I received the following letter:
“Oda Sensei, you’re such a weird, irresponsible person. Just to be clear, I’m always writing silly things in my comments these days, but in my youth there was a boy who was always being praised by all the adults in the neighborhood. He was a genius when it came to schoolwork and was great at every sport.
… That would be my friend Tanaka. Please enjoy volume 30!
~ Eiichiro Oda, 2003

It’s easy to have faith in an author that’s consistently cheeky like this. You just know he loves what he does. Speaking of which, I just watched the new Live Action One Piece trailer yesterday. It’s crazy how it doesn’t look terrible. Live action anime has a – well-earned – terrible reputation. Could this be the one? I really shouldn’t get my hopes up. We’ll probably talk more about the live action series when it actually comes out though. Let’s reel things back a little bit and focus on today’s topic: One Piece volume 30.

Last volume we were left with only a handful of fighters facing off against Enel. This volume he makes quick work of everyone who remained. Zoro and Wyper go down with ease and Nami decides that her best chances are by accompanying Enel onto the Maxim. Meanwhile Conis is trying everything she can to inform everyone on Skypiea of the danger they’re in. She’s surprisingly successful in this endeavor. The panel where she’s not being respected initially and then aims the flame cannon right at the soldier attacking her without a shred of hesitation goes so incredibly hard. The captain of the guard reveals that he secretly knew that Enele was bad news, but he hoped that by keeping everyone peaceful that their land would be spared. Unfortunately for him that was never an outcome, and he seems to realize that now. 

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the island, Luffy, Aisa and Pierre make it out of the snake safely. He finds his crew completely defeated and Aisa informs him that she sentences two people down below, which are likely Nami and Enel who are on the Maxim that’s about to take off. We then get our first showdown between Luffy and Enel. This has one of the most iconic panels in all of One Piece. As shown below, Enel’s surprise when he finds out Luffy is his natural enemy is such a joy to see.

Luffy and Enel fight and Enel quickly adapts to fighting someone who can’t be hurt directly by lightning. This is probably what makes Enel such a terrifying villain. Even without being able to just murder people outright, he’s a good fighter. He might not be at the top of the food chain in the blue sea, but he’d probably outshine a lot of pirates who are a tier below Emperors. But Luffy is still growing at this point, and he gets sent overboard with a giant golden ball stuck on his arm.

We get one of my favorite bits of this arc when Usopp and Sanji show up as stowaways on the Maxim. This fight perfectly encapsulates both of their personalities. Usopp threads the needle between being a total coward and being a brave warrior. As much as he’s scared and his urge to run away, he’s not ready to abandon his friends. Usopp is much less of a coward than he actually appears to be most of the time. He’s realistically just some guy fighting with some of the most insane figures in his world. Usopp goes to distract Enel while Sanji does his thing by destroying the inside of the ship. Sanji is always the tricky one. He was Mr. Prince in Arabasta and now he’s messing with the insides of this ship. While Enel is off to check on the ship, Usopp once again sneaks back on board to pick up the heavily wounded Sanji. At the bottom of the beanstalk, the entire crew reunites, albeit most of them unconscious.

We end the volume with Luffy running back towards Enel to fight him once more. I believe that volume 31 is the final volume of this story arc and then we move on to one of my all time favorite arcs. I think most people call the upcoming arc one of the best. To keep you updated on the cover stories as well, since it’s important that we don’t forget those, they’re still focused on Ace. He is chasing down Blackbeard and so far struggling to find the man. Not much happens except that he almost drowns after kicking a doctor in the face because he thought it might be Blackbeard. Yeah, Ace is a goofy guy. There you have it, 30 volumes done and discussed. I worried I’d get tired of doing this every week when I started on this project, but the opposite is true. I’m often wanting to start working ahead of schedule on this series, but I’m sticking to one volume every Sunday. If you’re still enjoying reading along, please leave a like on this post, it tells me I’m not writing into the void. And as always, thanks for reading!

‘When I visited my family recently, my parents expressed an opinion about One Piece for the first time. “That story about the deer was really good.” DEER?’
– Oda in 2002

The latest few chapters in One Piece have been absolutely crazy. I feel like every Sunday I’m having to brace myself for what is coming next. But looking back at some of these older chapters I’m starting to realize that Oda has always had some crazy chapters in between big arcs. To kind of prove my point, we get Hina’s power revealed. Anything that passes through her body gets tied up and Django and Fullbody are both big fans. Oda knew what he was doing. We then get the news – and I hate this plot twist – that Pell is still alive. What was the point of him flying the massive bomb away from the town if you can just survive a hit at point blank? I really don’t know what Oda was thinking here, and I think this is one of the worst written twists in the entire story. It would have been perfectly fine to never mention Pell again after he died in the sky, but he had to be alive. I wonder if this was an editor input or not. It feels very kid-friendly to not have a good guy die by a big bomb. But maybe I’m looking far too deep into it.
On the Going Merry we get the reveal that Nico Robin wants to join the crew. She snuck on board the ship after she got out of the underground mess that the fight with Crocodile left behind. She took a nice shower on the ship and switched into some of Nami’s clothes before getting bored of reading and showing herself to the crew. This is the weirdest new crew member so far but I can’t say I’m opposed.

Here we get the first mention of a sky island. Robin has given us a little bit of her backstory and won over the crew pretty quickly. To be fair, none of what she’s saying sounds suspicious at first glance and she did hide the super dangerous weapon’s location from Crocodile so she can’t be all bad. It is funny that she had given up and Luffy just refused to let her. That’s so on brand for Luffy. We’re quickly changing pace as ships come falling from the sky with no real indication where they came from. The log pose pointing up means there’s at the very least some sort of magnetic field up there that it can latch on to. Whether this is a sky island as the crew says or something different we have yet to find out.

Seeing as the crew finds a map of Skypiea and this saga has the same name, I think we all know where this story is headed soon. I wasn’t a big fan of the Skypiea arc the first time I watched it. Compared to the arc after it it fell a bit flat. Now that I’m much more aware of the later arcs and the political messages in One Piece, I’m curious how much I’ll like it this time around. I hope it’ll pleasantly surprise me like most volumes have done so far. So Usopp makes some diving gear out of some barrels and the boys are sent down to look at the shipwreck. In the meantime a group of salvagers show up and they seem like simple folk so Nami asks them if they can just watch them work, which they obviously agree to, since they’re nice folk.

The ship gets hauled up by the salvagers and the crew barely escapes from a giant turtle trying to eat them. Things don’t get much better from there on out since giant shadowy monsters appear. Luckily the crew manages to escape. In this part of the story it really feels like the gang is a D&D party with Robin being the only person who put any points into intelligence. Nami is probably the smartest out of the group but even she’s not that bright when she’s panicking. Chopper is just booksmart and doesn’t have many real world skills at this point. Same with Usopp, he’s good with making things, like the pulley system and the diving suits (barrels), but he’s not particularly quick on his feet. The crew sets sail to Jaya.

Three things of importance happen in Jaya in this volume. And I’m not talking about Nico Robin getting a new outfit, but that is important as well I suppose. The first thing is the introduction of Blackbeard’s crew. I believe he only has three members besides himself at this point. They have such an interesting introduction and they’re all so weird. But Blackbeard is still a very fun character to me. His panel in which he talks about dreams is iconic as well. I’ve heard way more talented people than me talk about how good Oda’s panels are when he wants to, and there’s definitely more throughout the years that I’ll point out. But the way the page just goes empty with nothing but the characters highlighted shows off how not important everyone else in the village is. 

The second thing that happens and is important is the parallel between Luffy and Zoro’s response to Bellamy’s taunts and Shanks’ response to the mountain bandits early on. I’m still not certain after all these years if I like the sentiment of what they do, but the parallel is definitely well executed. Nami’s rage afterwards is also understandable.

The third thing that happens that is important is that Robin shows the crew a map of Jaya. There’s someone else on the island and Robin is already aware of this person’s existence before they reach the island. I think it’s interesting to add her to the crew at this point because everyone else is so oblivious to the world at large. She has a ton of knowledge as she’s been an archeologist for twenty years. She’s had to join big organizations and live with them to learn quickly about how the world works. She’s probably the biggest asset to the crew they could have gotten at this point. So next volume we’ll go visit this Mont Blanc guy and see what’s really going on in the region. Hope to see you all there and thanks for reading.

The final volume of the first box set and the conclusion of the second major saga: Baroque Works. We’re speeding through this, but there’s so much more amazing content on the horizon that I don’t really mind. Besides, at this rate it’s still going to take until 2025 before we even get to the volumes that are coming out now. Reminder that I’ll talk more about this saga as a whole in a separate post, but for now let’s dive into volume 23 of One Piece.

Zoro, Sanji, Nami, Usopp, Chopper & Vivi all work together to take out the remaining Baroque Works executives that are guarding the bomb in the town square. They even manage to stop the bomb from going off. Unfortunately for them, Crocodile has put the bomb on a timer in case his two cronies failed setting it off. Within a few seconds, the entire city center is going to be blown away. Who shows up but Pell, the royal guard with the falcon power. He takes a second to reminisce over his time serving the royal family and then makes his way high up into the sky with the bomb, going out in a blaze of glory while defending the kingdom he’s been protecting all his life.

Meanwhile, Luffy and Crocodile’s underground fight is still going strong but Luffy is mostly out of power after multiple defeats and he’s really struggling against Crocodile at this point. But it’s pure tenacity that is the final decider – as it often is in this manga – and Luffy manages to kick Crocodile straight out of the underground tomb and into the center of the square. He’s not getting up anytime soon. With the help of Luffy, Cobra makes it out alive as well and helps stop the fighting.

But crucial in this moment is Vivi who’s still screaming from the tower to the people to stop fighting. Rain powder is shot into the sky and for the first time in years the Kingdom of Arabasta sees proper rain. Crocodile is arrested and Tashigi makes the decision to let the Straw Hat pirates go. Arabasta is finally saved.

We get a whole bunch of the Straw Hats winding down and recovering after their fights. There’s not much to talk about here when it comes to just substance, but these are always some of my favorite moments in the manga. Cobra bowing his head to the crew in the palace baths, Igaram’s wife making food for the entire crew, the banquet. I mean, these moments are so fun because of how deserved they are. And then we also learn a little bit more about Smoker and Tashigi. Tashigi is angry at herself for how helpless she was and Smoker is arguably even more angry at how the headquarters is planning to treat this fight. They’re giving credit to him and promoting him for work he didn’t do. Smoker seems to be a great exception to Oda’s general ACAB approach to the marines. We also see Django and Fullbody again, remember them from their cover story? Django is now fully a marine soldier. 

In the dead of the night, the Straw Hats escape the palace and travel up the river to find their ship, which has been taken by Mr. 2 Bon Kurei, who claims to be helping them now. He wants to be friends again now that Baroque Works no longer exists. Vivi’s been informed of this plan and she knows that she still has one chance left to go with the crew. Here we get the now famous moment where Bon-Chan and his crew pretend to be the Straw Hats to lure Hina and her crew away so that Luffy and the gang can escape. They had to, it’s for friendship after all.

Far more memorable than the Bon Kurei moment is what happens next. The crew sails past the shore waiting for Vivi and she shows up. But she’s only there to say goodbye. She cares too much for the kingdom and wants to stay there to help and rebuild it. So instead of going with them, this is where they part ways. To avoid showing to the navy that they’re allied to a princess, the crew stays quiet but instead of saying anything they just hold up their symbols on their arms. The cross that marks their friendship. And with that we leave the desert kingdom of Arabasta behind us as we journey onward. I’ll be honest, there were a few more small details that I thought would be in this volume, but they’ll be in the next one. Because of this, I’ll probably wait another week before doing my post on the arc as a whole since there’s some key moments that change my opinion on things quite a bit.

But it shouldn’t be a secret to anyone that I enjoyed Arabasta quite a bit. Vivi is a great character, so are Cobra, Nico Robin, Crocodile, Koza, Igaram, Bon Kurei and many more. I remember this arc as being slow, but reading it back after all these years it didn’t feel too slow at all. I wonder if I’ll feel the same about some of the newer arcs when I don’t have to read them spread out over 5 years. But that’s been me, I’m gonna go back to bed since I’m still quite ill as I’m writing this. I’m getting better though, so hopefully in a day or two I’ll be back up to normal levels of exhaustion. Thanks for reading.

Somehow both so much and so little happens in this volume. We move the story forward only a little bit in time, and we’re paying attention to the countdown towards disaster, but everything that happens, happens in maybe thirty minutes or less. This is the second to last volume in the Baroque Works Saga and with that we’re only one week removed from finishing the first out of four box sets. Let’s dive into it then. One funny thing is that this arc insists on making sure the reader knows that Eyelashes (the camel) is a part of the gang. We see him? Her? Again on the cover of Volume 22.

We start off with a bit of a weird chapter. I’m going to be honest with you all, I have no recollection of these characters at all. A special forces group that basically kills themselves without ever doing anything? Did people check up on Oda while he was writing this arc, that’s so needlessly dark. And who would design a potion that gives you superpowers but then kills you immediately after? That seems like a terrible business model. Weird moment in the arc, but luckily we move on from it quite quickly. After letting the four soldiers die, Crocodile wakes up and deals with Chaka.

Koza and Vivi finally come face to face and it is at this moment that Koza realizes the mistake he’s made. Crocodile being responsible instead of Cobra kind of rocks his world. Cobra and Vivi convince him to help out and end the fighting. So Koza gets a white flag and stands with the royal guard, surrendering to the rebel army. We finally get an end to the fighting. Well, only for a moment, as unfortunately there are still Baroque Works members infiltrating both sides. Koza gets shot and within moments the fight is back on, no one realizing they’re being played like a fiddle. One nitpick I do have about this arc is that everyone outside of the top ranked officers – and then I only mean Mr. 4 and up – simply follows orders. They don’t seem to be aware of the cause they’re fighting for, they don’t even know what they’re doing, they’re literally just there to kill people and mess things up. A small flaw in an otherwise gripping story. After dealing with Chaka, Koza and everyone else, Crocodile gets to fight Luffy.

Luffy shows up on the back of Pell, who saved him earlier on in the story with a little bit of help from Nico Robin. The latter shows a sense of humor by laughing at Luffy’s silly methods. He drinks up all of the water he brought with him so he becomes water Luffy, a rubber water balloon of a person. He found out in their previous fight that water is Crocodile’s weakness and when he’s wet, he can get hit. They duke it out for a bit and although this fight is much less one-sided than their first fight, Crocodile still manages to get the upper hand pretty comfortably and suck all the moisture out of Luffy. Luffy did prepare a plan B to revitalize, but this took a moment and when he comes to again, Crocodile has gone to follow Nico Robin.

Speaking of Nico Robin, she’s brought Cobra to the underground Mausoleum to find the Poneglyph. It turns out she’s someone who can read them, which is apparently a lost skill. This is why it’s important to conserve old languages, you’ll never know when you need them to read a big rock that tells you about a secret weapon. On their way there, they’re approached by soldiers from the Navy, but Robin tells them to kindly piss off. They do so reluctantly, and some of them with a broken neck. Tashigi gets beat up pretty bad by Robin, showing that she means business. She then meets up with Crocodile again in the mausoleum where she reads the Poneglyph. She tells Crocodile that it just mentions the history of Arabasta and not actually anything about a secret weapon. Crocodile doesn’t buy into this and stabs Nico Robin who was prepared to betray him in a heartbeat, but didn’t have the follow-up unfortunately.

We end the volume with Robin and Cobra badly wounded while Crocodile faces off with Luffy one last time. On the other side of things, the battle still rages on and the remaining straw hats, Vivi and Pell, are on their way to stop the bomb from exploding. They converge on the clock tower where the bomb supposedly is being held by some high ranking officers from Baroque Works. Pell gets killed for like the fourth time in this arc while he’s flying around. I’m sure we won’t get to see him again after this. 

And that’s it. After next week’s volume review I want to dive into the entire arc as a whole and look at some of the details we might have skipped over while reading. Arabasta is fascinating in how much of current day lore it establishes. So many vital characters to the entire story of One Piece are introduced here, which is a stark contrast with the upcoming arc(s). We also get some more cover pages of Hachi walking along the sea floor but not much interesting happens here in my opinion.

And that’s been me, I’m still enjoying these volumes every week but it’s getting harder and harder to not read ahead. That’s why I try to have other things to read on hand, so I don’t get the urge as much. Thanks for reading!

This series is called One Piece Wednesday and today is Thursday. What this means is that someone – not going to name any names – forgot to upload this post yesterday. So instead you’re getting it a day late. But it’s still just as good, so enjoy!

I’ve not talked too much about the volume covers whenever I talk about this manga. Sometimes they just have cool artwork representative of the characters in that specific volume, but I quite like the cover for volume 20. It shows the five main groups – rebels, marines, army, Crocodile & Luffy – converging in one point with some mysterious looking pattern (and Carue) in the center. Below each character is an arrow and we’ve seen a lot of arrows on maps in the previous volume while people were planning out where to go. There’s also a map in the background but none of it seems legible to me, so I don’t know if that’s supposed to be a map of the kingdom of Arabasta or just something to fill up the page. Moving on.

We immediately kicked off where we left the last volume. The start of Luffy’s first confrontation with one of the seven warlords of the sea. Crocodile quickly proves to be a formidable opponent as his sand powers allow him to turn into sand and thus avoiding any attacks Luffy throws his way with ease. At this point in the manga it seems that these Logia fruits are the most dangerous. They’re also supposedly the rarest and anyone who is fighting against small-time pirates with a fruit like this will dominate the fight. That’s exactly what happens here and Luffy is dealt a defeat at the hands of Sir Crocodile. The latter then leaves the battlefield, leaving Luffy to die in the desert as a sandstorm is headed towards the old man’s village.

Here we get the moments before battle and this part of the story was super interesting to me the first time around. Even after all these years it’s still great to see everyone’s motives and machinations clash like this. The most interesting person still, to me at least, has to be Nico Robin. We learn more about her as this manga goes on, but she brings up the letter D in Luffy’s name here. We get a few reveals about her. For starters, she didn’t actually kill Igaram or Pell. There’s no doubt in my mind that these men would both be dead if Robin decided to actually kill them. She also saves Luffy from certain death and even sets him up for a second shot at all of this by leading Pell to him. Nico Robin probably isn’t a good person, but just because you’re a bad guy, doesn’t mean you’re a bad guy. (or girl, in this case.) 

The crew plans ahead and although none of them are particularly smart – save for maybe Nami on a good day – their plan works really well. THey split up into four groups, three of which try to attract the different members of Baroque Works. Vivi is the fourth group that separates earlier and heads straight to stop the rebel forces. But at the last second one of the Baroque Works members shoots a cannonball at her, making it impossible for the rebels to see her and she misses Koza by mere seconds. The armies clash. Smoker has left under the pretense that something important came up, leaving the decision on what to do to Tashigi who picks wrong. Things are looking really dire as our crew squares up against Baroque Works and to make things even worse, Mr 2. Pretends to be Usopp and confronts Vivi. She sees through his ruse as he shows her the bandage and something about it sets her off. I wonder what that is. (He writes as he damn well knows what it is).

Man, I forget how cool Sanji used to be. His womanizer persona used to be backed up by a sense of style that felt real. Nowadays he feels more like a joke character. Without going too deep into spoiler territory, a lot of his recent fights in the anime felt very forced to me. Perhaps I’m just getting old and jaded, but I feel like a lot of characters lost their edge after the timeskip. The story is headed towards a conclusion in the manga, and I’m curious what that will look like, but for the first time in the almost fifteen years of consuming this story I’m no longer completely confident that I’ll like the ending.

The fight against Mr. 4 and Miss Merry Christmas has always been a memorable one. It’s where Usopp finally got his moment to shine. He gets more of those as the manga continues, which is great because he’s such a great character, but this was the first time where readers of One Piece realized that just because someone is a coward doesn’t mean they’re not strong. You can be terrified of your situation and want to run away at all costs, but still stand and fight because your friends are being insulted. It’s also one of those great moments that highlights the crew’s unshakable faith in Luffy’s ambitions. They all believe that Luffy will be the Pirate King one day.

Before I leave you all again and wait another week to read more One Piece, I want to quickly highlight the cover story that we start in this volume. We only get a small amount of it, but we see Hachi – the octopus fishman from Arlong Park – escape from a marine vessel and start making his way across the ocean floor. I wonder where he’s headed and if we’ll see him again. I feel like  the people who just watch the anime sometimes miss out on these side stories. I didn’t even know they existed when I first watched the anime. Have I talked about this before? I probably have, I’m tired. Ignore my rambling and let’s move on.
As always, I had a blast reading this and I love talking about these volumes each week. It makes me more critical of what I’m reading and allows me to really take in all the little details I find. So if you enjoy reading these posts, please make sure to leave a like or a comment and thanks for reading!