The One Piece franchise has been going strong for 25 years, ever since author Eiichiro Oda's manga began serialization in 1997. Against all odds, One Piece has remained fresh, exciting, and highly imaginative even after 1000+ episodes and chapters, long past the point any other series would have gone stale or ended. A recent example of One Piece's tireless imagination was Luffy's Gear 5 transformation, which totally broke the internet, according to many fans.
There is little doubt that Luffy's Gear 5 transformation in One Piece Episode 1071 made anime history with its impact and viewership. Some fans say it's a transformation for the ages, while others believe it's overrated—but that debate actually makes the transformation more historic and memorable, not less. There's no single right answer, but the intensity of that debate is still flattering to One Piece, proving that it's still relevant and compelling after all these years.
Why Some One Piece Fans Say Gear 5 is Overrated
Some One Piece fans are debating whether Gear 5 is a bold new definition of shonen power-ups, or whether it's just another glow-up like many before it. One Piece used to be much more alone in the shonen world, mainly having series like Hunter x Hunter for company, but then the "big three" took shape when Masashi Kishimoto's Naruto and Tite Kubo's Bleach came along. In the 2010s, more shonen pillars like Gege Akutami's Jujutsu Kaisen, Kohei Horikoshi's My Hero Academia, and Koyoharu Gotouge's Demon Slayer arrived, making One Piece part of the pack.
One Piece was and still is the biggest and oldest of them, but its uniqueness as a shonen story may feel more diluted, with those other series having their own legendary moments, characters, and combat techniques to try and rival One Piece's own. Now, fans have Naruto's jinchuriki and Sage Mode transformations, Ichigo Kurosaki's final Getsuga Tensho form, Nezuko's adult demon form, and Izuku's awakening of One For All's built-in Quirks to think about. This means shonen manga/anime fans are spoiled by content, and that may lessen the impact of Gear 5 in their eyes. It may feel "been there, done that" by 2023, with so much competition around. That, in turn, may lead fans to call Gear 5's awakening overrated, a fun but otherwise unremarkable development that felt like a predictable obligation rather than something groundbreaking.
In addition, some One Piece fans may feel that Gear 5's flamboyantly cartoony nature hurts the series' immersion, giving Luffy a bizarre new power that's disconnected from the more serious Gears that Luffy trained so hard to create. Luffy has always been about training and fighting hard to get ahead, allowing him to narrowly defy the odds when he defeated the likes of Arlong, Sir Crocodile, Doflamingo, and Charlotte Katakuri. Then, Luffy lost fair and square to Kaido the pirate Emperor, only for his Gum-Gum Fruit to bail him out with a brand-new power he had never trained for. It could almost make Luffy's Haki training with Silvers Rayleigh and his innovative Gears 2, 3, and 4 feel like a waste of time in retrospect. Still, fans argue that One Piece actually did drop enough hints about Nika the sun god and Luffy's connection to that figure, making it less of a deus ex machina, even if it's true Luffy never did the shonen-style training to unlock it.
Why Other One Piece Fans Defend Gear 5 as a Game-Changer
On the other hand, plenty of One Piece fans have defended the wacky development of Gear 5 not just out of loyalty to the anime, but because they believe Gear 5's nature and its sudden awakening keep One Piece fresh in ways its younger shonen competitors never would have thought of. It's true that awesome power-ups are now common and can be taken for granted, from One For All's extra Quirks to Hinokami Kagura and Ichigo's new bankai in the TYBW arc. However, those power-ups were a linear progression of their own series' combat systems, while Gear 5 tears up all the rules to provide a hard reset to how Luffy's fighting style works. Gears 2, 3, and 4 were indeed a linear progression, with Gear 2 being little more than "Luffy hits harder and faster." But even Gear 4's awesome Snakeman and Tankman forms were just Gum-Gum Fruit+, and that threatened to get stale.
Gear 5 powered up Luffy in entirely new directions, and in so doing, turned a lot of heads with is reckless and creative innovations. Whether or not it was the intention, Gear 5 provided commentary on the increasingly routine nature of shonen power-ups, and in fans' eyes, that meant One Piece is still relevant after all this time. Plenty of fans loved Gear 5's debut because it took even veteran fans by surprise with its off-beat innovations. It was a case of old dogs learning new tricks, and ensured that One Piece wasn't just an old series that stubbornly lasted beyond its prime. According to Gear 5's supporters, this means One Piece actually hasn't reached its prime yet, and a 25-year-old series can still reinvent itself and refuse to get into a rut.
Eiichiro Oda's robust imagination and clever storytelling strategies were what put One Piece on the map and kept it there for so long against the odds, and now Mr. Oda's unpredictable imagination is at it again. He's still doing what made One Piece such a long-lasting hit, and Gear 5 is just the latest of many bold creative decisions, and plenty of fans respect that. Never before had a shonen series broken its own rules so brazenly and humorously with Looney Tunes physics and sound effects like that, and speaking more broadly, it's that kind of goofy but bold creativity that convinced so many fans to begin watching and reading One Piece to begin with.
After all, even the series' early days included a rubbery pirate captain, a swordsman with three blades, and a talking reindeer doctor. Gear 5's rule-breaking goofiness is just the logical next step that longtime fans didn't see coming, but in retrospect, they may feel like this sort of development was due to arrive sooner or later and fits One Piece's storytelling style. That may be one of the single biggest reasons why so many One Piece fans enjoyed Gear 5 and embraced it as the most logical development for the show, rather than rejecting it as an immersion-breaking deus ex machina to bail Luffy out of trouble in his toughest fight yet.
