Dressrosa is pretty much done or will be in a chapter or two and I have a little free time now so I'll write my mini review of the arc. Obviously Dressrosa is a large setup arc which sets in motion the entire plot for the New World so even though it is a very important arc for the main plot, the arc itself is mediocre. It is very long and it has a lot of ups and downs. Sometimes it felt like Oda dragged it like hell and sometimes it felt like he rushed as fast as possible. The whole Colosseum fights and then the running till the palace felt so long and then the execution of the fights against the officers felt really fast (one chapter per fight) and at the same time very slow because you knew that there are a few more officers left standing and that you have almost a month until you finally reach the final boss - DD. That is a major problem caused by a shit ton of characters and sub-plots. I sure as hell hope that it was worth it and that Bartolomeo and co. will get to play a very important role even before the final war/arc. A lot of things could've been completely erased and with no or only slight modification the plot could've remained the same. For example, Viola could've played both her role and Rebecca's. Rebecca's character was a complete waste of panels, IMHO (and I won't comment anything about her anymore, I said everything already with this sentence). The dwarves could've been cut too, we had the toys already, there was no need to add the dwarves at all. Then there is Fujitora. Great character with an awesome plan. It is really cool how he likes to talk in riddles and how he bet on Luffy. That apology to Riku which was broadcasted to the neighboring countries (and everybody else read it in the newspapers) was a great payoff after all his riddles and "weird" behavior during the entire arc and the way that he stood against Sakazuki was just epic. And of course, the world building chapters were great as always. But let's return to Dressrosa, specifically the villains. Where to even begin? Oh well, let's just start with the executive officers. To say that they were a complete disappointment would be the understatement of the year. Diamante failed at everything, he literary didn't accomplish anything in the arc. He was a bystander in the Sabo-Burgess skirmish in the Colosseum and later the best he could accomplish was to insult Rebecca… Then there is Pica. I would've liked to see Zoro have a little more problems with him. I mean yeah, Pica attacked a bunch of already defeated fodder and he was creating problems for Zoro, but the whole fight was practically Zoro trying to figure out how to cut Pica in a way that will actually hurt his real body. And the second that he managed to do that, Pica was basically OHKOed. In the end Pica was too weak for my taste, especially considering where we are at with the story and that his opponent was fricking Zoro and that he already had a warmup fight on FI. How many chapters are we gonna have to wait now until he faces someone against who he is gonna have to show how strong he actually got after the timeskip? He doesn't necessarily have to go all out, but it'd be really nice to see Asura or something like that again, preferably something new, like Luffy did with his Gear 4. And at the end we have Trebol... A lot was expected from him, especially after he threw that pirate ship like nothing. Not only didn't he get even a proper fight, but he was also completely ignored by Oda. He lit himself on fire and even though we all knew he wasn't dead, Oda made a cliffhanger-ending chapter of that and after that he didn't even bother to show us the aftermath. Was it so hard to show a defeated Trebol lying on the floor in the next chapter or to have DD comment how Trebol was defeated? Oda acted like Trebol never existed in the first place... Not to mention that he was a complete bystander in the Law/Luffy fight vs DD and he just spouted his stupid comments all the time. I won't comment the rest of the officers because I don't have time for all that. I'll just say that the Senor Pink vs Franky and Bartolomeo vs Gladius fights were awesome. Bartolomeo and his face expressions are epic. Such a great character. I hope we'll see him again soon. The Law/Luffy fight with DD was good, but it left me to wonder how will Luffy (with or wihout Law, same shit) defeat Kaido at his current level seeing as he barely defeated DD for what he needed to get into G4 twice. Yes, he completely dominated DD while in G4, but one round of G4 wasn't enough to finish a weakened DD and there is the serious drawback of being completely exhausted for 10 minutes which a future enemy could very easily exploit. But at least thanks to that we got that epic Gatz speech which totally pumped me up for the final showdown. I can say that DD lived up to the hype. He was a great villain and we got to explore and learn a lot about his past, personality, dreams and ambitions. Among other things that I didn't like about this arc I need to especially point out two. The first one is Sugar with her Hobi Hobi no Mi DF which conveniently erases memories of other people when somebody gets turned into a toy. The second one is Birdcage, obviously... Everything was said about it already so there is no point for me to repeat it again. These two things felt so forced into the story just so Oda can get the plot where he wanted it, because both things were left completely unexplained other than "it works like this and you need to accept that fact". We had such things before, but they were at least plausible for OP standards, but a DF which transforms people into toys and then other people all of a sudden completely forget everything about that person and a cage made of strings which not even an Admiral can cut or destroy are just too much, even for OP standards. To add one more thing to the "don't like" pile is that even though we had enough subplots going on already, Oda decided to add even more, which were forgotten just a few chapters later, they wasted precious panel time and hadn't had any impact for the outcome, like the Star hunting game. And for the end of this review I'll add two more things to the "like" pile and that is the flashbacks and the art of the arc. The flashbacks were simply great and so was Corazon. Even though we "knew" him for just a couple of chapters I really grew to like him really fast and when we finally got to the moment of his death which we knew was coming, oh well, what is there to say other than I was left speechless. Oda handled that scene perfectly, such emotions, poor Corazon (and Law)... :cwy: The art of the arc was great, especially the chapter when Zoro defeated Pica and a few other chapters where the art was just breathtaking. Dressrosa layed the foundation for the future and I can't wait to see all that New Age (the new generation overcoming the old) thematic to be further explored in the next few arcs. Epic shit is gonna go down soon, and even sooner than we thought because Kaido is one crazy son of a bitch