One Piece has spent over 25 years enthralling fans with the weekly adventures of the Straw-hat Pirate’s quest to find the ultimate treasure. With recent developments in the manga, it seems the franchise is finally heading towards its exciting conclusion.
Table Of Contents
One Piece So Far
Speculation on when the One Piece series might end has been occurring for almost as long as the series itself. Its 25-year lifespan has rarely shown signs of slowing down. One Piece has consistently remained amongst the most popular manga in Shounen Jump, the weekly manga magazine in which it is released.
For many other stories, this kind of extended length might work against its quality. For One Piece, however, which had established a clear end point from the very beginning of the story, this kind of length only serves to enhance the grandiose stakes.
Recently, the manga’s latest arc wrapped up with a dramatic finale and a break in the manga was confirmed as part of creator Eiichiro Oda’s preparations for the final saga. This means we’ve gained a lot more information about roughly when both the manga and anime might conclude and what to expect.
Speculation on the Ending
To give an imprecise but short answer to the question, “When will One Piece end,” One Piece’s manga might conclude between 2025 and 2027. But this is a date that’s definitely subject to change.
One Piece author Eiichiro Oda has a long history of speaking out on when One Piece might end without ever providing a clear date. To his credit, he is often consistent with the information that he provides, which is usually a percentage figure of the story that has been completed.
Oda has been providing assessments about when the manga might conclude for as long as it has been serialized. However, it’s only in the last 10 years that we’ve gotten a clearer indication of when the titular One Piece might be found. In 2016, during an interview, Oda announced that the manga was approximately 65% complete. This set in motion a long chain of speculation that has continued to this day.
Updates on Completion
Since 2016, the frequency of official updates regarding when One Piece might end has increased exponentially. In 2018, another update was issued which seemed to suggest that another 25% of the story had passed in just two years. This brought the completion of the manga to a surprising 80%. In 2019, Oda stated in a live interview that he predicted the manga’s story to end between 2024 and 2025. He later cited the Wano Arc as the manga’s ‘penultimate’ chapter.
Finally, the most recent development in the road to One Piece’s conclusion came very recently. The manga went on a month break (one of only a few extended breaks in the series’ history) between June and July 2022 to ‘make preparations for the final saga.’ Oda told fans that this final saga would begin with the manga’s 1054th chapter that would release after the month-long break.
The Final Saga
The fact that the final saga is commencing soon and the recent trajectory of the story seems to suggest that Oda’s earlier ‘predictions’ of the series reaching its conclusion between 2024 and 2025 could have some merit to them. But does that leave enough time to conclude the series?
Although we ultimately don’t know how long this final saga will be or what story arcs may exist within it, two to three years for the final saga to play out does seem plausible. But this isn’t necessarily consistent with how long other major story arcs in the series have taken. For this reason, the popular consensus amongst fans seems to be that 2025 is merely the earliest possible time that the manga could end. However, a few more years beyond that could be a more realistic estimate.
The One Piece Universe
Of course, the manga is just one part of the larger One Piece multimedia franchise. 2022 is going to be a busy year for the series in all aspects. There will be a live-action Netflix series on the horizon, a new theatrically released animated movie coming in August, and even a new trading card game hitting shelves internationally. The anime adaptation is currently some way behind the manga, ensuring it will probably continue long after the manga ends.
The manga’s recent revelations of Luffy’s true power and the amount of character arcs left to resolve at the end of the Wano Arc do seem to suggest it might take a longer time to resolve. However, the pieces are certainly in place for a gripping conclusion to the world’s most popular manga. One Piece has many mysteries left to explain—chief amongst them being what the titular treasure actually is! There’s plenty of threads left dangling, but it seems like in the next few years, they’re all going to be tied neatly together as the series wraps up.
