One Piece‘s Wano Country arc is finally kicking off in full with the next episode of the series, and it’s one of the most anticipated arcs to come to the anime in quite some time. It’s been teased since the Zou arc, so it’s been great to see that the anime itself is putting a strong foot forward with Wano with some staff and style changes. But what’s always helping to hype the anticipation for the arc is the pure excitement from the anime’s team.
Videos by ComicBook.com
Director for One Piece’s Wano Country arc Tatsuya Nagamine recently held an interview with Animedia, and he’s excited for fans to see the season unfold as its battles will apparently remind fans of the flashy battles in Dragon Ball.
Cute how Nagamine is hyping the quality of the animation in Wano he even said that the battle scenes are going to look more like Dragon Ball than One Piece because of how flashy they are going to be https://t.co/OS5HU0H6b5
โ โ.๏ฝก.:*ใDeemใ.๏ฝก.:*โ (@Deem939) June 30, 2019
As noted by @Deem939 on Twitter, Nagamine is hyping the animation quality buff with the Wano Country arc for the fact that “battle scenes are going to look more like Dragon Ball than One Piece because of how flashy they are going to be.” The trailers for Wano had already impressed with how great it looked thanks to the new character designs from Midori Matsuda, and the preview for its debut episode impressed even further by promising the returns of the missing Straw Hats.
But with Tatsuya Nagamine previously directing Dragon Ball Super: Broly, this statement should excite fans even further. Even if it’s an exaggeration, if the anime series can approach Broly’s frenetic energy with its action it’s going to be a marvel to watch. One Piece isn’t exactly known for its dynamic fight scenes as they are usually pushed more by characters’ emotions, so if the fights can finally stack up to One Piece’s heart then we’re in for something special should it all shake out as promised.
Nevertheless, fans will see soon for themselves as the Wano Country arc will officially kick off on July 7th. Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece first began serialization in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. It has since been collected into over 80 volumes, and has been a critical and commercial success worldwide with many of the volumes breaking printing records in Japan. The manga has even set a Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book by a single author, and is the best-selling manga series worldwide with over 430 million copies sold. The series still ranked number one in manga sales in 2018, which surprised fans of major new entries.
