Surfaced One Piece Episode Titles Tease Wano's Next Steps

One Piece fans have been waiting for the Wano Country arc to come to the anime, and the first few episodes of its adaptation definitely did not disappoint as fans continue to rave about just how great the anime has looked lately. With the end of the recent filler arc tying into the upcoming One Piece: Stampede film, the anime is finally returning to the events of Wano proper and it's going to get pretty intense from here on out.

The titles for the next few episodes have surfaced online thanks to Reddit user Prmas, and they tease an extended version of a battle that only lasted for a short time in the manga's version of the events. Here are the titles for Episode 897-901 below:

• 897: "Save O-Tama! The straw hats travelling through the wasteland"
• 898: "Headliner! The magician Basil Hawkins enters the scene!"
• 899: "Confirmed defeat! The assault of the Strawman"
• 900: "The greatest day! O-Tama's first Oshiruko."
• 901: "Entering enemy territory. The protagonists spread into the town of Bacura"

It should be noted that these titles are still in flux, and will potentially change for the official translated releases, but they do tease that the fight between Zoro, Luffy, and fellow Worst Generation member Hawkins might be lasting longer than expected. Without giving too much away, the fight with Hawkins in the manga only lasted for a few pages before it found its conclusion.

Considering Hawkins will meet Luffy and Zoro in the next episode of the series, this leaves the next two episodes for the battle itself. Fans are worried this means that the anime will dive into spoilers, but that might not be a bad thing. One of the biggest goals new director Tatsuya Nagamine said for the anime was to fully flesh out the events of the Wano arc and explore the smaller details in new ways different from Eiichiro Oda's original release.

It seems like the first test of this will be coming sooner than expected as one of the major events of Wano is already going to get more focus, so fans will find out how they feel about this "filler" before long.

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.