Onigashima Paced:

At the rate One Pace was taking to adapt the Wano arc, they would finish releasing in ten years.  Obviously no one has time for their shenanigans (their perfectionism?), so an intrepid individual decided to edit the entire Onigashima arc to One Pace standards on his own.  This huge segment of One Piece is now available for viewing in a viewable format -- i.e., 45% shorter than the original One Piece broadcast, while still keeping every canon part of the manga intact.  This is exactly what we desire from One Pace, but it's actually out, unlike One Pace which who knows if they'll ever release this segment of the story.

There's still a gap between this release and One Pace's Wano arc releases, which means we still don't have a complete cut-to-manga version of the Wano arc, but now we're very close to that dream.  The editing could have cut more.  There were still a bunch of unnecessary flashbacks I had to skip through, some flashing back to just the previous episode.  Ridiculous.  As if we need a reminder of what happened twenty minutes ago.  But it was, in the main, a fine job.  Onigashima Paced was the equivalent of a sudden release of 57 great episodes of the #2 anime ever made.  It was like Christmas had come early.  I downloaded this present and marathoned it as quickly as possible, and now I'm all caught up.

Onigashima arc is a solid arc of One Piece.  Not as good as Dressrosa or Water 7, but better than the likes of Punk Hazard or Thriller Bark.  These 57 episodes made me laugh, they made me cry, and they made my heartbeat elevate as spectacular fight scenes played out on the most epic scale in One Piece history.  I'm not talking about the Gear 5th fight, but the 5 on 2 fight between the aspiring captains and the Yonkou.  That fight was so amazing in terms of all the synergistic interactions between all the different skills of the various participants.  Also Ulti was great.  Onigashima is the first arc with the whole crew together in one place for a long time, and the author made sure to give every member of the Straw Hats a moment to shine, which I appreciated.  It was like finally getting to see a bunch of old friends.  They'd been missing from the story for so long.  Most of One Piece these days is flash backs of unrelated characters, there's practically nothing about the original crew, so this was an oasis in the desert.

In honor of this massive deployment of new great anime, I also decided to add the ending theme song, Raise, to my music hall of fame as a 5-star song.  I don't have to demote anybody else to make room because I'm done with that.  But I can at least delete a 1-star song I don't want anymore, 'enemy spy,' so the total remains at 5500.

In addition, I'm adding three new characters to my fictional character hall of fame, all obviously from One Piece -- Tama, Marco and Law.  They all earned their new esteemed status during this arc.  They went above and beyond the call of duty to help out and save others and defeat enemies they really had no reason to expect they could.  They were heroes.

On this day I have nothing but praise for my 2nd favorite anime, it was a great day, a great moment.  57 episodes.  Episodes it was doubtful we'd ever get to see at the rate One Pace was going.  Few gifts are as precious as this one.