Last week our heroes arrived at the mysterious location of Zou, a monstrous living elephant supposedly carrying an entire civilization on its back. This week, Luffy and the Barto Club find the Straw Hats' ship, the Thousand Sunny, trailing behind the elephant safe and sound, meaning that Sanji and the others must already be up on top. It's been a solid 90 episodes since the whole crew has been together, so we're inclined to make haste.
That said, we still don't make it to the top of the elephant by the end of this episode, as we've got another info-dump load to cycle through first. We get an update on the Revolutionary Army, as Monkey D. Dragon sifts through the reports of Sabo and Koala's adventures in Dressrosa. It's nice to see Dragon and Koala discuss their mutual friendship with Robin, but I was far too distracted by the fact that Koala is suddenly cartoonishly over-endowed compared to the last time we saw her. Even by modern One Piece standards, it looks obnoxiously bad and I can't believe human beings chose to draw her like that. Robin gets it pretty bad in this episode as well.
Boobs aside, this scene connects us to an update on the Blackbeard pirates. Blackbeard himself has stayed hidden from our sight since the time skip, but we do get to see Lafitte and shiryu again as they answer a call from Burgess, who it turns out has tailed Sabo and Koala back to the Revolutionary's headquarters. I don't know if Blackbeard has any real stakes in anything the Revolutionaries are up to, but we know Burgess has it out for Sabo after the events in Dressrosa. The scene ends with the implication that there's going to be a battle between the two sides.
The rest of the info-dump comes from the two most recent additions to the Seven Warlords: the self-proclaimed son of Whitebeard, Edward Weevil, and our good friend Buggy the Clown, who appears to be using his new Government pardon to run a pirate mercenary business. The Weevil scene mostly just confirms a lot of the talk we heard last week about how this guy is overwhelmingly strong and hunting down the leftover members of Whitebeard's crew. On top of that, this full view of him makes it clear that, despite his strength, he looks like a big doofus without an original thought of his own, always doing what his bossy mother tells him. I'm fifty-fifty on whether he's legitimately the son of Whitebeard at the moment, but the story clearly wants us to doubt it.
The last scene in this episode involves Luffy and friends' efforts to climb the elephant. Kanjuro is able to use his art powers to make a super cute, super ugly doodle of a dragon that comes to life and allows everybody to ride on its back. I love seeing Robin break character to blush and internally fawn over how cute it is. As it scales the elephant, we wave goodbye to Bartolomeo and his crew. I'm gonna miss Bartolomeo, but when we see him again, I hope we get to see some of his obnoxious punk side instead of him just being a fanboy 24/7. It was getting a bit old, in my opinion.
After last week's awful looking episode, it's nice to get one that at least holds itself together. It's not super ambitious production-wise, but it doesn't need to be, since this is another episode all about the updates on what the other big picture characters are up to. I can't say that it avoids doing anything bad, since the women do look really terrible. It's a shame, because it was almost a perfectly fine episode without any hiccups. Fanservice is a-ok in my book, but not when it's this tacky and unpleasant to look at. It's like the people drawing it have no respect for the fact that this is a cross-generational franchise, or that it's actually some people's favorite show.
Japanese studio to handle production slated for broadcast, streaming globally― Kadokawa and Singaporean game developer and publisher Garena announced on Monday that they are co-producing an anime adaptation of Garena's Garena Free Fire battle royale shooting game, with a Japanese studio handling the animation. Kadokawa's Kadokawa Qingyu subsidiary is the production manager. The anime is planned to b...
Healer Nanna's powers have one very unique caveat: she has to have sex with the person to heal them. See why Rebecca Silverman calls it "a cute story, decently racy, and generally good, fluffy fun."― One of the fun things about Seven Seas' Steamship line of racy manga aimed at a female audience is finding which romance tropes are prevalent in any given release. While every genre has its tropes and s...
What's the perfect recipe for waifu supremacy? Lucas and Nick look at fan-favorites from Yu Yu Hakusho to Spice & Wolf.― What's the perfect recipe for waifu supremacy? Lucas and Nick look at fan-favorites from Yu Yu Hakusho to Spice & Wolf. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.Spoiler Warning for discussion of the s...
Train to the End of the World and Voice Actor Radio are getting a lot of love these last few weeks! Discover which other series stand out in our weekly user rankings!― Let's have a look at what ANN readers consider the best (and worst) of the season,
based on the polls you can find in our Daily Streaming Reviews
and on the Your Score page with the latest simulcasts. Keep in mind that these rankings...
Crystal Kay previously sang themes for 2004's Fullmetal Alchemist and Nodame Cantabile― Recently, Anime News Network was able to sit down with singer-songwriter Crystal Kay and talk about not only her involvement with anime over the years but also what it was like to grow up in Japan as the child of a Korean-Japanese mother and an African-American father. Anime fans likely know of Crystal Kay throug...
The plot is excellent in the romance camp. Everything that happens is to get Eui-joon and Gunwoo together, and it works pretty well.― You can read The Dangerous Convenience Store in English two ways. The first is to read it on the manhwa site/app Manta, which has all seventy-five chapters and four bonus stories available. The second is to read Seven Seas' print (or ebook) edition, which, as of this ...
Some older mysteries inch closer to resolution as the true nature of the Abyss slowly comes into view, and long-posed questions start to be answered.― Sometimes, being a fan of Akihito Tsukushi's acclaimed Made in Abyss series means acclimating to suffering. Like many Western devotees, I was introduced to this bizarre, squishy, disturbing world via the 2017 first season of Kinema Citrus' fantastic a...
60th, final episode of previous anime streamed on YouTube on Friday― The official Twitter account for the anime of Penguin Box's Odekake Kozame (Little Shark's Outings) manga announced on Friday that the manga will get a new anime series. Update: The staff revealed a visual for the new series in a press release on Saturday. The previous anime series debuted on YouTube last August, and its 60th and f...
As Slam Dunk reached its final stretch, I can see why this series is considered the sports classic that it is today.― This is the largest batch of Slam Dunk episodes that I've reviewed thus far. Originally, I wanted to review the show in more even seasons, but given its overall pacing and release, it wasn't easy to find a moment where it felt right to stop and start again. However, as we approached ...