Focuses on the adventure of a young pirate trying to become the Pirate King. It does a great job at building a rich world within an immense scale. Needs around 50 episodes to get good.
The rest is just a balance of some absolutely fantastic arcs which are accounted by some slow, and sometimes pointless arcs.
No matter how good you are, you shouldn’t use up to 600 episodes to tell a story with an ending still nowhere in sight.
These are far from perfect, and have plenty of competition in the same genre (Fairy Tale). So the question is how these shows have gone above all others.
The first answer is simple. Since it’s universally true that just because something is popular, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good. Besides them being extremely marketable by having the perfect balance of pirates, ninjas and death god samurais, they have their length.
However, the length can do nothing to help with their popularity. Since as popular as Death Note, Code Geass, back a few years ago, they are a lot less talked about now because they’ve ended. With the seemingly never ending story of THE BIG 3, there’s always something new to discuss, something new to watch, something to keep fans coming back. And since it’s been going on for years now, those are just more years for new people to discover them, allowing their popularity to grow over time, even when shorter anime may have better stories ----------------->>>>>>>>>>>>>>
So where does The Big 3 stand now? Well, Naruto and Bleach slowly coming to a close, with Bleach already ended (long time ago), and One Piece is still going strong with a story predicted to be concluded within the next ten million years or so.
I am not saying that these shows are bad, in fact there are some amazing moments in them. But everything they’ve achieved in hundreds of episodes or chapters they have, has been done elsewhere and mostly in a much shorter time period (Shingeki no Kyojin / Attack on Titan). For instance, the sword fights in Fate/Zero are better than anything that Bleach could ever achieved in its dreams. And there are literally thousands of other stuff out there that you can find at the touch of your fingertips.