Is Echiro Oda underrated?

One Piece is the biggest selling manga of all time and deserves that title. While others can make the argument that other series have more nuanced characters, I think the strength of One Piece lies in the world Oda has created. His world building is top notch, not just for manga, but any form of fiction. But because of its medium of being a manga, and the factor of it not achieving the level of success globally like series like Dragonball or Naruto, I feel like people tend to overlook Oda as a storyteller. The guy puts a lot of published authors in the west to shame imo, and it seems like from a literary standpoint, he doesn't get his just due. Then again, I think a lot of mangaka don't get the recognition they deserve simply because their stories have pictures in them.

Does he get overlooked? In the manga world he comes up very often, and most of the time people have nothing but (deserved) praise.

Nah he's like a national treasure in Japan. In the west he might be.

He is not even remotely overrated.He's just simply a genius and artist with twists and mystery.Even after 920+ chapters,I still don't know Shank's full name,or Im sama's story or Dragon's df. This shows his talent of keeping the fans excited.

@heatforce: I meant the West, but as I typed the OP, I realized that it wasn't just Oda, but most mangaka are underrated in the West, but that's just due to manga/anime being more of a niche over here. Fullmetal Alchemist is a prime example of this. It's not just a great manga, it's a great story, period, and would crap on a good portion of the shows America produces.

I really don’t understand how one could argue him being underrated. Like you said One Piece is the best selling manga of all time, fourth best selling comic of all time behind Supes, Batman and Spidey and it’s also the best selling comic under a single author of all time, it’s broke Guinness world records and receives critical praise. As you’ve said the praise is mainly directed towards Oda’s phenomenal world building, palpable characters and an incredibly nuanced story with mind boggling foreshadowing so good that the fans call him Goda.

Additionally Oda’s net worth is exactly 10x Kishimoto’s: the mangaka of Naruto and Oda’s worth to the manga industry dwarfs Toriyama’s. I’ll put things into perspective so you can get an idea of how successful he is, here is a short list of people Oda has a higher networth than: Eminem, Drake, Ariana Grande.

As far as global recognition is concerned, I’m no expert but that’s probably down to marketing/decisions for the anime side, Naruto is the most popular anime and with good reason as the voice dub is very good and there’s relatively minor sensorship. One Piece’s English dub however is poor by comparison, Luffy sounds like a whiny brat and 4Kids Sanji sounds retarded. I don’t mean that in a colloquial way either: I mean he actually sounds like he’s got a mental deficiency. Shanks is also cockney which might break the immersion for some people. Furthermore the sensorship is terrible, I get that they wanted to market One Piece to kids for maximum $ + £ but it changes the whole pirate dynamic from serious to eh-an example would be in the manga and Japanese sub, Shanks tells an enemy bandit that guns aren’t for threats and with that pistol he risks his life, then Lucky Roo caps the bandit in the head, killing him. In the 4Kids dub they changed it to him getting knocked out with a blank when the purpose of the scene was to show kid Luffy (who had told Shanks his punch was as strong as a pistol) that being a pirate isn’t a child’s game and it’s life/death. Other side changes like Sanji sucking lollipops instead of smoking are fine, no big deal but then 4Kids added filler and skipped canon content which left the story disjointed.

No. One Piece sells like crazy, and everyone credits Oda with that.