[james0246]

Originally Posted by Blackbeard D. Kuma

Here's a question that I am curious to know everyone's answer to.

In terms of the art style between One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach, which art style do you like best?

For me, it's One Piece hands down, followed by Naruto and then Bleach. As I've said before, Oda's designs are very eccentric (one can argue against this with his female designs though ) and because of that all of his characters really stand out and are differentiated very well from one another. If you were to shave everyone's head bald in One Piece, you would be able to tell who's who; whereas for Naruto and Bleach on the other hand, there will definitely be some confusion discerning who's who since a lot of the designs are very generic and similar to one another (a lot of characters have almost the exact same face).

I prefer One Piece, but each has their charm.

Kubo is very good at using sleek designs, with a good use of angles to accentuate character's faces and hair. I do prefer Kubo's male character designs, though, since I feel that too much attention is placed on a female character's breasts in Bleach.

Kishimoto generally has a good eye for small details. Facial distinctions (in battles), slight movements, heights, and a wonderful use of sound effects etc, and other minute details are quite apparent in all of his character designs (even if the basic facial or hairline structure is quite similar between multiple characters). But, his clothing ensemble is awful, sometimes Kishimoto will even lose track of the basic designs of his clothing (especially inseams and clothing that covers the arm). (That is not to say that Bleach or One Piece are better, Bleach's clothing, while chic, are too common and eventually they become boring; and One Piece's clothing is seen as largly irrelevent, so not much focus is applied.)

Oda is great at creating wonderfully unique characters, and he really likes to give odd looking characters quite interesting powers, which adds to their designs. Oda is fairly bad at drawing different scales, though, with character's switching sizes sometimes mid-chapter (part of this is due to the fact that Oda loves to use interactions between characters in the foreground and background at the same time (he uses this quite a bit during his comedic segments were a lot of characters are interacting together, especially on the ships).

So, in terms of basic characters designs, Bleach looks better, One Piece is more interesting, and Naruto has a great eye for details.

For setting design, though, One Piece wins hands down.

Bleach's settings are static, sleek, yet ultimately boring in their simplicity (admittedly, there have only been three distinct settings in the series, so far).

Naruto, again, has a great eye for detail, creating a "lived-in" world with clutter and phone lings, and other small details.

And One Piece has a beautiful chaos of constantly unique and interesting settings each mixed with unique types of characters. Oda really goes out of his way to create some truly cool as well as beautiful locations.