Every manga fan has a list of series they reference confidently in conversation but have never actually finished. Sometimes it's because they watched the anime and assume that counts. Sometimes it's because the series ran for so long they gave up at volume 8 and pretended they were caught up. Sometimes it's because everyone else seems to have read it and admitting otherwise feels like losing fan credibility.
These are the four worst offenders. Each one is genuinely brilliant. Each one is also genuinely intimidating — long enough, dense enough, or simply old enough that finishing it has become a kind of badge. If you've ever nodded along when a friend mentioned the Marineford arc or quoted Griffith without actually knowing what happens at the Eclipse, this is your list.
The good news: every one of these is fully available digitally, and the longest of them gets significantly easier to manage when you stop trying to keep track of which volume you're on in your head. ComicFlow reads CBR, CBZ, RAR, ZIP, and PDF, supports right-to-left manga page flow, and tracks progress on every single volume independently — useful when One Piece alone is over a hundred volumes long.
Quick Reference
| # | Series | Chapters | Why People Lie | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | One Piece | 1,100+ | Length, watched the anime/live action | Ongoing |
| 2 | Berserk | 374+ | Length, brutal content, untranslated arcs | Ongoing |
| 3 | Hunter x Hunter | 400+ | Hiatus drama, dense plot | On hiatus |
| 4 | Naruto | 700 | Watched the anime, skipped manga | Completed |
Two are completable today (Naruto and HxH up to current chapter). Two are still publishing (One Piece, Berserk). All four are old enough that "I'll get to it eventually" stopped working a decade ago.
1. One Piece
By: Eiichiro Oda | Chapters: 1,100+ (108 volumes and counting) | Genre: Shonen / adventure / fantasy
A boy named Monkey D. Luffy eats a Devil Fruit that turns his body into rubber, then sets sail to become King of the Pirates. The premise sounds disposable. Twenty-seven years and over 1,100 chapters later, it is the best-selling manga in history and one of the most ambitious long-form narratives ever attempted in any medium. Every island arc plants seeds that pay off five hundred chapters later. Every minor character returns. The world-building is on a scale almost no other manga even tries for.
The reason everyone lies about One Piece is that catching up genuinely is daunting. The Netflix live-action and the Toei anime cover enough of the early arcs that fans can fake familiarity through the East Blue saga and Alabasta without ever opening a volume. But Oda's actual storytelling lives in the manga — the panel composition, the visual jokes, the way information is layered into background details that the anime simply cuts. If you've made it past the Marineford arc you're already further than most people pretending to have read it. If you haven't, the only way to start is by accepting it's going to take a few months and reading from chapter one. Skipping is not an option.
2. Berserk
By: Kentaro Miura | Chapters: 374+ (42 volumes, ongoing posthumously) | Genre: Seinen / dark fantasy / horror
A mercenary named Guts wields a sword the size of a person and hunts the man who betrayed him in the most catastrophic moment in fantasy manga. The plot description does the manga no justice. Berserk is the most influential dark fantasy of the last forty years — Dark Souls, Elden Ring, Attack on Titan, and almost every grim-dark anime made since the 1990s owes a direct debt to what Kentaro Miura drew between 1989 and his death in 2021. The detail in the panels is genuinely on a different level from anything else in the medium.
People lie about Berserk because the famous panels — the Brand of Sacrifice, Griffith's transformation, the iconic two-page spreads — circulate constantly online. You can quote the Eclipse without ever having read the Golden Age arc. You can recognize the Berserk armor without having read what it costs Guts to wear it. The full manga is brutal in ways that screenshots cannot capture, and the slower arcs after the Black Swordsman saga are where the actual emotional weight builds. The series is currently being continued by Miura's longtime studio after his passing, and the existing 42 volumes are more than enough to be one of the most rewarding reading experiences you can have.
3. Hunter x Hunter
By: Yoshihiro Togashi | Chapters: 400+ (38 volumes, on hiatus) | Genre: Shonen / adventure / strategy
A 12-year-old named Gon leaves his island to find his father by becoming a Hunter — a licensed adventurer in a world where dangerous treasures, beasts, and other Hunters constitute a real profession. The premise sounds light. The execution is anything but. Hunter x Hunter spends its first arc looking like a friendly battle shonen and then quietly evolves, arc by arc, into the most sophisticated piece of writing in the genre.
The reason people pretend to have read HxH is the hiatus. Yoshihiro Togashi releases chapters in clumps separated by years. Fans who started with the 2011 anime adaptation can claim familiarity through the Chimera Ant arc without having read the manga, and the Election arc and Dark Continent prologue mostly exist outside the anime entirely. The Chimera Ant arc on the page hits differently from the anime — denser, slower, more philosophical, and more devastating. Skipping the manga means missing what is widely considered the single best long-form arc in the medium. Most of the people quoting Meruem on Twitter have only ever watched it.
4. Naruto
By: Masashi Kishimoto | Chapters: 700 (72 volumes, completed) | Genre: Shonen / action / adventure
A loud-mouthed orphan named Naruto Uzumaki, ostracized for housing the Nine-Tailed Fox demon inside him, trains to become Hokage of the Hidden Leaf Village. Over the course of 700 chapters and fifteen years of weekly serialization, Masashi Kishimoto built one of the defining shonen of an entire generation. Naruto, alongside One Piece and Bleach, was part of the Big Three that ran Weekly Shonen Jump in the 2000s and shaped the tastes of nearly every modern shonen mangaka working today.
People lie about Naruto for a different reason than the others on this list. The anime adaptation and its enormous wave of filler arcs left so many viewers exhausted that millions of fans simply gave up and assumed they'd "watched it all." But the manga reads dramatically faster than the anime — a 200-episode anime arc routinely compresses to 20 manga chapters, and the Pain Invasion, the Five Kage Summit, and the final war arc all land considerably harder on the page than they do animated. If you tapped out of the anime around the Land of Waves and never came back, the manga is the version of Naruto worth finishing. The 700 chapters are completable in a few weeks of dedicated reading and the ending pays off the entire run.
How to Actually Finish These
The honest reason most readers don't finish these series is that the file management gets unmanageable. One Piece alone is 108 volumes — that's hundreds of CBZ or PDF files to keep organized, and trying to remember which chapter you stopped on is a losing battle. ComicFlow's progress tracking and library organization solve the actual logistics problem behind these "intimidating" manga.
A few practical tips for finally clearing this list:
- Read One Piece in arcs, not chapters. Treat each saga (East Blue, Alabasta, Skypiea, Water 7, etc.) as a separate goal. The series stops feeling endless once you stop counting individual chapters.
- Read Berserk in volume releases. Miura's pacing was deliberately slow. Read 1-2 volumes at a time, take a break, come back. Bingeing it tends to numb the impact.
- Read HxH out of order if you have to. The Chimera Ant arc works as a standalone read. If you've watched the anime, jumping straight to the Election arc and Dark Continent prologue catches you up on the manga-only material.
- Read Naruto in 50-chapter chunks. The manga's pacing is significantly tighter than the anime. A 50-chapter session usually clears a major arc.
ComicFlow handles all four formats and reading directions these series ship in — Japanese right-to-left tankobon, official VIZ digital releases in PDF, and the various scan formats older fans still have. One library for the entire backlog.
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