Its not just the Vivi Crush, its the entire chapter of Baroque Works laughing in Kohza and Vivis face and using trickery to ignite the fighting anyway, its the awesome wordless imagery of Croc throwing away Vivi as he laughs, only to see Luffy soar through the sky on Pell, and the culmination of everything in the awesome turnaround moment where Luffy finally shows up to kick Crocodiles ass, at a point where we've never wanted it to get kicked harder.
wheeze wheeze
I'm sorry, I love me some Alabasta, and chapter 198, after all those arcs and arcs of buildup, is just sooooooooo great.
Its Crocodile in this chapter that makes the following full two-pager of Luffy landing his first hit have the maximal impact.
Every moment of Croc being despicable and hateable is him doing his job perfectly, and being the moments where his character is best.
Croc launching Joz into the air with a sandstorm isn't why he's great.
Croc revealing that he torments Toto with sandstorms for shits and giggles is.
Rayleighs scene is just so…smalltime to me, compared to the emotional rollercoaster of that Crocodile-Vivi scene. It's just a display of power and nothing else; if it was used under more dire circumstances where it saved they day or something I might've cared, but as is its just...cleanup of fodder that the main characters could easily have beaten anyway, in order to hype Rayleigh as a "badass". Theres just no emotional resonance there.
And Shanks did it better and first.