“Luffy Rages! Rescue Otama from Danger!”
What They Say:
After sending the yokozuna Urashima flying, Luffy and his clan continue their search for Bakura Town’s boss to save Otama! They finally find the boss, Holdem, one of the Beast Pirates’ Headliners, and Otama who is hanging in the mouth of a lion in Holdem’s stomach.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With One Piece in its standard exploratory phase with this new arc, we’ve gotten a couple of new characters aligned on the Straw Hats side while lining up some potentially interesting opponents for down the line a bit. A lot of what we’re dealing with now are folks like Urashima who, if they appear later in it, are likely to be comedy pieces at best since they’re dealt with here. The Wano material so far has been decent overall but it’s the style and color design of it that’s definitely keeping me more interested in it as it has a great visual look that’s got me excited for it. I’m also in that patiently waiting category for seeing what Trafalgar Law is up to since I really enjoyed his last main ongoing run in the series.
The opening elements of this episode has Urashima’s underlings just going all out on everyone at this point with the whole daring them to try and take Otama back. This keeps things simple with some action and it’s always nice just to see Zoro slide a sword into his mouth and take the pose. But we see that as things go big here and the ground is almost literally rumbling, the show shifts to the next town over where everyone is just struggling with the very basics of existence, remind us of the darker problems caused by those in power here. The further expansion to showing the way the area has been polluted is leaned into while also delivering us a look at the Paradise Farm that is the idyllic vision of what Wan can be. This all isn’t quite done as a montage or anything but it’s a shift from the current fight to fill us in more on the larger world here that we’ll be connecting with more soon.
As the episode barrels forth, it drops a number of hints about subplots to come that will all come to support the larger story that will take us through the overall arc. But like past arcs, I’m wary of connecting or really getting to know any character at this point because of how the show operates. So it’s a kind of superficial thing, a quasi-montage of information and visuals that’s intriguing but is best just kept to the side for now. The main thing that carries through the episode is revisiting the fight that Luffy and the others are in and moving past Urashima a bit as Holdem finally shows up since the whole place has been really messed up from the fight. It’s forced his hand in the simplest of ways. Which is unfortunate because I disliked Holdem from the moment I saw him and how he presents himself.
In Summary:
One Piece continues to do what it always does and that’s what I’m used to at this point. Revisiting some of the older material recently you can see a lot of the same structural points there as you do here but the difference usually comes in the size of the cast, as we still get these pared down stories rather than continually exploring where everyone is, which is my main frustration with it. There’s a lot of stuff introduced into this episode during the middle and I’m curious to see how it all comes together eventually. Otherwise, this episode is just more of the back and forth fight that we’ve had for a few episodes, which is fun and enjoyable enough on its own.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
