This was a fun little action chapter, wasn't it?
Pound's reunion with his daughters and their husbands feels like a good way to cap off the adventure portion of this cover story. Next few should start wrapping it up, hopefully with a last minute main plot sting, just like always. I think it could be Pound bringing some insider info about what happened in Tottoland after our main POV moved away from it that could change how we're seeing the current battle, or what kind of fallout we're anticipating.
Perospero's quick return is welcome. It would have been a shame for the Big Mom pirates to come all this way and not feature at all in the main event. I wish he'd managed to get more of the crew up the falls with him, but it's a start.
The Brachiotank switching to walk mode is an odd development. Will it have some baring in how it's used for the coming battles, or is this just for the funny visual? I loved Prometheus being a little shit and Big Mom using her powers to make yokai though. Sanji disappearing to look for women is a disappointingly overplayed gag, but here's hoping Oda's just using it to set up a much-needed Mr Prince moment.
Orochi's acting like he's back on top of the world. It's fine. At some point he'll realise the forces sent to capture Luffy, Law and Kid aren't coming back and return to fear mode.
I'm not the first to point this out, but I do think it's interesting that we've got a bunch of insect Gifters working together against Zoro. We've already seen Who's who's cat squad, and previous chapters have shown bee themed and ghostly looking Gifters working together in groups of two or three. Do the leaders within the Beast Pirates all have themed squads? Whose minions is Zoro up against? And it only be the Tobi Roppo who do this anyway, since there was no real cohesion among Queen's subordinates at the prison. Interesting too that them seem so enthusiastic about following Kaido and recruiting for his forces. That wasn't the impression I got of their vibe previously.
Luffy VS Ulti and Page One was a really snappy bit of action that flowed well. Luffy grabbing Ulti's horns mid-flip and slamming her down was a sick move. One of those beats you hope the anime lets have the speed and power it deserves, rather than breaking it up with a big reaction shot as he grabs her, or turns it into some kind of pulling contest before he can slam her. The elephant gun into poor Pay Pay was a nice panel, but where does Pay Pay go after it? If that was it for him, it would have been nice to have just a small panel of him falling, or have him unconscious in the background of another panel. Oh well, I guess if he was still up, he'd have made some objection to what Yamato was doing.
That said, these are just small skirmishes. I don't expect either Ulti or Page One to be totally out of the coming battle, even if this means they won't be coming in at 100%.
Side story: as a young kid, I loved dinosaurs. Like, I love them. Read every book I could get my hands on, even if they were above my level. In my first years at school, when you'd have a letter of the week and the week would start with the class yelling out a bunch of things starting with that letter to go on the blackboard, I'd frustrate my teachers every week by calling out dinosaur names that neither of us had a chance in hell of spelling properly. Seeing users and elsewhere struggle with pachycephalosaurus gives me a pleasant nostalgic tingle. Hard to imagine Oda not also being a precocious kid with more memorised dinosaur names than common sense.
Yamato makes a shock appearance and seems to be on Luffy's side. I don't think there's much I can say about his obvious Oden cosplay that hasn't been said. Why this? How does it affect his relationship with his father? There's a lot of questions and very little evidence to sift through for answers. With nothing more to go on, I like the theory that he found the logbook featured so prominently through the Oden flashback, but I wouldn't want to commit to believing anything is the correct answer this soon. But I don't expect to wait too long for the truth. Next chapter or the one after should warp up volume 97, and any bombshells Yamato has to drop would make a great end-of-book cliffhanger.