Hello everyone. This episode of One Piece was long anticipated, so I wanted to give my quick thoughts after watching it. If you’re not up to date on the One Piece anime or manga, please do not read this, it is basically just one big spoiler. I will also keep it short since I’m tired and I wasn’t planning to upload anything today. Once again: big spoilers coming up, leave now if you do not want to read these.
With that out of the day, I wanted to take a quick moment to address two things. First, the pacing. I was incredibly excited for this episode, knowing what was coming, and for the first couple of minutes I was sold completely. But then the pacing slowed down to a crawl, scenes were being repeated and the entire thing felt off.
The second point is the animation quality itself. This was fire. There’s no way about it. You can argue if you like the Looney Tunes style that Gear 5th brings with it, and there are definitely some moments that made me question the decision making, like the flashing letters spelling gear for no reason, but the actual animation itself was incredible. Everything was fluid and bouncy and when I first read this scene in the manga this is roughly the kind of chaos I was expecting. Luffy bounces like it’s the most natural thing in the world and Kaido’s understandable confusion at Luffy’s sudden revival is understandable.
I am hesitantly positive about this episode. Pacing issues aside, I think it conveyed the Gear 5/Joyboy moment quite well. I’m still on the fence on if I like this reveal as a whole, and a lot of the stuff that’s happening in the near future has me a bit more hesitant about upcoming moments, but it’s definitely an interesting ride. With One Piece being such a fantastic story for such a long time, I really hope that Oda manages to stick the landing with this final saga. And that’s really all my thoughts. I’ve been on team Manga for years, so whenever One Piece has a good anime episode it’s more a welcome surprise than anything else. Thanks for reading!
Opal Kaharis 