This chapter made me re-appreciate the Arlong arc so much more in hindsight. Why that, assuming I am not talking about the epic walk of epic?
First of all, Arlong used the water droplets back then. Hodi seems to use the same thing, except a fair bit more powered up.
Second, looking back the Arlong arc has always bugged me. Luffy never fought Arlong at his strongest. The only one who fought anyone at their strongest was Sanji, and he had to stoop as low as to have to bite the gills of the fishman he was fighting so he could force the battle back to land.
Third and last, it reaffirms how Arlong's danger was never in his raw power, although it was of course impressive for the point in the story we saw him at. Rather his danger was in his ambition. He was planning things years in advance, playing people and fishmen alike as if they were chess pieces for a bigger endgame. You would not take a super strong pirate crew to a soft sea like East Blue, but you'd have them train in the middle of the Grand line. This is what made him so dangerous. The WG saw him as a bunch of (rookie-level) pirates with big egos who wanted to play ruler on a weak sea, and of no consequence: hence 20 million Beli. It was only because he was undervalued that he was ever capable of bribing corrupt Marines - the higher up in the chain you get, the stronger the sense of justice, and in general the bigger the dislike of fishmen due to the WG influence.
Arlong made two mistakes: one was to assume the weakest sea would only have weak people who would not dare stand up to him, and the second is that he didn't finish Luffy off the moment there was a chance that Luffy was not dead yet. And Hodi, despite his arrogance, does not seem to be repeating either of those mistakes just yet.
Finally, I must agree with some other posters that Hodi is horribly bland for Oda's standards. He's an underling with tons of strength, or at least was meant to be such had Arlong not had his ambitions crushed. Hodi is not a planner, and is probably gonna turn out to be a bit of a retard. But compared to Arlong we can at least expect him to put up a hell of a slugfest with him being in the best situation he could be in. And right now, right after the timeskip, that is probably what most of us want to see. :)