As Luffy recovers as best as he can, it’s time to see how the rest of the Straw Hats are handling the news.
What They Say:
Luffy finally realizes that, though he has lost his brother, Ace, he still has a lot to live for! Meanwhile, other members of the Straw Hat crew begin to hear news of the tragic events of the War of the Best — and their thoughts turn immediately to Luffy!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
After the extended back story segment with Luffy, Ace and Sabo that really bonded the boys together, events have shifted back to the present and Luffy has been shaken out of things by Jimbei now to the point where he does remember that he has friends that he needs to think about. In a way, it goes back to how he and Ace lost Sabo all those years ago and carried on because they have each other. Luffy’s emotional moment is definitely appropriate for him as he goes kind of over the top a bit with it and just weeps about wanting to see his friends. With what he’s lost, he wants to feel that right connection again and knows that he can get it from them. Unfortunately, they’re all over the place right now and are just learning what’s happened to Ace.
It’s been an age since we last saw most of these guys and even then it was just a series of brief stories that showed what they were up to while Luffy was digging into Impel Down. This episode combines all of this into one event as we see essentially a series of reaction shots from them as they learn the news about Ace. The first two do run a bit longer, as we see Zoro dealing with the baboons of the island he’s on where they’re actually pretty good, and he’s pretty wounded, so it’s a bit of a draw there. He learns it the worst way in a way as Mihawk arrives there and ends up informing him about what happened, and having it come from an enemy definitely feels worse.
Chopper has a bit of time given to him as well as he deals with the natives on the Birdie island that he’s on who are trying to get some medicinal plants from up on high. While they don’t trust Chopper, believing him to be a strange talking racoon for awhile, they follow him up to see what he’s doing to get them what they want from the birds up there. It’s cute and fun, much like the last time we saw Chopper, and it cements the way he manages his time by trying to be productive while staying in his small form. He does go big for a bit, mostly out of frustration, and there’s a lot to like here. Beyond that, the rest of the cast gets a brief look one by one, sometimes for little more than a minute, but they wrap it all up with a series of reaction shots to the news that they discover. It’s fairly appropriate and I have to be happy that they did it in the space of an episode rather than giving everyone their own episode to draw it out a bit more.
In Summary:
With events now back in the present, there’s hope for the show to get back on track, and I say that having had a good time with the back story arc. Luffy’s presence here is brief and is essentially what we saw in the previous episode, but this gives us a lot of time with the rest of the cast. Sadly, they’re all split to the winds and that means lots of small doses of catch-up to be had rather than one big sequence with all of them figuring it out. Some characters get shorted, but Zoro and Chopper make out the best and it works to their advantage, especially with Zoro as he has to be told by Mihawk while discovering he’s been hanging out on the island where Mihawk has a rather ornate castle. Hopefully the show will bring Luffy and the Straw Hats back together soon so it can get rolling on what it has to do next.
Grade: B
Simulcast By: FUNimation
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
