There's No New 'One Piece' Episode This Week

You might be wondering why the latest episode of One Piece isn't available to watch today, and that's unfortunately because there was no new episode of the series this week in Japan.

Not to worry, as the series will continue it's normal schedule next week. It just had a break due to the imminent release of Dragon Ball Super: Broly in Japan.

To promote the upcoming release of Dragon Ball Super: Broly, Toei Animation and Fuji TV aired a special one-hour presentation about the film in the series' original Sunday time slot. This meant that both Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro (which had taken over Dragon Ball Super's half-hour slot) and One Piece were on break for the week. Although Dragon Ball Super: Broly has some cross appeal with fans of One Piece, fans are admittedly disappointed by this.

This unfortunately comes at a time that One Piece is reaching the undeniable climax of the Whole Cake Island arc. The final battle between Luffy and Katakuri in the Mirro-World has begun, and Big Mom has boarded the Thousand Sunny in an attempt to find her "stolen" wedding cake. Luffy and the rest of the Straw Hats are stuck in terrible situations, and fans have been glued to their seats in order to see how they get out of them.

But the series will resume it's normal schedule next week, and for those interested in Dragon Ball Super: Broly, the new special reportedly did not offer much new information about the film. Though that's to be expected with the hugest reveal of the film already debuting in a previous trailer released not long before.

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.

Oda revealed that he was about 80-percent done with the manga at this point with the Wano arc, fans are worried that the series may be coming to an end sooner than they thought. But it wouldn't be wrong to infer that the ending will most likely still be years away given how much of the world there is to explore and just how well it's selling week to week.