bleach included, their true brilliance hasn't shown yet." Rei looked at his wife. "All three are still in the buildup phase right now."
Miyu's face froze.
Time moved into October.
The hot summer was about to be behind them, and autumn was coming.
Rei's daughter, Hina, was about to celebrate her first birthday.
Rei was a person who disliked complications, but he was setting up a first-birthday banquet for his daughter inside the busy schedule.
He had no interest in showing off wealth, achievements, or assets.
He was, on the other hand, very interested in showing off his daughter.
Since he didn't have much contact with the anime industry partners whose livelihoods leaned on him, he could use the daughter's first-birthday banquet to deepen those connections and strengthen the partnerships.
Inside Japan's anime industry.
The public conversation and the popularity of the three works, Bleach, Naruto, and One Piece, kept climbing.
In Bleach's plot, the settings of the Arrancar and Visored began to surface. At the core, in Bleach, the original duty of a Soul Reaper was to eliminate Hollows.
After the middle of the plot, with Ichigo's break into the Soul Society, the entire stretch had been about Soul Reaper vs Soul Reaper combat, and the Hollows had faded out of the audience's mind.
After Aizen defected from the Soul Society, he became the boss of Hueco Mundo.
A group of high-tier, intelligent Hollows operated under his command, and their combined strength.
Wasn't necessarily lower than the Gotei 13, the top combat force inside the Soul Society.
The full shape of the world-building started to unfold now.
Ichigo and the others, with Uryu Ishida and Urahara, along with other people from the real world, sat as the centrists.
The Soul Society belonged to the protagonist side, and Aizen and the other monster powers from Hueco Mundo belonged to the villains.
The new arc was structured around concepts like saving the world, reshaping the world, and destroying the world. The audience was thrilled, and every Bleach metric was running up.
Naruto.
The Chunin Exams final-round arc was a high-anticipation arc, but the opening plot put minor characters into matches first, so the audience's enthusiasm wasn't running hot yet.
Everyone wanted to see the main characters in the matches, Naruto and Sasuke.
For One Piece, right after Zoro's plot wrapped, the show moved into the character writing for Sanji and Demon Man Gin.
Gin, loyal and principled, had his life saved by Sanji with a bowl of fried rice and never forgot it. Don Krieg, the captain he had brought to the restaurant, turned on them in the middle and attacked the floating restaurant, putting Gin, the second-in-command of the pirate fleet, in a tight spot.
Caught between his loyalty to Don Krieg and his gratitude to Sanji for saving his life, Gin, in the life-and-death fight against Don Krieg's poison gas bomb attack, in the end handed his gas mask to Sanji.
In this arc, the childhood memories of Sanji and his adoptive father Zeff moved the hearts of countless anime fans across Japan.