It’s The End Of An Era For The One Piece Anime

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After 25 years, a major chapter for the One Piece anime is coming to an end on December 28th. The series, created by Eiichiro Oda, first appeared on television in 1999 and has consistently released new episodes every week. With only a few brief interruptions – including a longer break from October 2024 to April 2025 – fans have been able to follow the ongoing adventures of Monkey D. Luffy and the Straw Hat Pirates without fail.

The long-running anime series One Piece is making a big change. Starting in 2026, new episodes will no longer air every week. Instead, the show will switch to a seasonal format, releasing episodes in blocks throughout the year. The episode airing on December 28, 2025, will be the last weekly episode in the show’s history.

Going forward, new episodes will be released in seasons spread out over several months, similar to how many anime shows are released. Each season will be divided into two parts, called ‘cours,’ and will result in a total of 26 episodes per year, which is fewer than the 52 episodes fans have previously received.

The first new installment of One Piece is scheduled to arrive in April 2026, continuing the story with the highly anticipated Elbaph arc from the original manga. But that won’t be the only One Piece content released in 2026.

Fans can expect the second season of the popular live-action series to arrive on Netflix in March. Meanwhile, the team behind the original story is also creating a new anime version that will revisit and streamline the earlier events, though a release date for the anime hasn’t been announced yet.

Why Is One Piece Going Seasonal? 

As a longtime anime fan, it’s hard to believe, but after all these years of weekly episodes, month after month, year after year, One Piece is coming to an end. It really feels like the end of an era, not just for the series itself, but for the anime world as a whole.

For a while, many popular anime shows released episodes continuously, without traditional seasonal breaks. Instead, they paced their releases to match the schedule of the manga they were adapted from.

Over time, anime fans’ preferences have changed. They used to prioritize finding a show and watching it consistently each year. Now, with anime becoming more popular, viewers simply want high-quality content, regardless of schedule.

Despite other popular shows switching to a seasonal release schedule, One Piece continued with its ongoing format. Now, after 26 years since the anime first premiered in Japan, it’s finally changing things up, and there are several reasons for this decision.

One major reason for this shift is that viewers now prioritize quality over quantity when it comes to anime—and television as a whole. Many of the most popular anime series in recent years have been relatively short, with only a few episodes. A great example is the highly praised Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End.

This approach allows the animators and manga artists more time to develop their work. While Eiichiro Oda, the creator of One Piece, remains very involved after over twenty years, his workload has decreased as he’s gotten older. Because of this, the anime has occasionally needed to add extra content or expand on existing storylines to avoid getting ahead of the manga.

Switching to a seasonal release schedule should prevent the anime from overtaking the manga, giving Oda and his team more time to write the story without that pressure.

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2025-12-26 23:35