Crunchyroll Confirms Luffy’s Gear 5 Reveal In One Piece Anime Broke Their Streaming Servers

After months and months of facing the “airplane mode” allegations from other fandoms, One Piece fans can finally play their uno-reverse card as Crunchyroll themselves have confirmed that Episode 1071, featuring the debut of Luffy’s Gear 5 transformation, has indeed broken their streaming platform at the time of the episode’s release on August 6th, 2023.

The hype for Gear 5 in the anime was unlike any other we’ve seen, arguably since Goku’s Ultra Instinct in Dragon Ball Super. Fans around the world were celebrating as if their favorite team won the World Cup. The episode did break multiple websites (including the pirated ones), and was screened in France’s biggest theatre.

However, the Gear 5 episodes had zero impact in manga sales, making fans to question whether the anime as a medium is really doing the job of being a promo for the original source material.

About One Piece

One Piece manga series written and illustrated by Eiichiro Oda. It has been serialized in Shueisha’s shōnen manga magazine Weekly Shōnen Jump since July 1997, with its individual chapters compiled into 107 tankōbon volumes as of November 2023.

The manga spawned a media franchise, having been adapted into a festival film by Production I.G, and an anime series by Toei Animation, which began broadcasting in 1999. Additionally, Toei has developed fourteen animated feature films, one original video animation, and thirteen television specials.

The latest entry in the franchise, One Piece Film Red, premiered in Japan in August 2022. It is the 8th highest-earning film of all time in Japan and also topped Japan’s box office for the year 2022 in terms of both yen earned and tickets sold.

One Piece Anime Synopsis:

The tale of One Piece takes place on a parallel Earth when the ‘Golden Age of Pirates’ is in full swing.