Pretty solid effort on a whole from the staff.
First half was definitely the weaker of the two, but the direction was decent enough, and Kitazaki's character art was pretty consistent throughout, despite his output not being as animated as it was in 856(which was expected). On the animation front however, the first half didn't really have much going for it in that sense.
Second half more than made up for it, with Ishizuka(who was obviously there but was uncredited for some reason) and Tomita doing a lot of really cool stuff in the second half. Ishizuka had a really nice scene with Jinbei throwing the water current, as well as his typical almost meme worthy impact scenes in the Vagabond drill. Tomita handled a lot of the Zeus discharge and the last bit of Katakuri vs Luffy in the last part of the episode. Really cool stuff from both of the, and definitely elevated the episode to something more engaging than a less animated handling of those scenes would be.
Overall, really solid episode, with a great second half and a pretty solid first.
Not sure what to expect from next episode, its seems the storyboarding and direction could be interesting, but I'm a little pessimistic considering the episode director. The animation looks pretty standard considering, though I'm hoping we do get a couple of cool scenes in what seems to be a bunch of fairly average scenes. Expectations aren't too high.