The moment I heard someone was going to adapt One Piece into live action my morbid curiosity kicked in, fully expecting another embarrassment on the level of Dragon Ball: Evolution, but damn if they didn’t succeed in faithfully recreating the look, tone and feel of the world.

The show fully embraces the wackiness of the original source material as opposed to early comic book/anime/video game adaptations that actively tried to sand down all the elements the makers deemed too weird and off-putting to the assumed general viewer. It’s also sincere, and not soaked head to toe in constant shit-eating MCU-style sElf-aWaRE IrONY.

I’m two episodes in, and while I thought the first episode was pretty great from start to finish, I was a bit disappointed in the second one. Buggy’s crew got really short-changed, with everyone with the exception of Cabaji just amounting to background characters and none of them getting to actually fight Luffy and crew. I was really looking forward to seeing Cabaji having a sword fight with Zoro while riding a unicycle after seeing how they nailed his design in the first episode. Instead he was just Zoro and Nami’s jailer and got knocked out in one blow

The fight with Buggy was also a bit underwhelming. Despite his powers he just mostly stayed in place whereas in the manga he was really mobile, flying and chasing people around with ease. I’m going to chalk that one up to the limitations of live action and hope thr members of the crew get to have more individual duels in future episodes.