Tropes A to B (Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole, Arc Villain, Berserk Button, Beware the Silly Ones, Big Brother Instinct, Bowdlerise, Break the Cutie) | Tropes C to D (Call-Back, Chekhov's Gun, Cliffhanger, Combat Pragmatist, Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass, Curb-Stomp Battle, Dark and Troubled Past, Deconstructed Character Archetype) | Tropes E to F (Early Installment Weirdness, Famous Last Words, Foreshadowing) | Tropes G to J (Heart is an Awesome Power, Hypocrite) | Tropes K to M (Laser-Guided Karma, Logical Weakness, Mass "Oh, Crap!", Moral Myopia, Muscles Are Meaningless) | Tropes N to P (Nice Job Fixing It, Villain, Oh, Crap!, O.O.C. Is Serious Business) | Tropes Q to S (The Reveal, Shout-Out, Spanner in the Works, Superpower Lottery) | Tropes T to Z (Wham Episode, Wham Line)
One Piece has fallen afoul of the censors more than a few times in translation.
In the 4Kids dub:
- Luffy's attacks (which were named after firearms) were renamed. For example, the Gum-Gum Pistol was changed to the Gum-Gum Blast.
- A scene where Luffy hits Koby on the head on Alvida's ship is censored to Koby thinking Luffy's going to hit him, and cowers down in fear, with Luffy's fist as Koby drops down being edited out.
- Sanji's cigarette is edited to be a lollipop, and is referenced in several lines of dialogue. Near the end of the 4kids run, during the final filler arc they dubbed, a scene of Zoro using a cotton swab to clean his sword is replaced by Zoro having stolen Sanji's lollipop because he's curious about what Sanji was always sucking on.
- Zoro's swords no longer cut people open, and so there's a memorable scene where his blade cut through a giant stone mallet and then "knocked out" the guy beyond it.
- When Mihawk sliced Zoro open across his whole chest, they removed all the blood from the image. A similarly extreme example happens in the fight with Mr. 1, in which the blood from Zoro getting hit in the chest with Mr. 1's drill-bit like arms is removed.
- All references to ale become 'juice' or, if you were cheating in the Drinking Contest, 'ginger tea'.
- Belle-Mère's death is removed. A case of bowdlerization making something worse, 'cause instead of just being killed, she's imprisoned and presumably enslaved by Arlong until she eventually died.
- Likewise is Kuina's fate. Originally, she died by falling down the stairs. In the 4Kids dub, she was confronted by a gang of sexist sore losers and was beaten so severely that she couldn't fight again. That last one sounds awfully worse, especially when you consider that most villains don't die in One Piece, they live to see their dreams crumble, which seems to be considered a worse fate.
- According to the dub, Nami is afraid that Arlong will hurt people, and she hates him because he fills people with fear, not because he shot her mother right in front of her when she was ten, as in the original.
- In a case of So Bad, It's Good, Captain Chaser (even "Smoker" was too edgy) no longer smokes several cigars at once, but he has "smoke breath" from his Smoke-Smoke Fruit, a Devil— err, Curséd Fruit that enables its user to turn into smoke.
- They renamed Ace Portgaz D. Trace. Apparently, even "Ace" was too edgy.
- They replaced all guns with water pistols or pop-guns, except Helmeppo's, which was replaced with a mallet on a spring! It's not even spring-loaded, it's just... on the end of a loose spring! When the above-mentioned Belle-Mère confronts Arlong, her rifle is replaced with a shovel (which, ironically, makes it worse when you realize that murdering someone with a shovel is much more gruesome than doing it with a gun).
- When a man is shot point-blank by one of Shanks's men (to show how ruthless and powerful they are) Shanks informs the bandit that the gun was full of blanks and the man simply fainted. This is the exact opposite of the original point of the scene, which had Shanks warning some bandits not to point guns around unless they were fully prepared both to kill with one and to die by one.
- This edit was done by dubbing in Shanks saying the line "When he wakes up, tell him it was a cap-gun." Meaning it might have been meant to be (in the dub) a cork tied to a string, meaning it might not have actually struck the man.
- Nami uses a "rubber knife" to stab Usopp, then tells him to fall in the water. In the original story, she stabbed her own hand instead of Usopp, getting her blood on him, and he fell into the water out of shock, only realizing that Nami had planned for him to escape after making it to safety. What makes this worse is that she constantly keeps mentioning how much it's a rubber knife, just to drive home that she isn't really stabbing him. Initially, the viewers, like Johnny, would come to the conclusion that she had really killed Usopp.
- Krieg's dart-firing gun was changed to fire poisonous suction-cups. Even then, the visual representation of the 'poison suction-cup' part only came into play AFTER they made their mark. And when Luffy pulls them out, they fall to the wooden deck with an audible metallic 'clank'. Also from the fight with Krieg, when Luffy punches him through the spiked cape, the blood is removed, leaving no indication that the cape was of any use whatsoever and undermining how determined Luffy is, who will risk getting hurt just to land a decisive blow on his enemy.
- Kaya's threat of self-harm with Jango's chakram is changed to an attempt to use it against him. The scene that follows is rewritten to suggest the weapon has a mind of its own and is "too powerful for an amateur to hold", making it seem like she's struggling not to hurt herself with it.
- The removal of the Laboon arc which replaced him with an iceberg that Luffy destroys, possibly because the backstory implies that Laboon's crew, which hasn't been seen in 50 years, must be dead (They died, but one came back to life), or because of Luffy fighting against a whale. Which would've become a major problem had the dub continued as a later arc, Thriller Bark, has ties with this story. What's more, this was the arc the crew got their Log Pose (Grand Compress) from which originally was given to them by Laboon's keeper who fills them in on how the Grand Line works. Instead, the Compress just falls onto the deck of the Merry and some of the crew state they have knowledge of the Grand Line gotten while growing up (with clips reused from previous episodes to showcase this). Likewise the removal of Little Garden which drew plot holes for Alabasta.
- Luffy and Crocodile's first fight which originally ended with Crocodile stabbing Luffy with his hook and holding him in the air. It was awkwardly edited to make it looks like Crocodile was holding him upside down.
- Later on, Luffy figures out that he can use water to counter Crocodile's sand. In the original, Luffy uses his own blood to fight Crocodile when he is unable to find a proper water source. The dub erased all the blood in favor of Luffy using his sweat instead.
Non-4Kids edits:
- One Piece has also received bizarre edits outside North America. For instance, the Korean broadcast painted over Zoro's swords to make them look like billy clubs.
- In the transition from manga to anime, and the Japanese manga to English one, Mr. 2 status as an "okama," or Japanese transvestite, is downplayed, instead using the term "Oh come my way" — which, granted, really is a phrase he uses. By the time the Impel Down arc reached the anime, however, even this amount of censorship was abandoned and the term was freely used because an entire island worth of transvestites is introduced, including a legion of transvestites dressed like Vegas hookers and a very important character with Gender Bender powers that happens to be designed after Dr. Frank-N-Furter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
- That scene's completely intact in the Viz Manga and Funimation subs, which may surprise "hardcore" fans who expected these versions of the franchise to get the 4Kids treatment.
- In the Skypiea arc in the English translation of the manga, Enel's title is "Kami" rather than "God". Whether this actually counts as "censorship" is debatable: the translators might have decided to leave the word untranslated to go with the Japanese concept of "kami" (it is not always analogous to the Western concept of a god). But it's fairly clear that Enel thinks he is a God, even though Gan Fall, the previous God from whom Enel usurped his position, angrily tells him that it's not what it means to be "God" of Skypiea. Enel becomes "King" in the broadcast Funimation dub episodes ("Perhaps they lacked royal protection"), but some later episodes in the arc that were only shown on Australian Cartoon Network had him use the term "God".
- Funimation informed fans early on that they recorded two separate dubs for Season 3. One—the dub aired on Toonami—was required to maintain continuity with the earlier 4Kids dub as well as satisfy the famously-strict US Broadcast Standards (so any mention of God was verboten). The other—made for the uncut DVD release—didn't give two shits about what Cartoon Network or the FCC wanted and is a very faithful translation of the original. The uncut dub uses "God" throughout.
- The Italian sub scenes are rarely edited, but dialogues is bad. A lot of double entendre, funny stuff, and insults going beyond "babbeo" (fool) are removed.
- In the manga, Zeff cut off his own leg and ate it while stranded with Sanji. In the anime, he instead lost it when he saved Sanji from drowning.
- Other parts of the manga were toned down significantly, while preserving a wisp of the intent; for instance, Bellmère (and a precocious Nami) saying they'll pay someone back 'with their body' became paying them back "with kisses"; Nami saying she's going to Hell became "going to blazes."
- Episode 369 was censored on its first airing out of sensitivity to the Akihabara massacre, specifically the fight between Absalom and Sanji. A lot of shots and sound effects were changed in order to lessen the resemblance to the then-recent massacre, including the censoring of blood and removing the knife that Absalom lodged into Sanji's body. It was uncensored for the Japanese home release, but strangely half censored in the Funimation dub, which uses the censored sound effects, but the uncensored visuals.
- During Whitebeard's fight with Akainu in Marineford, the latter manages to blow half of the former's face off with a swift magma fist. In the anime, he punches half of his mustache off, instead, which makes his defeat look more one-sided.
- On two different occasions in the manga, Trafalgar Law flips the bird at someone he doesn't like: Eustass Kid the first time, and Donquixote Doflamingo the second time. Both of these instances are edited out in the anime: with Kid, it's replaced with Law just smirking at him defiantly, and with Doflamingo—since Law did this while boasting about the "miracles" that the Straw Hats have pulled off—the anime replaces it with a quick montage of some of Luffy's and the Straw Hats' greatest accomplishments.
- Other instances of characters Flipping the Bird were removed in the anime. Like Sanji flipping off the Newkamas that helped him during the 2-year training, Sai flipping off Luffy at Dressrosa, and Pudding's Imagine Spot where she's flipping off Sanji.
- The anime immensely toned down the injuries Cosette received from Niji Vinsmoke, removing her swollen eye/lips and broken teeth. It's rare for the anime to censor violent stuff, other than dismemberment (and even some of those scenes are still kept in), which gives you an idea of just how fucked up the original scene was.
- Another instance of censoring violence in the original comes in the Skypeia Arc. In the manga, a child throws a stone at Conis's head when she accuses Eneru of planning to destroy the island, causing her to bleed. The anime changes the rock to a tomato that hits her cheek, not nearly as impactful. Conis and Cosette look similarly attractive, so it makes one wonder if there's a Double Standard at play.
- In the American Shonen Jump magazine, Hancock and Sadi-chan's cleavage was covered up for possibly being "too much". They were uncovered in the collected volumes though.
- In the Arabic dub, Devil Fruits are called “Ocean Fruits” (Arabic: فاكهة المحيط).
- In an SBS, a fan noted that the characters stopped drinking grog out of glass beer mugs and now the cups were shaped like miniature barrels. Oda replied that in Japan, drinking under the age of 20 is illegal (several of the main characters and the story's target audience are under that age limit), so the mugs were changed to barrels to allow for plausible deniability of the drink inside.
- There are two instances of censorship involving Bartolomeo:
- During the flashback where he reminisces about how he became a gigantic Strawhats fanboy, an underling barges into the room where Bartolomeo is admiring his collection of wanted posters and asks him what to do with the fingers obtained from a rival gang. In the anime, he instead asks what to do with a defeated crew. Bart's reply is just about the same ("Eh, just chuck 'em elsewhere").
- In the manga, Bartolomeo stabbed the tongue of the man who mocked Luffy. In the anime, he simply beat him up.
