One Piece is an institution in the anime and manga landscape. While series like Naruto and Dragon Ball Z may be the face of anime in the West, One Piece dominates the rest of the world, especially in Japan. With over 500 million copies of the manga in circulation and a live-action Netflix adaptation (for better or worse), there are still plenty of people diving into One Piece for the first time, eager to see all of the adventures they’ll be going on alongside the Straw Hat Pirates. But those new fans will have a lot of stories to catch up on since One Piece has an enormous amount of story arcs and sagas to journey through to the point where you’ll need to dedicate several months just to take it all in. So here we will fully explain how many arcs (and sagas) of One Piece there currently are in total.
Because One Piece is an ongoing manga, it’s hard to say just how many arcs One Piece has left in it before the curtains eventually fall on what I believe to be the greatest fictional epic of the 21st century. But if you’re one of those brave souls that wants to read the manga or, God help you, watch the anime, let this handy dandy guide show you just how much of an undertaking it will be to catch up on One Piece and exactly what the differences are between a saga in One Piece and a story arc.
Explaining Exactly How Long One Piece Is & How Many Arcs There Are
A story arc in One Piece is typically broken down into the stories that take place on each individual island the crew lands on. For example, the most recently completed arc, Wano, began when Luffy and his friends landed on the island of Wano and ended when they left it. There are a few exceptions to this rule, mostly in-between major story arcs. In those instances, instead of following the crew on their next voyage, these smaller arcs will catch us up on events taking place in the rest of the world and how those events may or may not influence the direction of future story arcs. A saga in One Piece is a collection of arcs that usually revolve around a single goal, like defeating a particularly strong pirate or rescuing a crewmate, that will take multiple arcs to conclude and almost always ends in a large party where everyone celebrates their goal being achieved.
Unless series creator Eichiro Oda lied about this current saga we’re in being the final saga, by the time One Piece concludes there will be 11 main sagas split across well over 100 manga volumes and over a thousand episodes. As for the individual arcs within these sagas, there are a total of 32 arcs as of this writing, with each arc consistently building on the others and offering a much larger and more complicated view of the world. For the sake of simplicity, I am not counting filler arcs from the anime in this assessment due to their non-canon status within the series, nor am I counting any movies or TV specials for obvious reasons. Just the arcs within the manga. The One Piece arcs, which saga they belong to, and how many volumes / episodes / chapters each saga respectively lasts for are as follows below.
List of All One Piece Sagas and Arcs with Number of Volumes / Episodes / Chapters
- East Blue Saga (12/61/100)
- Romance Dawn
- Orange Town
- Syrup Village
- Baratie
- Arlong Park
- Loguetown
- Alabasta Saga (13/74/117)
- Reverse Mountain
- Whisky Peak
- Little Garden
- Drum Island
- Alabasta
- Sky Island Saga (9/71/85)
- Jaya
- Skypiea
- Water 7 Saga (15/119/139)
- Long Ring Long Land
- Water 7
- Enies Lobby
- Post-Enies Lobby
- Thriller Bark Saga (5/45/48)
- Thriller Bark
- Summit War Saga (12/132/108)
- Sabaody Archipelago
- Amazon Lily
- Impel Down
- Marineford
- Post-War
- Fish-Man Island Saga (6/58/56)
- Return to Sabaody
- Fish-Man Island
- Dressrosa Saga (15/172/148)
- Punk Hazard
- Dressrosa
- Whole Cake Island Saga (11/143/107)
- Zou
- Whole Cake Island
- Levely
- Wano Country Saga (16/184/149)
- Wana Country
- Final Saga (Still ongoing)
- Egghead Island
- TBD
With over 25 years of stories going on within the series and plenty of twists and turns, there’s a lot to really get invested in when it comes to One Piece. I’m excited to see where the series goes from here and how it handles the transition into live action as it becomes more well-known to an audience outside of the anime and manga industry. But when in doubt, if you’re looking for a big summer read, then One Piece is a perfect series to lose yourself in and you’ll be left immensely satisfied in the process.
But to summarize how many sagas and story arcs, currently, One Piece comprises 11 sagas and 32 arcs, canonically.
