I’m not going to sit here and sugarcoat things. This is definitely my least favorite volume of One Piece up until this point, and probably will be my least favorite volume by the time I’m done with all of them. This volume is straight up bad. The entire volume is dedicated to the Davy Back fight with the Foxy Pirates which feels like it’s a straight up filler. But, it’s a volume of One Piece, so I will be talking about it today. There’s a couple of things of note in this volume, despite them being few and far between, so let’s go through them.
We get the early beginnings of a new cover story. This one follows Gedatsu, the priest from Enel’s gang that was yeeted into the bottom of the white cloud sea. It turns out he kept falling and landed on solid ground. I wonder where adventure will take him, or, you know, how he didn’t die from falling. Someone should make the joke “did you fall from heaven, because you look like an angel” or something. I don’t know.
If we all remember, the Foxy Pirates shot Sherry, the horse, and this prompted Luffy into getting angry and accepting the Davy Back fight. The Davy Back fight is based on the legend of Davy Jones. It was created on pirate island. Without going too deep into spoiler territory, pirate island isn’t a one-off mention here, it’s something that we revisit later in the story. Now I wouldn’t be surprised if the two are unrelated and we never hear about the Davy Back fight again, since it wasn’t a popular arc, but who knows. Maybe this arc turns out to be an incredibly important set-up for something that happens in the final moments of this manga. Somehow I doubt it.
The Davy Back fight has two crews fight each other in a bunch of games. The three games in this particular fight are a race around the island, a strange soccer variant where two players are cosplaying as the game ball. Still makes more sense than Quidditch though. The final game is a fight. In the race, Nami, Robin and Usopp take part. Robin’s devil fruit power is very useful to mess with the enemy team and Usopp shows off the power of the impact dial by using it to send their ship flying forward. Nami does a great job reading the current, but they never really had a chance of winning with all the interference that was going on. The ball game has Zoro and Sanji participate and as much as the enemy is trying to cheese their win, these two are on a completely different level from anyone in Foxy’s crew. That ends up being Foxy’s downfall in the entire Davy Back fight, as the monster trio is just built differently. They win back Chopper, who was sent to the enemy team and then the final fight between Foxy and Luffy starts.
The good things are some of the jokes, and I quite like how casual the pirates are leading up to the event. Usopp becoming Luffy’s ringman and dressing him up in an Afro and boxing gloves to start the fight is the highlight of this volume. Usopp really steals the show throughout this volume, which is a nice change of pace as his character can definitely be hit or miss at times. I like Robin’s casual attitude and there’s a chapter cover page that shows her walking on the beach in a sundress that’s just pure perfection. I’ve always preferred Robin’s early design compared to what she looks like in the present day, and I don’t think I’m the only one. She’s simply stunning throughout a lot of this manga and then becomes more generic looking in my opinion. But if we want to talk about the way Oda draws women we can be here all day and I have other things to do.
Let’s talk about the bad things, and why I really didn’t enjoy this volume much. Putting aside the fact that this entire arc just feels like a filler from top to bottom, there’s a few character interactions throughout this volume that really irk me. For starters, the way Zoro treats Chopper when he gets taken away from the crew, almost unfairly so, is just mean. Chopper is just a kid and he is being mistreated here without any fault of his own. Zoro needs to not be a dick and have some respect for his crew mates.
Secondly, the way half the crew just accepts this dumb game, no questions asked, is idiotic. Never before have they cared about fake made up senses of honor. They care about real honor, of course, but this is clearly just dumb.
Lastly, that brings me to how they treat Nami for suggesting they take Foxy and win the game by default. Somehow there’s no honor in that? What do you mean, as if they’ve not been cheating at every chance they had. The referee has been biased, they’ve been interfering and plainly setting up home turf advantage from the very start, but somehow you’re still concerned with honor? It seems like Nami and Usopp are the only sane characters throughout this volume. Robin is still emotionally detached for most of this part of the manga, so I can’t really blame her, but Chopper and the three idiots should really step up their game.
Anyway, I can rant for a while longer about all the reasons why I didn’t like this volume, but that’s not good for my blood pressure. I’m putting away this volume, and in the next one we’ll leave this arc behind us and forget it ever happened. But maybe I’m bitter and maybe you really like the Davy Back fight arc. If you do, let me know why, so perhaps I can understand it. Either way, thanks for reading!
Opal Kaharis 