One Piece’s Per-Episode Army Will Make One Punch Man Take Notes — And Give JC Staff Vertigo

One Punch Man season 3 is stumbling out of the gate, and One Piece is over here running a masterclass on how weekly anime gets made. One looks like it got crunched into submission; the other is the definition of overprepared.

The One Punch Man season 3 problem

Under JC Staff, season 3 is rough: flat character designs, messy consistency, and pacing that just does not land. At this rate, it could be the worst anime adaptation of 2025, somehow outdoing the once-untouchable clunker The Beginning of the End. And no, this is not a size thing. Plenty of smaller studios have proven you do not need a giant headcount to make gorgeous animation. The issue here feels like planning and ownership. Season 3 plays like a capstone project that shipped before it was ready.

From the outside, the schedule looks rushed and chaotic, which gives animators almost no runway to do their best work. That is especially frustrating after Shinpei Nagai talked up impressive CGI; what we got instead was a lot of slideshow energy. There is no public headcount for JC Staff to hide behind either. Talent is there, but season 3 is not using it well.

Meanwhile, One Piece shows its work

This is where the contrast gets loud. Tatsuya Nagamine, who directed episodes 892–1122 (that is most of Wano and the start of Egghead) and One Piece Film Z, laid out how an episode comes together in a 2021 interview with The Hundreds. Nagamine tragically passed away on August 20, 2025, with the news made public on November 13, 2025 — and the guy left behind some of the most visually loaded episodes in the franchise. His explanation of the process is eye-opening.

"On top of this, on a monthly basis, there are about 2,000 people, including non-full-time staff, working on the project. There are more than 5,000 pictures for each episode, and we have a lot of people working on it every week. We have six scenario writers, led by Yonemura-san, who is the main writer, and we have scenario meetings with those six writers, three producers, three series directors, other directors, and the production manager to check the content."

That is just one slice. The staffing breakdown is even more granular:

• Roughly a dozen sequence directors and assistant sequence directors on deck for the series.
• About ten animation directors guiding each episode.
• Ten to twenty key animators per weekly TV episode.
• Art-wise: a general art director and a setting director at the top, plus an episode-specific art director and a color setter.
• Editors and producers backstop the visuals; six scenario writers led by Yonemura-san shape the scripts, with recurring meetings that also include three producers, three series directors, other directors, and the production manager.
• Each step gets checked before the next one moves, aiming to stay in line with Eiichiro Oda's vision. It is not flawless, but the intent shows on screen.

Toei Animation can support that kind of pipeline — as of March 2025, the company lists a bit over 900 employees on its site — but the headline here is not just size. It is the way responsibility is carved up so every piece of a weekly episode has an owner. That care is why individual episodes can pop even under tight TV schedules.

Receipts: ratings do not lie

You can literally see the gap in the numbers. One Piece sits at a 9.0/10 on IMDb and an 8.73 on MyAnimeList. One Punch Man season 3 is nowhere close: IMDb episode scores for 1–5 are 5.4, 5.6, 5.4, 5.4, and 6.0, and its MyAnimeList average is 5.63. Not exactly a photo finish. One Piece wins by a mile, and JC Staff has put season 3 of One Punch Man in a hole it may not be able to climb out of.

Does size matter? Not really. Does process? Absolutely.

Toei is a big shop, sure, but smaller studios have delivered stunners for years. The difference with One Piece is how many people are clearly empowered to own their slice of the episode, and how many eyes check every stage. That meticulous handoff is why, even when an episode is not perfectly in sync with Oda's intent, the craft still shines. Considering the visual high points One Piece keeps hitting, the effort seems more than worth it.

One Piece and One Punch Man are both streaming on Crunchyroll. Do you buy Toei's approach, and can JC Staff salvage season 3? Drop your take below.