If we want to believe in Oda’s affirmation that One Piece will be over in exactly 5 years (not one more), we have only one short arc and one long arc left after Wano. Not that much, really. Also, if you believe in math and descriptive statistics, Wano could be crudely predicted as being 100-ish chapters long.
ODA’S “FIVE YEARS STATEMENT”
If you are a fan of One Piece, you should live under a rock to have never heard that One Piece will end, probably a lot sooner than you expected. Every other year, Oda says something on the lines of “One Piece is at XX% of completion” or something like that, but quite recently he came out with a true and true expiration date.
Oda was involved in a interview with Fisher, a very famous Japanese youtuber with millions of subscribers, last year in between August and September 2019. This is the link to the video.
Question: Considering the entirety of One Piece, how many years does the story have left?
Oda: I want to end it in five years.
Many were skeptical at first, Oda’s former manga editor and current media editor, Takuma Naito, included. He made some tweet about it and released few interview about it in the next few months and many could say that his statement were exaggerated to promote interest in the interviews around some of the future released One Piece properties.
First, he said the following during an Interview about the release of One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4, that came out last September, few weeks after Fischer’s interview. Naito told the audience he was surprised everyone took Oda at his word.
Question: I thought to myself, ‘Why did everyone believe that? There’s no way.”
Naito: It’s not that we want to drag anything. The stories ahead are just that dense, we still have so much to do, to finish all of them in 5 years…
Later (during an interview about the success of One Piece: Stampede), he said that his statement was untrue and, based on the current pacing of the Wano arc, One Piece could very well end in 5 years.
So… where are we left now?
The original Oda “5 years statement” was largely misread and misquoted, but now that we had more weight behind it due to Naito’s sudden change of ideas I think that it has become more believable. Worth to notice that Oda said that One Piece would end in 5 years time last year (in September 2019), so by his estimate the series should end by middle 2024.
Accounting for the current pace of release made by Oda (with an average of a break after three straight chapter releases), with an average of 36-40 chapters per year, we can second guess the number of chapters left and the number of arcs left in the story to see how much this is statement is true/probable given the way Oda is used to lay out the story.
- Chapter 967 – January 2020
- Chapter 1003~1007 – January 2021
- Chapter 1040~1047 – January 2022
- Chapter 1076~1087 – January 2023
- Chapter 1103~1127 – January 2024
- Chapter 1125~1147 – Middle 2024
- Chapter 1139~1167 – January 2025
So lowballing the number of chapters left we got 150 chapters left. Highballing the number we got 190 chapters left and for the sake of the argument I will use an approximate number of 175 chapters, but the same could go both ways quite easily, with the series ending just a little bit shy of 1150 chapters.
So where could we go with 175 more chapters?
