Love Yamato's reactions to Franky this chapter. Sense of wonder followed immediately by cooperative team building and order relaying.
Anyway, Reposting some of my earlier thoughts on Yamato from when he first showed up back in July.
TWO dramatic introductions, an actual backstory that will be relevant to the rest of the arc and create conflict and story points with the arc we're in, a connection to Ace, a unique weapon and fighting style, a quirk of a woman claiming to be a man? These are all actually unique things to the character. Child of an Emporer is unique to Kaidou, but BM has a million kids including Pudding, so its not that big a deal.
But the Oden worship is kind of like fifty other characters like all the scabbards. Dream seems very tied to the current location, and like they're just sort of here to help conveniently tie up some plot threads by coincidentally owning Oden's journal… and who knows what quick fix plot wraps ups that could provide later. Ace connection was already a thing with Jinbe, and Tama within the same arc also has it, so that's not much. "I knew Ace" is maybe becoming too much of a convenient shorthand for instant connection.
It was pointed out that she was in fact in Oden's flashback (or at least the pants were) so Oda conceivably had the character in mind a few months earlier than first mentioned, but that's hardly a "third sake cup shadow indicating Sabo" level of "Oda definitely was being sneaky here" situation. I'd feel more strongly if they were alluded to much earlier, similar to how Pudding was shown off years in advance.
Design wise, it seems like the horns are real (they were underneath the mask and multicolored) , she's very tall, she's got a little hair twirl at the top, and I think the hair fading from one color to the next is neat and fairly unique. Not unprecedented, Jinbe had the same thing going on when he was younger, and I feel like Ulti's hair stripes are a bit more unique I think. Oda put some thought into this design, but not a crazy ammount.
But oh man the Nami face is strong on this one. The eyes are different but... its very Nami. A stronger jawline or some cheekbones or something would make a difference, its definitely no Robin level of decisive facial distinctness.
So between the strong Nami face and the heavy Wano ties, I'm not riding this particular hype train, but its the most potential we've had in a character in a while. Devil fruit could obviously make a big difference. Strong secondary character to be sure, convenient to speed up the arc, not screaming nakama to me just yet.
If her main hair color ends up being white, purple, or red, that'll add some points though.
White hair, purple tint, red horns…
So Yamato has a tragic past, explicitly wants to see the world and wanted to go out with Ace, self invited herself onto the crew, and has only stayed in place this long because of issues with her parent figure, who happens to be the arc boss?
This after having TWO really interesting introductions and getting more interaction with Luffy in a handful of pages than most characters get in a year?
I'm conflicted. I've said for years that "Ods's NOT subtle about the next person when he brings them in" and that's definitely the case here, he's absolutely laying it on thick… if this was the first fifty chapters of the series it'd be a done deal. But I also always say he takes care with making the actual crew look unique, especially since Chopper. ANd that face is just soooo damn close.
Well, if when we see her in color her hair is red, purple, or white, or she gets something like a scar along the way, I'll get on board but that face is just too damn similar, even by Oda "all sexy ladies look like Nami" standards. That her hair has all that black in it is something, but it stops short of getting into closeups or just headshots so… not THAT helpful. (But I guess the horns cover that?) Like all the panels they're in the ceiling she doesn't look like Nami at all, and a couple of the closeups she looks pretty distinct… but others she doesn't.
Oda has now covered that problem in the more recent chapters, along with making the eyes more unique.
Oh, and now he's going to have some kind of alt form. Tiger would be neat visually I guess but we already have an island full of animal transformation and all the minks have white alt forms, and orange tiger would look pretty typically Oni, as would say, getting red skin. Tiger visual might cement him as an arc character though just checking off the oni checklist, I dunno. What else could it be though? Another dragon would be weird since we already have Momo running around to provide dragon support and allow Luffy to get where he needs later, unless it turns out they ARE dragons that ate human shaped fruits. T-Rex would look too much like Drake all in all.
Maybe its something more like bone or teeth fruit or something.