‘There wasn’t room to do it the way that it deserved to be done’: ‘One Piece’ director reveals the omission that stung the most

We’re closing in on the one-week anniversary of Netflix’s One Piece adaptation, and frankly, the fact that the streamer stuck the live-action anime adaptation landing at all is more than enough cause for celebration Perhaps we were so used to the Cowboy Bebops and Death Notes of the world, we simply weren’t prepared for showrunner Steve Maeda and company to not only satisfy us, but knock our socks off.

Of course, the triumph of One Piece isn’t without a few bittersweet notes; given that the penultimate episode of the first season wrapped up the series’ equivalent of the Arlong Park Arc, many fans may have wondered if they would get to sink their teeth into a rendition of the Lougetown Arc this season.

This was not to be, as the season ended with a Monkey D. Garp confrontation, no doubt leaving a bit of a sour taste in the mouths of a few, but none more than Maeda himself, apparently.

In a recent interview with Screen Rant, Maeda expressed his disappointment in not being able to adapt the Loguetown Arc – in which Buggy, Alvida, and the notorious Marine captain Smoker all battle the Straw Hats at the site of Gold Roger’s execution – for the show’s first season, citing logistical constraints for the reason behind its omission, as well as his personal desire to see the arc be brought to life with the appropriate time and resources.

“The biggest one for me that we didn’t get to do was Loguetown in the present day, and we needed two more episodes to be able to do it and there wasn’t the budget, there wasn’t the screen time… I wanted to come back to Loguetown and just couldn’t fit it in the eight episodes. I felt like we were rushing, and it was also a very expensive build. And so that’s a regret, for sure.”

It may end up being a short-lived regret, though; One Piece has been absolutely massacring the viewership competition since it set sail on Netflix, even beating out the likes of Stranger Things and Wednesday in some areas. This isn’t to say that a second season for One Piece is written in the stars right now, but with numbers like that coupled with the many teases of an eventual Loguetown Arc adaptation we saw in the final episode, all the pieces are certainly in place.

One Piece is available to stream on Netflix.