Top Anime Stories & Reviews of All Time – 2020 – Anime & Comics

“One Piece” is a very long work by Eiichirō Oda, full of fighting, laughter, and raids, given the era of piracy it deals with. It almost never works incoherent, with details that over time will sometimes prove super-important, thus making you pay even more attention to what you are watching/reading. Boundless and innumerable powers, thanks to the Fruits of the Devil, make everything more interesting because you never know who you are in front of, but the irony of the author in giving incredible powers after eating these “fruits” makes him lose the ability to swim to the owner, and then go to sea to be a pirate!

Very funny for almost the whole part of the story, the recklessness of the protagonist makes it all more interesting, funny and messed up, the protagonist who always acts for a cause he deems right, and therefore in his ways of doing in some moments “upsets” the natural order of things and sometimes the readers or viewers themselves. Myself in certain situations, before we realized it, we had my hands in my hair or my hands intertwined, hoping that everything would be for the best. This is because it is a work that transmits emotions, ways of thinking, making sure that those who look at it or read it can (even foreseeing what is going to happen on certain occasions) cheer for the Straw Hat crew.

We do not need many presentations, we are talking about one of the best-known shonen and the best-selling manga in history. The events narrate the pirate adventures of Monkey D. Luffy and his crew of pirates, in search of the great treasure: the One Piece. You will come to know characteristic and particular characters, and you will immediately see the great imagination of Eiichiro Oda, the author. The series manages to be light at the same time, with amusing gags, but also serious and thoughtful, dealing with different themes, even reaching several times to move. Another strong point is definitely having everything in a single shonen: you go from the island of giants to the winter one, from horror and fairytale atmospheres to deserts, islands in the sky, up to feudal Japan. It is a real epic, which certainly has some less successful moments, currently having over 900 episodes, but which absolutely does not affect the validity of the work.

We are pirates, at the boarding! Those who follow “One Piece” on local networks from the beginning remember well the first enthralling theme song of the anime. An anime that has an enviable record: more than 900 episodes, and is almost on the verge of breaking through the roof of the thousandth episode, crazy stuff. Not to count the various films, but here we speak only of the animated series.

A great series, very well done, even with its ups and downs, inevitable in twenty years. Often, out of necessity, it has been filled with filler episodes that are not in the manga, but very funny and that does not betray the spirit of the series. If we have to choose, the filler from Fortezza Navarone is one of the best. Sometimes there are long interruptions, like the entrance to Enies Lobby full of filler episodes, those so annoying because they are full of flashbacks, to try to buy time: a gimmick that will be repeated after the Reverie saga. Those are broth-lengtheners. At least they will be able to tell something to those who watch the series for the first time, but for others, it is endless torture.

Over the years there have been twenty-three original themes, among which we prefer that of Enies Lobby, the sixth (“Brand New World”). The animations have also changed over the years: personally, we prefer those of the first episodes (well, the first 500, go), while now animation is made with very naive drawings that are not to my taste, but it is still watchable.

Now the episodes have become very slow: what happens in an episode of the manga can be told in ten episodes of the anime, including fillers and insights (also because they are now too close to the production of the manga, not to mention the chronic interruptions of Oda). Another serious flaw of the anime is to alter some relationships with respect to the manga, especially that between Sanji and Nami, making them appear as a couple through the insertion of non-existent scenes in the manga or even altering several scenes of the manga, creating a relationship that does not exist in the original. For these defects, we cannot give 10 to the anime, as we have given to the manga.

Open your eyes, and it’s that day. That day you were waiting for, and at the same time, you hoped it would never come. You move on that day like many others, flaunting naturalness. It’s not a day like many, you know in advance. And the spontaneity is gone: you find yourself staring at your life and that of those around you like a scholar, or a football player ready to defend his goal at the first discard. And meanwhile, you observe the reality around you that is being realized, as you knew it would happen, hoping to see a sign that will give the pretext to think “no, it will not go like this, I can still decide”.

But you never really chose yourself from the start, before you knew Kakeru everything was written, and the letter was in your hands. In the hands of Naho, sixteen. Ever since the letter was catapulted into the entrance to her home, from the moment this sweet high school girl received the message from the Naho of the future, her life has been mapped out with warnings, tips, and tales about her future days. Whether Naho opposed the recommendations or completely ignored the content, whether she was willing to accept her fate or to oppose it, all took place according to a life already lived and revealed to her in advance, day by day, in its most salient points.

And it is the same for you, spectator, who follow the stories of Naho, Kakeru, and their friends, reading the letter. You already know what should have happened and for all 20 minutes each time you don’t have to ask yourself: will anything change? How decisive can a single chapter of one’s life be, to the point that history can be rewritten entirely? And, more compromising question, how inexorable one’s fate can be in the face of such upheaval. As you embrace the most disparate futuristic theories, the race deepens. Let’s punch his bike wheels, run right, ask his grandmother, we go left, Kakeru, where are you, here we are, Kakeru, please Kakeru, don’t do it run in the dark, yell at the top of your lungs while you gasp and you are out of breath even just to breathe but you are ready to scream his name again, and only passersby in the car listen to you and it is from them that you ask for information.

How much can it be possible to save a life? If you could have known everything from the beginning and had been able to play your game in the hope that an ideal future could come true, and rather escape the remorse and selves of life that ten years later remains marked by lack. From a particular absence, from his special presence. Kakeru, where are you, please.

” Have you lost the pride of the Saiyans, the strongest warriors in space ?! Eh, Kakarotto ?! “

When Raditz rushes furiously in the terrestrial sky in search of his brother, in the very first tables that kick off the Dragon Ball Z series, we discover one of the greatest twists in the history of the shonen: Son Goku does not belong to the Earth, but to the Saiyan race, ruthless warriors dedicated to raiding and fighting, whose only purpose in life is to fight, win, improve. The new – and more iconic – course of Toriyama’s masterpiece, in short, begins with the pronunciation of a name, Kakarotto, the true identity of the one who, until then, was known only as Son Goku.

It is from this point on that the battles of Dragon Ball expand far beyond the borders of the earth, to embrace alien and even divine worlds. Choosing to call their new action-RPG with the subtitle Kakarot, therefore, the CyberConnect2 studio wanted to pay homage to that revelation that gave rise to the events of the king of battle shonen, with the aim of creating the largest dedicated videogame transposition to the work of Toriyama. Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is indeed a game tailored for fans, decidedly vast and with out-of-scale fanservice, but unfortunately it hides so much potential within itself that it fails to explode completely.

Same story, with some news

From the arrival of Raditz to the defeat of Buu: Kakarot traces all the Dragon Ball Z sagas with absolute fidelity, except for the non-canonical ones, leading us along a journey of about 30 hours of gameplay, for the main story only.

Delaying in the explorable areas, completing the additional missions, and venturing into the endgame could add another good twenty hours to the general count, but the repetitiveness – we anticipate it – will not be long in making its evil aura feel. It must be admitted, in any case, that CyberConnect2 has studied the script of Toriyama very carefully: if we exclude some small inaccuracies that only the most avid fans will notice, overall the narrative similarity of Kakarot with the original work is to the limits of the manic, to the point of even repeating the same lines and the same shots of the anime by heart.

Within a story now told in almost all Dragon Ball video games, the development team has chosen to insert some additional details which, in full respect of the source material, slightly deepen some points of the plot to which – in the manga and in the animated series – had not been paid much attention. Beyond the marginal appearance of some characters belonging to the first part of the manga, such as Ottone, Nam, and Pilaf, what intrigued us most are those short sequences that provide more details on the relationships between the protagonists.