One Piece has a 25-episode fight at one point. Here’s a short list of anime shorter or the same length as this one fight:
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The first season of FLCL (6 Episodes)
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Hellsing (13 Episodes or 10 double-feature Ultimate episodes)
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No Game No Life (12 Episodes)
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Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo (24 Episodes)
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The first season of Re:Zero (14-22 Episodes depending on cut)
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Devilman: Crybaby (10 Episodes)
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Puella Magi Madoka Magica (12 Episodes)
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Bokurano (24 Episodes)
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Berserk (25 Episodes for the OLM show, 13 Episodes for Studio 4°C, 24 Episodes for 2016)
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Kill la Kill (24 Episodes)
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Ergo Proxy (23 Episodes)
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The first season of Psycho-Pass (22 Episodes)
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The first season of Assassination Classroom (22 Episodes)
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I play FFXIV, it’s unironicslly true.
However: The game is decently fun before the story kicks in
and the devs for sure need to trim the story a lot more specially the earlier levels.
in addition to that the early content is becoming very stale and needs a rework
I’m not kidding when I say the 4th expansion is some of the best story telling in video game history, the music and production is beyond anything I’ve ever experienced and I look back very fondly to that expansion
It peaked at Shadowbringers. Endwalker was very good. Dawntrail is crap.
This has genuinely happened to me

🐒 The One Piece is REAL! ⚓
All episodes up to Episode 37 showcases well of what the entire series is all about.
If you are not into it by 37 episodes in, I don’t think One Piece is for you.
I’ve also seen one too many haters turn their tune by then.
I no longer watch the series at release, instead I watch with other reactors that I feel like calling my Nakama.
🥹 Beware: prepare to cry & bring a towel to catch those tears. This series can & will draw raw emotion out of you.
#onepieceParks and Rec. The entire first season is trash. No idea how they were able to turn it around to abruptly.
You can pretty safely ignore that first season, though.
“It gets good at season 2”
“Then let’s start there.”
“But then you won’t know what’s going on”
“If it’s good then I won’t have to”
To be fair about One Piece, there’s so little unique content in each episode, sandwiched between a lengthy theme song and recap, and next episode preview, that 37 episodes is more like 15 episodes.
And I love all of it.
Honestly pacing is the anime’s biggest weakness. The show simply has dogwater pacing to help it maintain a consistent run since 1999. One Pace, which cuts roughly half of the total run time is a godsend if you ever want to watch the show
I mean, I’m currently already 650 episodes into the main anime already, so I may as well keep going. 😅 One Pace sounds great though, so I’ll probably try that for a rewatch someday. Maybe after reading the manga for comparison.
dude episode 37? try episode 130+ lmao one piece is so slow and boring until a little past the alabasta arc.
I made it through about one minute of one piece once.
One of those “every trite shitty fucking anime trope fist fucked into a pile of shit” anime’s. Which I’ll admit ismost of them imo.
I love good anime. The problem is the overwhelming majority of it is fucking shit.
Sounds exactly like the review from someone who never watches One Piece past the 1 minute mark.
Honestly, the opposite is why I struggled to get into the show for so long. I have a bunch of messages with friends who were pushing me to watch it of “I don’t get why this happens, I don’t feel enjoyment out of the fights. He’s doing the same thing every time and then for some reason it works the last time”
I think one piece is one of the few shows where I don’t actually like the main protag. I understand Luffy’s personality, and I understand that perseverance is his thing, but he takes a hammer approach for everything. I didn’t like how for the first 400 or so episodes his approach to fighting anything was to hit it repeatedly, just angrier. Defeating antagonists early on seemed super unrewarding because it was the same thing he does all battle, just for some reason it works that time.
Note this does eventually change, but like the time commitment required to get to that part where it’s engaging is super high. I do like the show now that it’s actually starting to pick up but, I defo don’t believe that I would have made it to this point if I wasn’t also being pushed to since I was in a one piece DnD campaign and not understanding key elements was getting old lmao
A simple premise stretched out across way too many episodes with flat, 2 dimensional characters, unrealistic fights laden with expository dialogue, weird-looking sexualized maybe underaged girls, side arcs that do nothing for the story but are zany and stupid, increasing levels of power which coincide with exactly the right increase in enemies’ power, is all this more or less in the mark?
It’s just shitty anime bingo. Beyond the superficial parts it’s interchangeable with all the other shitty anime.
Nah it gets good at Arlong Park
<Insert Anime here> is really good. You just need to cut away <roughly 75% of it>.
sometimes i watch with 4x speed. most times 1.25 or 1.5. they really like to stretch some things out. “go parn. save deedlit. i’ll deal with it.” “are you sure?” “go parn.” “are you sure?” “go parn.” “are you really, really sure?” get in the fucking robot. shinji
Bad TV apologia is a sure sign I won’t vibe with someone
Ain’t that the truth. There used to be a shortened version of Naruto on utube that was like a third the length of the full versions, with out lose of any content.
You just need to cut away <roughly 75% of it>.
Hey now, there’s no need to bring Farscape into this. (I’m joking. But Farscape was famously adapted into a very watchable re-cut that throws out a great deal of the original film.)
You take that back!
I never knew about the recut, but presumably it gets rid of a lot of the monster-of-the-week content?
I don’t think any of that was actually bad. It didn’t move the overarching plot along all the time, but that wasn’t the point.
Warframe players fr (I have over 3,000 hours)
I think the main reason The Second Dream hit so hard was because the game was so flat and plotless up until that point. Like, it’s a great story and all, but the “twist” would have been guessed within moments of starting it if players expected there to be any plot beyond the scraps of lore they’d been given thus far.
Though kudos to the devs for making that flatness part of the plot, as you’re basically just a machine going through the motions until you “awaken”. Still sucks from a gameplay perspective, of course.
Not to mention every quest after the second dream is also absolute cinema
I still count The Second Dream among the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had. I agree with you that the only reason it worked is because the game was so plotless until that point, but it’s not like the game wasn’t fun until then - it was just fun for reasons other than story. If the moment to moment gameplay hadn’t been engaging, having the big reveal be tens or hundreds of hours into the experience wouldn’t have worked at all.
The game Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is another example of this sort of thing… There’s a moment near the end that hits really hard, and I feel like the whole design discussion for the game focused on that moment and the rest of the game was just a vessel to get the player to the point where it would hit hardest, and it does a great job of that. It’s only a 4 hour experience, though, not a 40+ hour one.
Came here for this. I bounced before I could reach that “mission thar changes everything”.
I would not watch 36 episodes or play 150 hours. But…
… don’t dismiss something too quickly. I watched One Cut Of The Dead, and the gimmick of that movie was (I thought) that it was filmed in one take. But holy shit, bad acting, bad sfx, and super cheap production quality. Dropped it after twenty minutes.
And then I read fantastic reviews, thank god spoiler free. So I sat down again, started it, and somehow made it through the first thirty minutes. And holy fuck, it had a brilliant pay off! More than worth it to pay attention this half hour!
With anime I give them three episodes to get me hooked. For games I draw my personal line for 5 hours.
But not 36 episodes. Or 150 hours :)
Now I need to give One Cut of the Dead another go.
I also stopped 20 minutes in. Twice.
In my opinion, base FFXIV A Realm Reborn is already a good game. The first expansion, Heavensward, takes it to great. Stormblood goes back to good. Shadowbringers and Endwalker together are the best Final Fantasy I’ve played, though other people don’t like Endwalker as much as me. I haven’t played Dawntrail since Endwalker is a clear endpoint for the story.
I cried throughout the entire game, but a sequence in the last region of Endwalker made me ugly cry like no other media has
Dawntrail has its issues but it’s definitely hard to get something off the ground after a conclusion like EW. I think it was alright, not too strong on the story department and they wasted some characters imo but the content was really good.
I got super burnt out on the content in Dawntrail just because it felt like they got very comfortable in their formula and kept funneling everything into it more and more
Endwalker I already began having issues. A lot of the dungeon content felt dumbed down. I disliked how they mandated the pull-pull-boss formula in all dungeons. Especially combined with the crazy self healing they doled out to all tanks, it felt like the pack management got oversimplified, which was a double edged sword because in addition to being boring it made those sections take longer.
It was especially disappointing to me after Shadowbringers had some of the best and most comically massive boss to boss pack pulls in the entire game (Mt Gulg) and in many cases allowed you to pull directly into mini bosses, or had special tech that let you spawn enemies early (Qitana Ravel). I had a ton of fun learning these strategies from other tanks while doing roulettes on my dps and healers, and then teaching the optimal strategies to others when I leveled my tanks.
I was mixed at the time because I felt the actual dungeon boss fights in Endwalker were a lot of fun, and then I really enjoyed the extremes and savage content (Although I was also beginning to feel weary of an over reliance on floating bosses and arena sized bosses. I play tank in high end content and I love the gameplay loop of anticipating the boss moves and pre-positioning myself to bait their attacks, or lining them up well for my melee dps players). It also helped a lot that I loved the music and the story of Endwalker.
I should note I’m also very sensitive to the state of the casual content because I like to level and ~gear every job in the game. So I spend a lot of time in dungeons and such, running through content with FC members, and so on. I had a goal at one point to orange parse the extremes with every job in the game (extremely doable with the uncapped tome equipment and memeing on food and potions lol, it’s really just a test of if you can execute your rotation the whole fight without dying) and I did get at least one orange with each job. So having the ability to have fun while leveling all my jobs (a very time intensive task) is very important to me.
But yeah when Dawntrail dropped the dungeons felt even more restrictive than ever before, the boss fights hadn’t really improved much, and it felt like all of the jobs themselves got even simpler in their rotation. To the point where I felt like it didn’t even matter what tank I picked, it was basically the same rotation. Like the 6.3 Paladin rework to finish turning all the tanks into Warrior clones was just so gut wrenching to me. I looked at my hot bars one day and realized I had all the “same” buttons in all the same places. 1-2-3/4 combo, then press your big burst button 3 times, reach over here for your oGCDs. All of the defensive cooldowns were totally homogenized as well. I guess I’m a final fantasy boomer now but I used to like stressing the healers out by memeing them with Dark Knight’s old invuln and stuff like that lol.
It used to feel like I could get a lot of variety just from switching jobs but for Dawntrail I only bothered leveling one of each type (tank healer melee range magic) because at some point, after being able to make my own fun with the process for years and years over multiple expansions, it just felt like I couldn’t anymore. Eventually I stopped keeping up with the game entirely and for the first time ever I’m considering skipping the next expansion launch, which has always been a huge event for me that I take time off work for.
Anyway wow sorry for the rant, I started out just having a couple things to say but I guess I just hadn’t really processed all of that until now lol. TL;DR kids these days don’t realize the game was sooo much better back in myyy day
ARR has huge pacing issues and a lot of stuff that just isn’t that great. However, it’s basically essential for the later on stuff and can’t really be trimmed down that well without losing a lot of stuff. It does get good though :/
It does get good at the climax of the base game, A Realm Reborn, when Rauban loses control. That’s what hooked me. There are other great moments and plots along the way through the whole game . But for the overall best time, it’s the 3rd expansion, Shadow Bringers, that’s a masterpiece all the way through. That’s some of the best Final Fantasy I’ve ever played from Squaresoft or SquareEnix.
Dawntrail, I can’t recommend. I can’t get into it.
Rauban was so fun. I was like “yes, where was this hours ago?” I recently fell off somewhere post shadow bringers. I dunno, it really does start feeling slow there to me
It does slow down after that. Eventually, it picks back up during Endwalker and that does really well on it’s own, but in the shadow of Shadowbringers it’s hard to measure up. Endwalker would be my second favorite expansion. Even post-EW was good. But then it drops like a rock for Dawntrail. That’s my least favorite of the entire series. Maybe they’ve turned it around, idk. But I quit in the post-DT around one of the quests that just says “Speak to Wuk Lamat” AGAIN and I just don’t know why we’re still hanging out with that loser who falls into success.
Shadowbringers was a treat most of the way through, very unique and the constant feeling of dread was great. Except the trolley part, I spent weeks stalled on the story at that bit. Amaurot was worth it though.













