The Straw Hats put their plan into motion to rescue Lily’s father, but complications naturally arise.
What They Say:
Nami heads up the rescue effort for Lily’s father, but a glitch in the process pits the Straw Hats directly against Vice Admiral Momonga – will the sudden emergence of a third, unexpected force in the battle tip the scales for the Straw Hats? Or will it sink their dreams of rescuing Panz Fry?
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With the crew finally out from under the sea, they’ve ended up in a fun new situation where they’re now quickly thrown into being rescuers of a kidnapped man. Meeting Lily in the previous episode was cute and she brings some different kind of fun to the table with her height adjustment ability and it’s something that won over Lufy and the others fairly quickly. But it also got them drawn to it, more so with Luffy, with news that her father was going to be taken to Impel Down. With his history with the place and all that happened several years ago, it’s easy to understand him wanting to get into the middle of things there. And it also means we get to deal with the Navy once again for a bit.
Amusingly, Nami ends up taking over this mission for the most part, something that Lily gets behind easily having seen some of the silliness of the men, and the mission gets underway with the group split up to handle different parts of it. Nami tries to set things up right by putting all the Devil Fruit members together, but Luffy throws that off a bit with his own plans, which isn’t that big of a surprise. Considering the overall skill of the Straw Hats, it doesn’t take too long for the mission Nami designed to hit right and everyone ends up on the Navy ships, which leads to some real panic among some of the Naval men as they realize just who it is that has landed on deck.
Of course, it’s not exactly what Nami was planning, but when you plan around Luffy you know things won’t always go as you intend them to and you have to build that into it. Considering the fight they were just in under the sea, it’s not a surprise that the Navy men here really aren’t a challenge. Which means a bigger challenge has to come in, which we see as a new group arrives to get Lily’s father from them. Claiming to be the Neo Navy that’s intent on killing all the pirates out there under the direction of Master Z. The leader of this group, Shizuo, is a blustery type that lets all the secrets out easily but doesn’t care since he just wants to kill himself some pirates in order to forward the goal. It’s a decent setup and starts the action going rather well even if none of them are truly defined well here yet.
In Summary:
While the Navy rules the world in many ways under the World Government, it’s not a surprise that there are more groups out there that have it in for pirates for any number of reasons. Luffy’s crew has plenty to go up against here with the Navy, thinking initially that they’re going to have a relatively easy time dealing with some near nobody Navy men, but it does shift gears along the way, tosses Luffy out of the picture for a bit and lets the rest of the crew get a bit of time in the sun, focusing mostly on Sanji with a good dose of the new pirate-hunters and their push back against the way the Navy operates. It’s interesting but you also know that it’s just a first blush look at the New World storyline.
Grade: B
Streamed 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.
