Eiichiro Oda Reveals How Close ‘One Piece’ Is to Completion

The bestselling (and long-running) manga One Piece could be coming to an end soon.

In a recent interview, One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda revealed that the manga was about 80% complete. For reference’s sake, One Piece has run since 1997, so that means that the manga probably has about five years remaining on the manga series.

One Piece is a popular manga about a pirate named Monkey D. Luffy, who has the ability to stretch his body thanks to consuming the Gum Gum fruit. Luffy assembles his own crew of pirates known as the Straw Hat Pirates and sets out to find the fabled One Piece treasure and establish himself as the King of the Pirates.

Oda has commented about how close his series is to completion before. He claimed that the manga was about 60% done back in 2012, then 65% done in 2016. While a 15% jump towards completion in less than two years might be alarming to some fans, we know that One Piece has no problem taking its time to reach its destination. For instance, the setting of the current Wano arc (which is filled with fierce samurai and are independent from the World Government), was first mentioned over 10 years ago.

Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece first began serialization in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. It has been collected into 87 volumes, with a few chapters yet to be included. It 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 430 million copies sold worldwide.

New chapters of One Piece are released weekly and are serialized in the Shonen Jump magazine in the United States.