Anime historians love arguing about which decade did it best, and the 1990s keep coming up because that's when the medium properly broke out of Japan and into Western living rooms. What's less argued about, because it's just a fact, is that almost every show from that period is done and dusted. One Piece is the exception.

Eiichiro Oda's pirate saga premiered in 1997. Monkey D. Luffy is still chasing his crown, the Straw Hats are still picking fights they shouldn't win, and the show has now run long enough that it predates most of the people currently watching it on a phone. Nothing else from that era can say the same.

Collider recently put out a ranking of ten 90s anime it considers genuine masterpieces, and the list reads like a greatest-hits of shows that came, conquered and then ended. Berserk, adapted from Kentaro Miura's manga, told its brutal Guts-and-the-Band-of-the-Hawk arc and stopped there, its later attempts at continuation never quite matching the original run. Trigun did its sci-fi Western thing and wrapped. Yu Yu Hakusho gave shounen its tournament-arc template and closed shop, final arc and all. Slam Dunk sold Japan on basketball and then Takehiko Inoue moved on to other manga. Sailor Moon proved shoujo could headline mainstream anime and ended its magical-girl run decades ago.

One Piece just kept going. Through animation studio changes, through Oda's own health scares and hiatuses, through an entire generation of anime fans growing up and having kids who now watch it too. The show has outlasted the block of shounen it was born into and most of the industry trends that came after it.

That longevity is exactly why lists like Collider's keep treating One Piece as both a 90s artifact and a current one. It's rare for any long-form story to stay creatively relevant across 25-plus years without a reboot, but Oda's world has kept expanding instead of repeating itself, which is presumably part of why fans still show up for weekly releases the way they might for a live sports fixture.

What happens when the story actually ends is the open question nobody in the fandom likes discussing out loud. Oda has said in the past that he has an endpoint in mind, and with the manga now deep into its final saga, that ending is closer than it's ever been. Whether the anime can stick the landing after three decades of buildup is the thing to watch for whenever that day arrives.