Difficulty & Coverage

There are two modes, and the difference between them is much larger than the numbers suggest. This page explains what is actually in each one, how far into the series the roster reaches, and the one rule that confuses almost everybody.

Normal — 450 posters

The Straw Hats, the major crews, the villains, and the recurring faces most readers would recognise on sight. If you have read the series once and paid attention, essentially every name here is one you have seen before. It is the mode the game opens on and the one worth starting with.

Impossible — 1,576 posters

Every named character in the roster, including people who appear in a single panel, in a cover story, on a Vivre Card, or only in an SBS answer. It is called Impossible because finishing it is not a realistic goal. It is for picking at.

The rule nobody expects

On Normal, far more than 450 names are accepted. The 450 posters are what you are asked to find. But the game also recognises roughly 1,032 characters in total on Normal — the extra ones have no poster of their own, and appear as bonuses when you name them.

So “450” is a target, not a ceiling. If a name drifts into your head and you are not sure it is even in the game, type it anyway. A good number of them are.

How characters are rated

Underneath the two modes, every character sits in one of five tiers, sorted by how widely known I judged them to be. Nothing here is computed — I placed them by hand, one at a time.

Normal asks for tiers 1 and 2, and accepts tiers 3 and 4 as bonuses. Impossible puts all five on the board.

How far the roster goes

The roster includes characters introduced through roughly chapter 1175. On Normal, the most recent additions sit around chapter 1130.

Coverage is reasonably even across the series rather than piled into the early arcs — about 550 characters from the first 500 chapters, 847 from chapters 501–1000, and 126 from chapter 1001 onwards. The recent end is thinner, which is mostly a reflection of how many genuinely new named characters those chapters introduce.

I would rather say “through about 1175” than claim the roster is complete to that point. It is not exhaustive, and new characters get added as I get to them.

Spoilers

The board itself is a spoiler. Group names give away arcs, and completing a group tells you how many characters an arc you have not read yet contains. If you are mid-way through a first read, expect to see names and places you have not reached.