“Zoro, Stunned! The Shocking Identity of the Mysterious Woman!”
What They Say:
Luffy’s next enemies in the deadly sumo match in the Excavation Labor Camp are two tough Gifters. Much to Old Man Hyo’s surprise, Luffy keeps practicing using Haki properly at the same time as he fights them. Meanwhile, the wounded Zoro wakes up to find out the stunning identity of the mysterious woman he saved.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
While One Piece was away for a couple of months I harbored no doubts that there would be any real changes in how it was being adapted. If anything, it was just a touch more breathing room between it and the manga, though they’d likely keep padding things out where they can. It’s one reason I’m glad I don’t read the manga as well because seeing how padded out some areas are would just make me all the more upset with the anime adaptation – even if I understand the why behind it all. The Wano arc probably hasn’t been any worse than other arcs in terms of padding to the manga, at least in the last couple hundred episodes, but the problem I keep coming down to is that the story just feels listless and without direction.
The show did a bit more interesting last time around with some decent Zoro material that let him get a bit creative with his style but he also took on a wound along the way that knocked him out. It’s in the last few minutes that we get him waking up in the village of Ringo in the north, a graveyard kind of town by the looks of it, and being cared for by the same two he’s been involved with for a bit now. It’s fairly stock material here as he’s not one to lay about when he could be fighting, but his wound is definitely significant here. Recovery time ahoy.
The bulk of this episode is focused on Luffy facing off a pair of two new opponents that have come to play in the competition that’s going on at the labor camp. And for those that like the “weird” action that we get from One Piece, this one should work well enough with an opponent that has an armadillo ability. Where it has a bit of a struggle is in that Luffy’s first isn’t getting quite as metal as it usually does, which has him trying to figure out what’s up with that while keeping the old man alive. Oh, the other opponent is Alpaca-man, which means they’re really dredging the bottom of the barrel for opponents here.
In Summary:
One Piece is One Piece. There’s nothing significant here, which isn’t a problem, but there’s nothing interesting either. Luffy fights. Zoro spends downtime recovering after being manly. He gets a little information but after all that we’ve gotten in the past year or more of this arc I have no idea what’s new and what’s repetition anymore when it comes to the details as it all blurs. Something definitely needs to change and coalesce soon, however.
Grade: C
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.
