2kewl4u said:
...the story gets gradually more serious as it goes along and the stakes get higher (from what I've seen in the latest stuff or it seems that way). The series starts-out in a fun care-free kind-of way.
That part hasn't really changed. All the major story arcs usually start out with a light tone before getting far more serious.
They do have life or death fights, but the crew seemed more chill with each-other and have fun.
The dynamics between the crew and their attitudes haven't really changed much since East Blue beyond temporary rocky patches such as the CP9 Arc, and the crew still have fun, far too much in fact when considering the stakes of their current predicament.
I like that because that shows how much they've all grown and how hard it is to get the One-Piece.
If anything, I'd say this is something OP doesn't do that realistically. Aside from the 2 year timeskip in which the crew were separated and didn't grow in maturity, the crew have only been together for several months overall, if even that, which makes them talking so much about how great friends they are pretty unrealistic in both the early arcs and current events. It makes sense with Chopper, Robin and Brook, who's past justified them to be clinging to any form of companionship, but seems highly hyperbolic for the comparatively more socially adjusted members who's lives weren't complete misery prior to joining.
In terms of the unrealism of growth, the Straw Hats' actual influence over the world in such a short amount of time feels inconsistent with the universe when so many just as powerful or talented pirates have been at sea for years and not even accomplished 1/10th of such feats.
One-Piece doesn't go from comedy to straight-out outer-space alien drama in the matter of a few chapters. More gradual change.
Whilst that's true from a meta perspective, that isn't the case in-universe when most of those changes were after a timeskip and the more bizarre aspects of DB were apparent from the beginning, with some having fair build up from arc to arc such as Piccolo's alien origin being built up in the previous arc.
Also with One Piece, the tonal shift isn't really too apparent due to the main cast not changing their outlook due to this. Despite the serious nature and consequences of Marineford, Luffy goes back to making the same dumb mistakes in the very next arc. Timeskips are a very lazy way of excusing character changes, but at least DB used them for this affect rather than having the characters never evolve.
They or the enemies don't become a million times stronger in the very next story-arc like DragonBall, so it makes more sense.
Tell that to Crocodile at Marineford compared to his Alabasta self when all he did was sit in a cell.
Seriously though there were still other major problems in terms of power creep, or possibly it's attempt to combat power creep backfiring. Oda has even noted that he probably had the Straw Hats overcome a Shichibukai like Crocodile too early in the story, which not only made his power at Marineford inconsistent, but made several later antagonistic forces such as CP9 feel like a step down in scale in terms of the influence they possessed and what effect their defeat had on the world as a whole. On the subject of CP9, Lucci's defeat shows another problem with the escalation of villains in the series. Kuma acted as though his defeat showed the Straw Hats as some genuine threat to the World Government and the Shichibukai, yet it was evident from both Marineford and the timeskip that they were practically bugs compared to characters who can't even be considered high tier.
It's pretty evident from this that Oda didn't plan nearly as far ahead as the length would have you think (he even said he only planned for the series to go on for 5 years) and due to the clear limits he presented early on, he was forced to expand the gap between the tiers far more than he initially planned, which definitely shows when remembering Arlong was hyped up as representing the strength of the Grand Line and the Fishmen as a whole, only to be shown as mediocre by Grand Line standards and fodder to many of the fodder characters in Fishman Island, not to mention things such as Shanks losing an arm to a Sea King Luffy oneshotted when he was millions of times stronger and hundreds of times faster. Whilst Dragon Ball had little planning into it's villains and scale, this worked better up until the Freeza Arc since it wasn't widening the gap between top tiers and the current main cast in a manner that could easily become inconsistent, something proven to be the outcome when they tried to do such in Super with Beerus' constant superiority.
