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Review: One Piece (Season 1)

Posted on by Arleigh

“Being a pirate is not about raiding villages or perfect plans; it’s about adventure and freedom.” — Monkey D. Luffy

Netflix’s first season of the live-action One Piece is one of those rare anime adaptations that’s both messy and genuinely charming, often in the same scene. It doesn’t completely escape the usual problems that come with translating wild, cartoon logic into real people and real sets, but it gets enough right—especially the cast dynamics and worldbuilding—that it feels more like a real show than a cosplay experiment.

The basics: this first season covers the East Blue saga, following Monkey D. Luffy as he puts together the early Straw Hat crew and heads off toward the Grand Line. You get the big beats fans expect: Romance Dawn, Zoro’s introduction, Orange Town and Buggy, Syrup Village with Usopp and Kaya, Baratie with Sanji, and Arlong Park with Nami’s backstory as the emotional anchor. It’s condensed into eight hour-ish episodes, so you’re not getting a one-to-one remake of either the One Piece manga or the anime; this is very much a “greatest hits” version of that early stretch, with a ton of trimming, merging, and reordering to make it work as a bingeable live-action series.

Probably the easiest part to recommend is the core cast and their chemistry, which does a lot of heavy lifting. Iñaki Godoy’s Luffy is unapologetically goofy, earnest, and loud in a way that could’ve gone horribly wrong in live action, but he leans into the character’s optimism so hard that it mostly works. He feels like someone who really does believe he’ll be King of the Pirates and doesn’t see any reason to question it, and that unshakable confidence becomes the emotional center of the crew. Godoy also nails Luffy’s mix of childlike wonder and sudden steel; he can flip from grinning over a new ship to staring down a villain in a way that sells Luffy as more than just a rubbery himbo. His turn as Luffy ends up being the highlight performance of the season, because if he doesn’t work, nothing else does—and he absolutely carries the show’s heart on his sleeve.

Mackenyu’s Zoro is basically the polar opposite energy, which is why their dynamic works so well. He plays Zoro with a dry, deadpan coolness that never tips completely into parody, even when he’s doing something as inherently ridiculous as fighting with three swords. His line delivery is often clipped and understated, and that restraint gives him room to land some of the show’s funnier reactions just by raising an eyebrow or sighing at Luffy’s nonsense. Importantly, Mackenyu makes Zoro feel like someone who’s constantly sizing up the room and quietly choosing when to step in, which fits the character’s “honor-bound mercenary slowly becoming a real crewmate” vibe.

Emily Rudd’s Nami brings a different energy altogether, mixing competence, guardedness, and flashes of vulnerability in a way that really pays off once the Arlong Park material kicks in. Early on, she plays Nami with a kind of wary charm—she’s clearly the most practical person on the ship, always thinking about maps, money, and survival, and Rudd lets that edge peek through even when Nami is going along with Luffy’s madness. When the show finally digs into her backstory, she shifts gears into something rawer and more emotional without it feeling out of character, and her scenes in the latter part of the season give the story a genuine emotional spine. Alongside Godoy, Rudd’s performance is another standout, since the season’s biggest emotional payoff basically hinges on whether you buy Nami’s pain and eventual trust in the crew.

Jacob Romero as Usopp leans into the character’s role as the lovable coward and storyteller, but he doesn’t make him a total joke. His performance captures that mix of bluster and insecurity—he’s a guy who talks a big game, clearly doesn’t always believe himself, and still steps up when it matters. Romero’s physicality and timing help sell Usopp’s more exaggerated reactions, but he also gives the quieter moments with Kaya and the Going Merry a sincerity that keeps the character from being just comic relief. You can see why this crew keeps him around, even when he’s clearly terrified half the time.

Taz Skylar’s Sanji doesn’t show up until later in the season, but he makes a strong impression once he does. Skylar leans into Sanji’s suave, flirtatious side without making him completely insufferable, and he brings a surprising amount of warmth to the character’s loyalty toward Zeff and the Baratie. His fight scenes, built around kicks and flashy movement, give the action a slightly different flavor whenever he’s involved, and his banter with Zoro and Luffy slots into the group dynamic quickly. The show dials back some of Sanji’s more over-the-top anime tendencies, and Skylar’s performance sells that reined-in version pretty well.

One thing that helps the whole project feel less like a random “Hollywood take” and more like a genuine extension of the franchise is how closely One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda worked with the team to adapt his manga and anime for live action. His involvement doesn’t magically make every creative choice perfect, but it does temper some of the bigger changes from the original, since you get the sense that the tweaks to pacing, structure, and certain character beats were made with his blessing rather than behind his back. Even when the show compresses arcs or reshuffles events, it still feels guided by the spirit of One Piece as Oda sees it, which goes a long way toward making the adaptation easier to accept for fans who might otherwise bristle at every deviation.

The show spends a lot of time on relationships and backstory, and that’s both a strength and a weakness. On the plus side, those flashbacks—Luffy and Shanks, Zoro’s childhood, Nami’s history with Arlong, the way characters like Kaya and Usopp connect—give emotional weight to what might otherwise just be colorful pirate antics. By the time Arlong Park rolls around, you actually care enough about Nami and her village that the standoff with Arlong lands as the season’s big payoff rather than just another boss fight. On the minus side, the early episodes can feel overstuffed with introductions and tone-setting. There are a lot of characters and a lot of lore thrown at you quickly, and if you’re not already familiar with One Piece, it can feel chaotic and hard to latch onto at first.

Visually, the show is kind of wild—in a good way. One of the big fears with live-action anime is that the production design ends up feeling cheap, empty, or embarrassed by the source material. Here, the sets are large, busy, and distinct: each island or town has its own look and vibe, from circus-horror weirdness with Buggy to the ocean-front glam of the Baratie to the more oppressive, grimy feel of Arlong Park. There’s a sense that this is a big, strange world rather than just three reused soundstages and a backlot. The costumes, props, and little bits of world detail—like the transponder snails and offbeat outfits—lean into the original’s absurdity instead of trying to “ground” it into blandness, and that helps the show retain a lot of its personality.

The CGI and action are… pretty good, with caveats. Luffy’s rubber powers were always going to be a challenge, and sometimes the stretching looks a little off, but the show smartly leans into the inherent ridiculousness rather than pretending it’s supposed to look “realistic.” The action scenes are choreographed to be big and theatrical rather than gritty, which fits One Piece’s energy. There are moments where the limitations show—fights can be shorter than fans might want, and some sequences are clearly staged to avoid pushing the visual effects too hard—but when the show goes all-in, the results are genuinely fun. The key is that the action is always driven by character: Zoro’s swordsmanship, Sanji’s kicks, and Luffy’s unshakeable confidence all feel distinct and recognizable.

That brings us to the fishmen, which are easily one of the trickiest elements to pull off in live action. The make-up effects and prosthetics do a lot of heavy lifting, and from a distance the designs are bold and striking, but when the camera gets up close, things can get pretty rough. You can see the seams, the stiffness, and the slightly rubbery, mask-like quality that’s hard to completely disguise when you’re turning heavily stylized cartoon fish-people into real actors in costumes. By the time the show gets to that particular section of the season, though, the audience has more or less made its peace with the whole experiment: either you’ve bought into the concept that this is a live-action One Piece—with all the heightened, cosplay-adjacent weirdness that implies—or you haven’t, and the fishmen are just going to be one more thing you can’t get past. For viewers already on the show’s wavelength, the emotional stakes of Arlong Park matter more than the occasional rubbery jawline.

Performance-wise beyond the core Straw Hats, there are a few clear standouts in the supporting cast, and the obvious high point is Jeff Ward as Buggy. He takes a character who’s primarily used as broad, loud comedic relief in the manga and anime and plays him the same way on the surface—still ridiculous, still theatrical, still a clown-themed pirate—but with a bit more bite and cynicism underneath. There’s a mean streak and a sense of bruised ego in his version of Buggy that makes him feel less like a one-note gag and more like an actual threat who just happens to be funny. That extra edge helps his scenes pop whenever he’s on screen and makes Buggy one of the side characters you actually want to see come back later instead of just being a one-arc villain.

Tone-wise, season 1 walks a tightrope between over-the-top anime goofiness and more grounded live-action drama. The first couple of episodes lean heavily into cartoonish humor and big, exaggerated deliveries, which can feel jarring if you’re not already on board with that style. As the season goes on, though, the show settles into a more comfortable rhythm where the comedy and drama balance better. The horror-tinged atmosphere in some mid-season episodes, the emotional flashbacks, and the quieter character moments give it some texture beyond “loud and wacky.” Still, there’s no getting around the fact that some jokes are pushed too hard and some lines land awkwardly; not every animated beat translates cleanly to actors on a physical set.

One of the more interesting aspects is how the story has been compressed and rearranged. Plotlines that took multiple episodes in the anime get condensed, combined, or reordered so that they fit into an eight-episode season with a clear build toward Arlong Park as the climax. On the positive side, this keeps things moving and avoids the bloat that long-running anime can fall into. There aren’t many filler-feeling stretches; almost every scene is trying to push plot, character, or worldbuilding forward. On the negative side, there are moments where you can feel the rush: some conflicts resolve faster than they arguably should, certain relationships don’t get as much space to breathe, and some secondary characters end up feeling like sketches rather than fully realized people.

If you’re a long-time fan of the One Piece manga or anime, that editing is going to be a bit of a mixed bag. Some changes genuinely help the story flow better in live action, tightening up arcs that were originally more meandering. Other changes will probably rub purists the wrong way, especially when beloved scenes are trimmed, altered, or moved around. That said, the adaptation is more faithful in spirit than many other anime-to-live-action attempts. The Straw Hats act like themselves, the world still feels strange and adventurous, and the show never seems ashamed of its source material. It’s clearly designed as an accessible starting point for newcomers rather than a frame-by-frame recreation for existing fans.

Pacing is another area where the season both succeeds and stumbles. The length of the episodes means there’s room for characterization and little worldbuilding beats, but they can sometimes feel bloated, especially in the early going when you’re still figuring out how seriously to take anything. Some viewers may bounce off before the show fully finds its groove. However, once the series gets deeper into the crew’s emotional histories—especially in the middle episodes and leading into the Arlong material—it becomes easier to invest in what’s happening on screen. The season builds nicely toward its finale, even if the path there is occasionally uneven.

As a whole package, season 1 of Netflix’s One Piece is far from perfect but genuinely enjoyable if you’re open to what it’s trying to do. It’s big, colorful, sometimes clumsy, and often surprisingly heartfelt. Fans looking for a meticulous, panel-accurate adaptation are going to notice every shortcut and deviation. People who hate anime-style humor may find parts of it grating or too over-the-top. But if you’re okay with a show that’s earnest, occasionally awkward, and unafraid to be strange, there’s a lot here to like—especially the way the crew’s bond slowly becomes the emotional core of the story.

In the end, this first season feels less like a flawless triumph and more like a strong proof of concept. It shows that One Piece can work in live action without losing its identity, even if compromises have to be made in pacing, tone, and scale. The highlight performances from Godoy as Luffy and Rudd as Nami, backed by a solid ensemble that includes scene-stealers like Jeff Ward’s Buggy, Oda’s guiding hand, the ambitious production design, and the emotional beats of arcs like Arlong Park are strong enough that, by the time the final stinger hints at more adventures to come, it’s easy to imagine sticking around for another voyage with this crew—even if the make-up isn’t always convincing and the rubber powers don’t always look great.

Review: Fallout (Season 1)

Posted on by Arleigh

“War never changes. You look out at this Wasteland, looks like chaos. But here’s always somebody behind the wheel.” — The Ghoul

Fallout’s first season lands like a mini-nuke: messy around the edges, but undeniably powerful and surprisingly fun. It’s one of those adaptations that feels comfortable being both a love letter to the games and its own weird, often hilarious beast.

Set a couple of centuries after nuclear war, Fallout drops viewers into a retro-futurist wasteland where 1950s aesthetics collide with irradiated horror and corporate evil turned up to eleven. The show splits its focus between three main threads: Lucy, a bright-eyed vault dweller forced to leave her underground utopia; Maximus, an eager but insecure squire in the Brotherhood of Steel; and The Ghoul, a bounty hunter whose past life as a pre-war actor slowly bleeds through his charred exterior. The decision to juggle these perspectives is smart, because each storyline scratches a different itch: Lucy carries the emotional core and fish-out-of-water comedy, Maximus gives the militaristic, power-armor fantasy with a side of satire, and The Ghoul supplies the hard-boiled noir edge and moral ambiguity. The result is a season that rarely feels static; even when one plotline stalls a bit, another kicks in with fresh energy.

The tone is one of the show’s biggest strengths. Fallout leans hard into pitch-black humor without ever completely undercutting the stakes, which is harder to pull off than it looks. Limbs fly, heads explode, dogs get eaten, and yet the show keeps finding a way to make you laugh at the absurdity without turning the apocalypse into a joke. The violence is graphic and frequent, but it usually serves a purpose: to remind you that this world is brutal, even when the characters are cracking wise or bartering over chems. If the games felt like wandering into a deranged theme park built on the ruins of civilization, the series captures that same feeling of “this is horrible, but also kind of hilarious.” That balance, more than any specific lore reference, is what makes it feel like Fallout rather than just another grimdark sci-fi show.

Performance-wise, the casting is pretty inspired. Ella Purnell plays Lucy with this mix of optimism, naivety, and stubborn decency that could easily have been grating, but instead becomes the emotional anchor of the whole season. She brings just enough steel to the character that her idealism feels like a choice, not a default setting. Aaron Moten’s Maximus is a slower burn, and early on he risks fading into the background as “generic soldier guy,” but the more the show digs into Brotherhood politics, insecurity, and the pressure to be “worthy” of power armor, the more interesting he becomes. Walton Goggins, though, more or less walks away with the show. As The Ghoul, he’s vicious, funny, and weirdly tragic, and the flashbacks to his pre-war life give the season some of its most compelling dramatic beats. There’s a sense of continuity in his performance between the slick actor he was and the monster he becomes that keeps the character from feeling like a one-note cowboy caricature.

Visually, Fallout looks a lot better than a streaming adaptation of a video game has any right to. The production design leans into practical sets and tactile props where possible, and it pays off. Power armor has real heft, the vaults look lived-in rather than just glossy sci-fi hallways, and the wasteland feels like a place where people actually scrape out a living instead of just a CGI backdrop. The show has fun with the franchise’s iconography—Nuka-Cola, Pip-Boys, Vault-Tec branding, goofy radios—but it rarely pauses to point and wink too hard. The design team clearly understands that Fallout is basically “atomic-age corporate optimism weaponized into apocalypse,” and that theme is baked into everything from costumes to billboards rotting in the sand. Even the creature designs, like the mutated critters and ghouls, walk that line between unsettling and cartoonishly over-the-top, which fits the overall tone.

On the writing side, the structure of the season feels very much like an RPG campaign. Episodes often play like individual “quests” that build toward a bigger mystery: Lucy stumbling into a bizarre settlement, Maximus dealing with Brotherhood politics, The Ghoul chasing a lead that intersects with both of them. That quest-chain structure gives the first half of the season a propulsive, almost episodic energy, and it’s one reason the show is so watchable. At the same time, this approach has trade-offs. Sometimes character development feels a bit checkpoint-driven—people change because the story needs them to for the next “quest,” rather than as a smooth emotional progression. You can occasionally see the writers nudging the pieces into place, especially as the season barrels toward the finale.

Fallout sits in an interesting sweet spot when lined up against another prestige video game adaptation like HBO’s The Last of Us. Instead of treating the games as a sacred script that must be recreated line for line, it treats the Fallout universe as a shared sandbox—a tone, a style, a set of rules—rather than a fixed storyline that must be obeyed. Where The Last of Us is largely a faithful retelling of Joel and Ellie’s journey, Fallout seems far more interested in asking, “What else can happen in this world?” instead of “How do we restage that iconic mission?” It borrows the franchise’s black-comedy vibe, retro-futurist Americana, and corporate dystopia, then builds mostly original plots and character arcs on top.

That choice immediately gives the writers room to play. They’re not constantly checking themselves against specific missions, boss fights, or famous cutscenes; they’re free to jump around the timeline, invent new factions or townships, and reframe old ideas in ways that a beat-for-beat adaptation could never manage without sparking outrage. This approach also lets Fallout add to the lore instead of just reanimating it in live action. Because it’s not locked into recreating a particular protagonist’s path, the show can explore corners of the wasteland that were only hinted at in the games, complicate existing factions, or take big swings with backstory and world history. That kind of freedom inevitably creates some continuity friction for hardcore fans, but it also keeps the series from feeling like a lavish, expensive recap of something players already experienced with a controller in hand. Where The Last of Us excels by deepening and humanizing a story many already know, Fallout thrives by expanding its universe sideways, treating the source material as a toolbox rather than a template—and that makes it feel more like a genuine new chapter in the franchise than a live-action checklist.

Thematically, the show has more on its mind than explosions and fan-service, which is nice. Fallout keeps circling back to questions about corporate power, the illusion of safety, and how far people will go to preserve their own little slice of control. Vault-Tec’s smiling fascism is a blunt but effective metaphor for real-world systems that promise protection while quietly planning for everyone’s demise. The Brotherhood of Steel, meanwhile, becomes a vehicle for exploring militarized religion, hierarchy, and the dream of “owning” technology and knowledge. None of this is subtle, but Fallout isn’t a subtle franchise to begin with, and the series has enough self-awareness to let its satire stay sharp without slowing everything down for speeches. When it hits, it feels like the writers are asking, “Who gets to decide what’s worth saving when everything’s already gone?”

Where the season stumbles most is consistency. The pacing isn’t always smooth; some mid-season episodes are stacked with memorable set pieces and character moments, while others feel like they’re mostly there to set up endgame twists. The finale, in particular, is likely to be divisive. On one hand, it ties several plot threads together, drops a couple of bold lore swings, and sets up future seasons with a few big, crowd-pleasing reveals. On the other hand, it rushes emotional payoffs and leans heavily on explaining rather than letting certain developments breathe. The shift in tone in the last episode is noticeable enough that some viewers may feel like they suddenly switched to a slightly different show. It’s not a deal-breaker, but it does mean the season ends with more “wow, that was a lot” than a clean emotional landing.

As an adaptation, this freedom-to-expand strategy pays off by appealing to longtime fans and welcoming newcomers without getting bogged down in purist debates. Fans of the games will catch tons of details, locations, and tonal echoes that feel like affectionate nods rather than empty easter eggs. At the same time, the show isn’t just re-skinning existing game plots, which is a good call. It feels like a side story in the same universe rather than a strict retelling. That said, the lore choices late in the season—especially around the broader timeline and certain factions—are bound to spark arguments. If someone is deeply attached to the canon of the older games, some of the retcons and reinterpretations might play like a slap in the face. If someone is more relaxed about canon and just wants an entertaining, coherent story in that world, the show will probably land much better.

The writing of individual scenes shows a lot of care, especially in the way humor and dread coexist. Some of the best moments aren’t the big action beats but the small conversations: a strange, tense chat in a ruined diner, a piece of pre-war media resurfacing at the worst possible time, or a casual bit of wasteland banter that suddenly turns threatening. The dialogue sometimes leans too modern for the retro setting, but the rhythm feels natural enough that it rarely jars. When the show is firing on all cylinders, it nails that specific Fallout flavor: characters staring at incomprehensible horror and responding with a joke, a shrug, or a desperate sales pitch.

If there’s one area where the season could improve going forward, it’s in fleshing out the secondary cast and giving certain arcs more emotional weight. Some supporting characters are memorable and sharply drawn, while others feel like they exist mainly to be lore-delivery devices or cannon fodder. The world feels rich enough that it can absolutely sustain more side stories and slower, character-focused detours. A little more breathing room for relationships—whether friendships, rivalries, or romances—would help the big twists land harder and keep the show from occasionally feeling like it’s sprinting from spectacle to spectacle.

Overall, Fallout’s first season is a strong, confident debut that understands what made the games stand out without being slavishly beholden to them. It’s funny, brutal, stylish, and surprisingly character-driven for a show that spends so much time reveling in bloodshed and nuclear kitsch. The missteps in pacing and the polarizing choices in the finale keep it from being flawless, but they also signal a series willing to take risks rather than play it safe. For viewers who enjoy genre TV with personality, and for gamers who have been burned by adaptations before, this season is absolutely worth the trip into the wasteland. It doesn’t just survive the jump to live action; it stomps into it in full power armor, flaws and all.