26 Years And Over 1,000 Episodes Later, One Piece’s First Season Is Finally Coming To An End
Toei Animation 
Josh has been playing video games for longer than he can remember, kicking things off with a Master System before upgrading to a Mega Drive. Covering the industry since 2018, if a game has a strong story – or even better, the decisions you make determine the course of that story – odds are he’s going to like it. Or, you know, put Sonic or Pikachu on the cover and that’ll get his attention too.
One Piece will undergo one of the biggest changes in its history this week. The anime’s 1155th episode will air on December 28, and after that, there will be no more episodes until April. It marks the end of One Piece’s traditional, non-stop, weekly releases as Toei Animation prepares to shift to a seasonal format.
The announcement that the One Piece release structure will undergo an overhaul was revealed a while ago, but that day is finally almost upon us. Fans who have been accustomed to getting a new episode every week for the past 26 years (yes, really) are about to get a shock to the system.
One Piece s Egghead Arc, And The End Of Its Weekly Schedule As We Know It, Ends On December 28
Episode 1,155 will air on December 28, bringing the curtain down on One Piece’s Egghead arc. The arc has been one of the most explosive and influential in the anime’s history, presumably so that when it ends, fans will be hungry for more and eager to return after having to take a break for the first time.
The silver lining for those used to getting a weekly One Piece fix is that we already know when the show will return for what will effectively be its second season. The anime’s new era will begin on April 5, 2026, after which point 13 weekly episodes will air. There will then be a three-month gap before the second half of the season, comprising an additional 13 episodes, starts airing.
Some people will tell you there have technically been 21 seasons of One Piece. Those people are referring to its arcs, which, unlike the plan moving forward, didn’t have gaps between them like traditional seasons.
There Will Be 26 Episodes Of One Piece Each Year From Now On
That means, moving forward, there will be 26 episodes of One Piece per year as opposed to the usual 40+. I’d argue that’s more than enough considering the pace at which other shows work. The final episodes of Stranger Things are airing right now, a show that has taken so long to tell its story that the child actors at its core have grown up and had kids.
One Piece fans are concerned about the pacing of future storytelling, which is a fair concern to have. On the surface, it would seem story arcs will take far longer to unfold with fewer episodes per year to play with. However, the hope is that the storytelling is tightened up. Even the most hardcore One Piece fan will admit that, during 26 years of a non-stop episodic anime, there has been a heck of a lot of filler.
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2026 is shaping up to be a pretty big year for One Piece. Not only is the way its anime airs about to undergo a dramatic seasonal shift, but we’ll also be getting season two of its live-action adaptation. Fans of that branch of the One Piece tree will have to settle for even fewer episodes. Season two will be eight episodes and will be released three years after season one.
Hiroaki Miyamoto, Konosuke Uda, Junji Shimizu, Satoshi Itō, Munehisa Sakai, Katsumi Tokoro, Yutaka Nakajima, Yoshihiro Ueda, Kenichi Takeshita, Yoko Ikeda, Ryota Nakamura, Hiroyuki Kakudou, Takahiro Imamura, Toshihiro Maeya, Yûji Endô, Nozomu Shishido, Hidehiko Kadota, Sumio Watanabe, Harume Kosaka, Yasuhiro Tanabe, Yukihiko Nakao, Keisuke Onishi, Junichi Fujise, Hiroyuki Satou
Jin Tanaka, Akiko Inoue, Junki Takegami, Shinzo Fujita, Shouji Yonemura, Yoshiyuki Suga, Atsuhiro Tomioka, Hirohiko Uesaka, Michiru Shimada, Isao Murayama, Takuya Masumoto, Yoichi Takahashi, Momoka Toyoda
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