Thousands of anime fans packed into Cosm Los Angeles this week for One Piece Fest, a four-session immersive event organizers describe as the largest One Piece location-based entertainment experience ever staged outside Japan. The festival, which concludes Wednesday inside Inglewood's 95,000-square-foot dome venue, turned the space into a sprawling recreation of Eiichiro Oda's pirate world, complete with 19 themed environments drawn from major story arcs across the franchise.
Guests wandering the venue could take in a Gear 5 installation, pose at Zoro's Three Sword Style photo spot, or try their hand at the Davy Back Fight punching machine and Usopp's Shoot Out — all activities and games pulled straight from the anime series, according to KTLA. The event bills itself as a first-of-its-kind immersive experience celebrating the franchise, and it leaned heavily on Cosm's signature dome technology to pull it off. The Inglewood venue, which opened in 2024 in the Hollywood Park district near SoFi Stadium, spans 65,000 square feet on its own and features an 87-foot-diameter LED display capable of 8K and 12K resolution, according to Variety.
A Dome Built for Elbaph
That dome hosted the Elbaph Experience, a 180-degree immersive video presentation named for one of the manga's more recent story arcs, per the seed report. Toei Animation, which produces the One Piece anime, structured the entire fest into four two-hour sessions spread across Tuesday and Wednesday, capping total attendance at 7,000 guests and distributing tickets through a public online lottery back in May, as reported by Animation Magazine, which also detailed the event's ticket rollout in its April coverage. The company hosted an invitation-only VIP preview Monday night, giving media and industry guests early access to the 19 environments before the public sessions began.
Beyond the tech-driven centerpiece, the fest offered plenty for fans steeped in the franchise's lore. Monkey D. Luffy, the rubber-powered pirate who leads the Straw Hat crew in pursuit of becoming King of the Pirates after eating a mystical Devil Fruit, anchors the story that inspired every corner of the venue. Themed zones included a Buggy Carnival, the Sabaody Lounge, a giant manga book-cover installation, and Shanks' Straw Hat Donning photo opportunity, while a curated display showcased props and costumes from the live-action adaptation currently streaming on Netflix.
Music, Merch and a Marketplace
The mainstage schedule featured live musical performances, including sets by Hiroshi Kitadani, the original vocalist behind the anime's opening theme “We Are!,” who first recorded it in 1999 and has sung several subsequent openings, according to Anime.com News. The lineup also included Q&A panels with English dub voice actors Ian Sinclair and Brina Palencia. A marketplace on-site offered licensed and event-exclusive merchandise for fans looking to take a piece of the fest home.
One Piece Fest's arrival fits into a broader pattern of Southern California becoming a proving ground for major One Piece activations outside Japan. Universal Studios Hollywood rolled out its own ONE PIECE: Grand Pirate Show stunt performance on the WaterWorld stage during Universal Fan Fest Nights earlier this year, following a template Universal Studios Japan had already established, per Universal Parks News Today. Last August, Toei Animation opened a second official U.S. One Piece Cafe in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo, a permanent dining spot with regional menu items and exclusive merchandise, following the franchise's first American cafe location in Las Vegas in 2024, as reported by the LA Times.
From Chavez Ravine to Chavez Ravine's Neighbor
The Inglewood fest also arrives just weeks after One Piece fever hit Dodger Stadium. In July, the Dodgers hosted a One Piece Night promotional game featuring exclusive Luffy trading card giveaways that packed Chavez Ravine and sparked a resale frenzy, underscoring how deeply the franchise has embedded itself in mainstream Los Angeles culture well beyond dedicated anime conventions.
The underlying appeal isn't hard to trace. Oda's manga holds the Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author, having surpassed 500 million copies printed and sold digitally across 60 countries, according to Guinness World Records. The series first debuted in Shueisha's Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine in December 1997, and it has since spanned more than 28 years of continuous publication and expanded into over 1,100 anime television episodes. That kind of scale helps explain why organizers chose Cosm's dome over a conventional convention hall, and why the surrounding Hollywood Park development — planned to eventually include up to 5 million square feet of creative office space, 890,000 square feet of retail, a 300-room hotel and 2,500 residential units around a six-acre artificial lake, per Variety's reporting — is quickly becoming a fixture on the map for major entertainment activations in Inglewood.
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