Nami and Franky do what they need to do in order to get back to Luffy, but it won’t be easy. For them or the audience.
What They Say:
Nami tries to escape the Sky Island – Weatheria in order to be reunited with Luffy, but it proves more difficult than she planned. Meanwhile Franky tries to escape Winter Island, but there is only one boat to take…
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With word having spread around the world at this point about what happened in the last battle and the death of Ace, we’ve seen varying degrees of how the other Straw Hats have reacted to it and their intentions to get moving again. There’ve been some cute moments to be sure so far, but it’s going to be a bit of a process to get everyone back together considering they were thrown to the four winds awhile ago and have spent their time training and improving themselves. Well, at least some of them since we’re hard pressed to believe that Usopp really gained a lot of anything besides weight during his little island adventure, though the trick of it all is cute and interesting kind of trap for a creature to use to bring in some prey.
With this episode, it focuses on the Weatheria Sky Island where Nami has spent her time training and working, but she’s now intent on getting the heck out of there to return to Luffy to see what’s going on and what they need to do next because of the loss of Ace. Of course, the people that inhabit that Sky Island aren’t keen on letting her go in the slightest even with all the tricks she pulls to try and get out of there. Nami doesn’t have a really big struggle to get free considering the types of people that have been holding her, but she does get through it in a cute way but one still filled with some decent emotion. Her nature is one that I still like a lot after all these years with how she handles situations and the way she does manage to swipe a lot of useful things.
The other half of the episode brings its focus to Franky, who has bee stuck on Winter Island. Franky is a character that I’ve only had a limited amount of interaction with, since the DVD releases didn’t get to his introduction and he’s not been in the show much like the other Straw Hats since Luffy went off to rescue Ace. I’ve largely only seen the small handful of filler episodes involving him which doesn’t exactly enamor me to him. Like the other Straw Hats, his attempts to get off the island he’s on don’t go well since he’s been stuck there for a bit and others don’t exactly want to see him go. But like everyone else, the news of what’s happened is motivating him to get going in a serious way and we see that unfold in a basic way here.
In Summary:
While the story of Nami worked well, especially as she brought some real emotion into it in regards to how she has to escape, Franky’s was a bit less than interesting but still achieved the basic goal that was required. Both stories have their moments, but much as we saw with the previous episode involving Usopp and Zoro, it’s not really engaging material that you can get behind since they’re all just gong through the motions in order to move on. You know they’re all going to break free, they all have issues with where they’ve been, and they’ll deal with them with varying degrees of emotion. These continue to be pieces that are simply “there” rather than interest or excite since they’re almost placeholders that could do just about anything in order to bring the crew back together. I’d almost rather see it happen in the space of one episode with a lot of hustle and bustle and chaos so they all land in front of Luffy at the same time rather than this method.
Grade: C+
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.
