After years of waiting, Luffy and the rest of the Straw Hats have finally all gathered in the Wano Country region. To mark this special occasion, One Piece‘s anime has kicked off a whole new arc and subsequently surprised fans with just how much the series has changed since the Whole Cake Island and Reverie arcs. Though the new director and character designer already seemed to hint at this, what really cemented this shift was the new opening.
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The new opening theme for the Wano arc is titled “Over the Top,” and is performed by the returning Hiroshi Kitadani — who famously performed the first opening theme, “We Are!” It’s jam-packed full of fast and spoiler filled visuals, and you can check it out below!
One Piece: Wano Country Arc OP#onepiece pic.twitter.com/Nug5lToTtO
โ moetron | pKjd (@pkjd8I8) July 7, 2019
The Wano Country arc is still currently running in the manga, so fans were surprised to see how many of the later events have made it into the new opening theme of the series. Though previous openings have had spoilers, many of them made an effort to hide the bigger spoilers until their official reveals in the series. But that’s definitely not the case here as this new opening theme outright reveals many of the characters and battles coming in the arc.
But fans aren’t too phased by this because it’s just gorgeous to watch as the scenes go by with such a vigorous speed, the opening theme has been a huge hit. Teasing future battles, future character appearances, and even some character deaths that eagle eyed fans spotted, the new opening theme certainly paints a strong picture of the Wano Country arc’s anime run. Luckily for fans, the first episode of the arc teases that the series will be able to keep up this energy. But fans will know for themselves soon enough as the weeks roll on.
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.