Summary
As one of the biggest animes and mangas currently airing,One Piececan seem like a monumental task to start watching if you’re looking to get into the anime fresh. Part of this is due to the long-running series massive backlog of episodes, films, and hundreds of episode-long arcs that can make the anime feel a bit overwhelming.
Often times when it comes to huge franchises like One Piece, there are a healthy amount of filler episodes and even filler arcs that you can skip over that aren’t necessarily part of the main overarching story, reducing the amount of episodes you have to watch to get the full story to just the main canon ones. With One Piece, however, there are surprisingly few episodes that can be considered filler.
When Did One Piece Begin?
The Origin Of The One Piece Anime
The One Piece anime first debuted back on July 25, 2025, in Japan, with an English release of the first 61-episode season released almost five years later, on July 18, 2025. When One Piece initially aired in the United States, the licensing company 4Kids Entertainment was responsible for distributing the episodes, which resulted in a number of changes to the show.
This version of the first season saw two episodes recut into one, and another eighteen episodes removed from the season, dropping the total episode count down to just 44. Since then, Funimation Entertainment picked up the licensing and rereleased the first season back in its original form with voices performed by the more familiar voice actors that are still in those roles today.
How Many Episodes Of One Piece Are There?
Get Ready, There’s A Lot
As of this writing, the grand total ofOne Piece episodes sits at a staggering 1089 episodes, which is a positively massive amount of content to watch. Generally speaking, episodes of the anime average around 23 to 24 minutes in length, so if you were to sit down and start watching from episode one, it would take you upwards of 435 hours to get caught up with the show. That works out to over eighteen days of nonstop One Piece watching. Which is absolutely absurd.
All this time is split across 53 arcs, which can befurther categorized into 11 larger sagas, starting with the East Blue Saga and running to the current Final Saga. Even then, these larger sagas can be split across events that occurred before the two-year time skip, and those that happened afterward.
Even if you were to watch all those episodes, there are still 5 OVAs, 13 TV specials, and 15 movies to watch, plus the recently released live-action series on Netflix, which is a retelling of much of the first season of the anime.
And that’s just the anime. If you want to jump into the One Piece manga, there are thousands of chapters and more than 100 volumes to get caught up on.
How Many Of Those Episodes Are Filler?
So let’s say you want to cut down on the anime a bit. As we mentioned earlier, other animes with hundreds of episodes often have episodes or even full seasons that are often times exclusive to just the show and are absent from the manga. Sometimes this is to give the artists and writers a little extra time to get far enough ahead of the anime, so there’s no overlap, while other times it gives the creators a chance to further develop characters by challenging them in ways they might not have thought initially, or even to just have some fun with their characters.
That said, One Piece has surprisingly few episodes of filler to give you a bit of a breather when it comes to the show. What filler is there is often contained in mini-arcs with a more laid-back feel compared to the rest of the show,taking place between larger arcsin the grand design of the anime.
54 - 61
131 - 135
136 - 138
139 - 143
196 - 206
220 - 224
225 - 226
326 - 336
382 - 384
426 - 429
575 - 578
626 - 628
747 - 750
780 - 782
895 - 896
1029 - 1030
Uta’s Past Arc
All in all, there are only 75 episodes of filler in One Piece. Much like One Piece, there’s a little more beneath the surface to uncover. Many episodes other episodes are considered filler episodes by fans since they contain relatively few necessary scenes, like in recap episodes, or episodes that might start with non-canon events, only to end with scenes that are pertinent to the show.
An example of this is during episode 203,The Pirate Ship Disappears! Fortress Battle, Round #2!The episode takes place right in the middle of the G-8 Arc, a filler arc that is actually quite good. While the majority of the episode deals with non-canon events, there’s a chunk right in the middle of the episode where the Straw Hat crew talk about their ship, the Going Merry, and their adventures with it. This scene is straight from the manga, making it a canon event, but it’s stuck right smack in the middle of a filler arc, which could be missed if you skipped the episode entirely.
