Does One Piece have the largest anime cast? Explored

One of the biggest claims to fame author and illustrator Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece manga series has, is the fact that it has been running consistently for over 25 years. Never in serious danger of cancelation and still in the same magazine it started in, the series’ publication history is one of the most impressive in the entire industry.

Likewise, this has led to One Piece being regarded as having one of the biggest scopes and sizes of any manga series of all time. This is somewhat unsurprising, arguably going hand-in-hand with a successful publication history of over 25 years. Nevertheless, it remains an incredibly impressive aspect of Oda’s series, even if it is arguably consequential to the story’s length.

On a similar note, the series has boasts a large cast, both in terms of main characters and overall. This has led to fans wondering whether or not One Piece has the biggest cast in all of anime and manga. While it’s difficult to definitively answer this question, the series undoubtedly has one of the biggest in the industry.

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One Piece may not have the largest cast but is undoubtedly a major contender for the same

While One Piece technically has no official, Shueisha-certified count of characters as of this article’s writing, the series’ unofficial Wiki does have a list of canon characters. Per the page’s description, it includes every character “that has ever appeared or been mentioned in the manga and has been named.”

If the table of the One Piece Wiki’s list of canon characters is copied into a spreadsheet and edited to remove non-name rows, the number of rows totals 1,369. In other words, per the Wiki’s list of canon characters, the series’ total canonical cast numbers 1,369 in total. Including non-canon characters, this number certainly jumps to well above 1,400, possibly even passing 1,500 in total.

The reason behind the series having such a large canon cast compared to others that are similar in length and publication history stems from the amount of worldbuilding it does as an adventure series. For example, Hajime no Ippo has a similar number of chapters and publication period to Oda's series. However, Hajime no Ippo being framed as a boxing battle shonen puts a soft-ceiling on how large the cast can get.

The same can be said for other infamously long shonen series, such as KochiKame: Tokyo Beat Cops, Doraemon, and Super Radical Gag Family. With the scope of these series being much more inherently restrictive by nature of their genre and subject material, there's essentially no opportunity to accumulate anything close to the number of characters Oda's series has.

While this likely makes it the biggest cast in all of anime and manga, it’s hard to say for sure unless every other anime and manga series of all time has its characters indexed. Similarly, the indexing of all of these series needs to be uniform in method. Following the aforementioned guidelines laid out for qualification in the canon character list for Oda’s series is likely the best way to get a baseline for all series involved.

That being said, this would be a massive undertaking, which seemingly hasn’t been done by any fan or interested party as of this article’s writing. As a result, it’s impossible to say for sure whether or not One Piece has the largest cast in anime.

That being said, with the current number totaling 1,369, it seems almost impossible (but is not confirmed to be so) for any other series to eclipse Oda’s in total cast size.

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