One Piece put its Egghead Arc on pause until the 2025 TV schedule kicks off, but fans of the anime will still have things to look forward to despite the bummer news. The franchise will roll out a remastered version of its previous Fishman Island Arc, which has a reputation for being one of the worst arcs of the 1100+ episodes of the series. I'd argue it's the worst, and it's high time the franchise did something to try and improve it.
Fishman Island will be shortened from 62 episodes to 21 episodes, and that's certainly a start. That said, I'm not sure fine-tuned animation and a shorter story will fix every issue of this arc, which I'll get into below. If nothing else, at least watching it will make the wait for Season 2 of the live-action One Piece to arrive to our Netflix subscription a little easier to handle.
The Villains Are Not A Real Threat To The Upgraded Straw Hats
One of my main issues with Fishman Island is there's an inherent lack of tension compared to other One Piece arcs. From the jump, it seems pretty evident that baddie Hordy Jones and his cronies are no match for the upgraded Straw Hats, all of whom spent the past two years training to become stronger. There's slight tension in the fact that Hordy has Luffy at a disadvantage at one point due to the weakness of his Devil Fruit powers in water. Ultimately though, this is one of the easier battles the Straw Hats have had in their long history.
Sanji Almost Dies For The Stupidest Reason Ever
One Piece can always be a bit grating when Sanji is a sex-crazed skeez for humor, but Fishman Island makes that worse by trying to use it to dramatic effect. Sanji is overwhelmed when seeing the beautiful mermaids, and as is often the case in anime, characters get a nosebleed when they see beautiful women. The problem is that Sanji's nosebleeds become so frequent he suffers tremendous blood loss and almost dies. It's such a stupid storyline and it's taken 100% seriously.
Jimbei's Story Goes On For Far Too Long
Jimbei is a great character in One Piece, but the story he tells about the Fishmen being forced into servitude of the Celestial Dragons might be the most drawn-out origin story I've seen. What's worse is it's not even a complex story, but it's told in such a way that it just drags on to where the watcher knows what will happen long before the story gets to the point. It's my hope a vast majority of it will be cut when we see the remastered version, but we'll have to wait and see.
Shirahoshi Is One Of One Piece's Most Annoying Characters
I hope that when the One Piece remake in development retells this tale, they find a way to make Princess Shirahoshi less annoying. Truthfully, there's no way to remove her from the story fully because she's an important character for reasons I can't get into for the sake of spoilers. Still, with fewer episodes, I'm hoping the remaster can remove a good amount of her crying and complaining.
My main gripe is that while Shirahoshi is a teenager, her character is written as though she's four years old. It's incredibly annoying to endure on top of all the other upsetting parts of One Piece's Fishman Island arc, and really the icing on the cake for me on why I despise this arc over all of the others. I'd sooner watch Skypeia twice than endure it again, though I'd be lying to the reader if I said I wouldn't be watching the remaster. After all, I'm caught up on all the other '80s and '90s anime worth streaming, so what else would I watch?
Catch One Piece's beginning of the remastered Fishman Island arc streaming on Crunchyroll on Sunday, November 3rd. If you feel like I do about this section of the anime, it may be worth checking out to see how it improved.
