Best posts made by Zanze

It's a mystery command chain.

I kinda hate them, to be honest.
The events themselves feel mostly disconnected from the main story and they also feel somewhat abridged (Kidd getting one-shotted is the biggest offender, but also: the Blackbeards' powers get introduced a bit too quickly -some are not even shown in action-, Marco becomes friendly with Bakkin very suddenly...).
Then I can't help but feel like Elbaf and Fullalead are places we should have explored for the first time alongside the Straw Hats.

Last but not least, I mostly enjoy One Piece for its moment-to-moment storytelling: the gags, the twists, the weird things the crew meets in a new island, the character interactions... The main plot in One Piece has mostly served to hold all that stuff together in my opinion, so these quick barrages of hype moments don't actually do a lot for me.
Plus I'm loving the Egghead arc and I'd like for the story to stay there.

I might very well change my opinion if all this stuff gets to come together, and also, trying new things after 1000 chapters is of course okay... It's just that as of now I'm not really a fan.

Even if the scene didn't have any major consequences, showing the non-powerhouse members of the crew fighting one of the Big Bads and having the situation under control, while reassuring the readers that the WG hasn't forgotten about Robin and also adding a little bit to Saturn's characterization (he acts all high and mighty but he's under a lot of stress) is a pretty decent use of 6 pages I'd say.

I have quite a few gripes with Egghead but that scene isn't one of them.

God forbid we're shown the weaker Straw Hats (who were all otherwise completely irrelevant to the Egghead plot) overwhelm a semi-major villain with their smarts for once.
Wouldn't you prefer 10 pages of Nika's eyes popping out?

Finished the series. Overall I've really enjoyed it. The characters are on point, both visually and in terms of characterization, the sets are amazing, the story works and most of the changes are very inspired. Also loooved the soundtrack, I don't watch much of the anime but I wouldn't replace the sea shanties for anything else. Also liked how most characters had their own music style, jazzy Baratie, hip hop Arlong, and my favorite one is that distorted MEEEEOOOOOW that accompanies Kuro's scenes, ahah.
I liked Garp having a more expanded role. He's more down to earth than his manga version but I think he works. Him sending Mihawk after Luffy makes sense, he wanted to teach his grandson a lesson (or at the very least, test his will as is revealed in the last episode). Same for Koby, seeing him gradually grow into the heroic Marine he becomes later in the story is cool. I said that Arlong looked too scrawny in the trailers, but in the actual series he worked really well. He feels very intimidating, and I also liked how he's more in line with his characterization during the Fishman Island flashback than with his money-obsessed East Blue version. It just makes his character more grounded. Buggy is also very different from the manga, he's still a fun character but I'm not fully on board yet. But, he works.
Also, the action scenes just worked. I'm not fully convinced by Luffy's fights yet, but daaamn Zoro and Sanji's fights are spectacular. Really well-coreographed, and very readable. Buggy's powers also worked way better than I thought it would.

My biggest criticism would be that they changed or streamlined some of the character beats too much. As a seasoned OP fan I didn't mind it that much, but my girlfriend, in her first exposure to the series, failed to connect with most of the crew with the exception of Nami. In particular:
-Luffy finding Zoro on the cross after, like, one hour he's been there reeeeally doesn't have the same impact as Luffy finding Zoro on the cross after he's been there for a week and is literally dying of starvation like in the manga. The rice ball scene with the little girl was also way stronger in the manga. It just feels kinda devoid of context in this version. Also, Morgan doesn't really come off as a villain at all here. It's not too much of a big deal, that section of the story still works as a quick introduction to the main characters, but the emotional beats kinda aren't there.
-They skipped way too much stuff about Usopp. You don't really get why he wants to become a brave warrior of the seas here, since he's never shown to be much of a coward. Without the Usopp Crew, his fascination with pirates is also barely conveyed. And without Django, he pretty much loses the moment where he's most useful to the crew. Also, with Merry dead, you don't even much get why he up and decides to leave Kaya all alone. Don't get me wrong, I think the actor did a very good job and Usopp very much feels like Usopp, I just feel like he lost most of what made him memorable in the early days of the series.
They also simplified Sanji's introduction arc but I think it worked a little better there.
Aside fom that, Episode 4 felt a little like it was dragging on sometimes, the Luffy fight scenes are for sure going to be better in future seasons, and some camera angles were weird.
That's pretty much it as far as my criticism goes. It's easier to talk about what you don't like as opposed to what you like, I want to stress that I've really enjoyed the series a lot.

Nami I think is the real heart of the show here. She's the only character who gets development throughout the entire series, and is often the catalyst to bring out more character out of the rest of the cast (Luffy just like in the manga, but here Zoro and Kaya as well). Also, Arlong Park was the least streamlined arc and I think it really payed off here. For example, Arlong sending Nezumi to retrieve Nami's money is one of those things that could have easily been skipped (much like Kuro's crew assaulting the village and stuff like that), but it's the main catalyst to the "Help me" scene and keeping it really worked in making it as effective as it should be. Not every detail from the mangs is there, but I don't think it matters because you still really feel for Nami there.
Sanji's flashback was also very good.

The final scenes were also great, I loved Shanks in this. "I could beat you with one arm tied behind my b-wahahahahahahahah", and the barrel scene was perfect. The Smoker tease too!
Oh and I couldn't help but smile at the references to later stuff like Sypiea, Foxy and Punk Hazard. They were very smooth with the easter eggs!
Overall I've had a ton of fun. My girlfriend not as much, though. She only started to get more into the series from Sanji's flashback, which... makes sense. That's how it goes for most people. She even cheered on Nami during the Nezumi scene! She's still not fully convinced though. But Drum and Alabasta might do the trick a couple years from now.
Also glad that the series is finding success. It's fun, fresh and well made, I'd certainly want to see more.
That's pretty much it as far as my impressions go...

If anything, more or less grounded theorycrafting and predictions are more interesting to read than the endless and increasingly wilder Yamato coping. Even if they pan out to be wrong they can offer you a new perspective into the story you didn't think about.

Not the best action sequence in the history of One Piece, but I found the full set of Elders very cool and entertaining. I actually kinda liked how scatterbrained they felt, like their priorities were constantly changing and they had to change approach on the fly, and they had to deal with so much shit: Vegapunk spilling the beans, Bonney hijacking the Pacifistas, Nika/Joy Boy's second coming, Robin being there...
In fact, the way Saturn's encounter with the Straw Hats developed didn't bother me. He climbed the island trying to reach Punk Records, then Robin suddenly appeared in front of him and he attacked her no questions asked. Then the crew stopped him, he realized the fight would have taken too long and he resumed his primary objective.
These scenes I think worked pretty well in characterizing the Elders. Making them feel nervous and under stress is justified under these circumstances and it even humanizes them a little. They were literally seeing red any angle they turned.

What didn't work very well for me was solo Saturn. He was so one-note and ineffective. It felt like the story was asking me to take Wapol fully seriously.
Maybe it's just me... He's actually one of the very few villains who (kinda) got to kill a character in the present. But yeah I didn't really feel anything when he finally (kinda) went down. He felt incredibly passive and just kinda lame. He worked a lot better as part of an ensemble.

I'll have to reread the arc to get a better judgement...

After having been hyped for more than half of the story, I think it's only right that Vegapunk gets to be a well-developed, memorable character instead of just a glorified in-story SBS lore drop.
I also appreciate that Oda is trying to write a well-intentioned character who also has a ton of flaws. It's somewhat rare in shonen and even in One Piece itself, really, at least to this extent.

Plus the art was on fire this week, York towering over Stella with her absent-minded smile that now feels intimitading and that panel with Bonney crying are just really great.

Egghead as of now also feels to me like it's going to end in 3 chapters at most, but on the other hand Saturn has really been built up as the despiceable villain that gets taken down in a big climax. Saving him for later would remove most of the catharsis for all the Kuma/Bonney related stuff... Who knows.
There's some things that I haven't liked that much about Egghead, but at the very least it's been an unpredictable ride.

@Deicide:

I got a lot of flak a few months ago when I said Yamato's role in the story was to enable other characters' stories.

We need someone to have Oden's journal.
We need someone to protect Momonosuke.
We need someone to stall Kaido once Luffy is thrown outside.
We need someone to teach Momo how to be a dragon.
We need someone to be Momo's mentor figure while Luffy is busy.

So, someone was made to fill those blanks. How do you make people interested in such a character? Create big expectations about him.

I do see Yamato having a character arc, it's just does not seem to be the one people want. If it's meant to make him fond of Momonosuke and realise his role is as Wano's "Guardian Spirit", every choice so far makes sense. He starts in Point A ("I want to go to the sea") and ends in Point B ("I see this is my place after all"). Wants vs Needs. If not, then it's questionable while he got those roles in the first place. His character arc should have been something else.

You know, given his background (20 years of isolation and suffering, with pretending to be another person being the only thing to keep him sane) I thought Yamato would be a little too naive, or a little too nutty, or a little too sheltered or all of the above. And he was like that in the first few chapters, but then as soon as he met Franky he was basically the most mature person in the entire Onigashima already and then he went on to become Momo's mentor. Even the Oden thing was kinda dropped.
It all felt a little artificial, I don't know how to say it

The trailer looked... fine?
The sets are very good, the characters are mostly on point, Lord of the Coast looked great, and I really don't mind them changing Luffy or Zoro's characterization a little bit to make them more grounded, or changing the humor to be a bit more mainstream. But this mostly felt like One Piece to me.
The two things I didn't like are:
-the lighting, it's way too yellow/brown, the One Piece world should be colorful and vibrant, and it's even more of a weird decision because the characters fully embrace the goofy vibes instead,
-and the Gum Gum Pistol, the effect looks fine but the composition of the shot is weird. Alvida (?) looks like she's just standing there waiting to get punched in the face.
But overall this looked pretty good, even fresh actually, I'm definitely going to watch it.
I'd also be more interested in the reactions of people who weren't already familiar with One Piece.

Vegapunk is so fun. We've been waiting for more than half of the series' runtime to meet him, but so far it's been worth it.
The idea that he didn't split only his body, but also his personality is really cool. It both makes for a fun cast of weird scientists, and creates intrigue for just what kind of person is the main Vegapunk going to be. He has made many ethically questionable things to say the least, and it's a bit telling that two of his personalities are devoted to "negative" traits (Lilith is Evil and Atlas is Wrath), while the other four are more impersonal (Edison and Pythagoras just do "cold" scientific research, York just does bodily functions, and Shaka... seems to be a decent guy?), but everyone spoke very well of him in his home island, and overall we've been getting an ambigous vibe from him.
An entire body being devoted to eat/poop/sleep and seemingly not even being able to talk is pretty creepy, though. I wonder how far Oda's going to explore this potential thread.

The fight with Seraphim Jinbe was cool, him having Pink's fruit is also a stroke of genius. Can't help but feel worried for Pink though... Maybe he's dead and that's why his meeting at a bar with Franky was drawn as a non-canon chapter cover. I always found that a little weird, but it's only clicking now.
Otherwise, Vegapunk can now wholesale copy Devil Fruits. He already did that with Kaido's fruit but that was supposed to be a secret, at least to the WG, while now DF clonation is public. Assuming Pink is still alive, of course.
The final reveal isn't super surprising, with the Ancient Kingdom having built Pluton and all the similarities to Atlantis assuming they were very technologically advanced was sort of a 2+2. I'd agree that these reveals are being introduced in a bit of an anticlimatic way, but so far the set-up of the island is still very intriguing and these are easily the most fun chapters we've had in a long while.

Let's do the not disappointing ones now.

Kidd - It might be because of his punk rock theme but I really like Kidd. He hasn't been as developed as Law did during Dressrosa, which is a bit of a shame considering they're the two most prominent members of the Worst Gen (sans Luffy and Blackbeard)... But I don't think his role is finished. In any case, I like what we got. His bond with Killer is really well made, you can feel they're every bit as close as Luffy and Zoro, but unlike our two main characters they're also allowed to fail, which made for some interesting scenes. The scene where Kidd and Kilelr are brought back to Udon in particular really hit hard for me for some reason. Killer got basically disfigured, and Kidd rushed to his aid despite having just managed to escape the prison... It's nice stuff. And they also have each other's back during Onigashima, which is also pretty cool. Then, the gags with Luffy, Law and Kidd have been consistently fun and I just like the way he fights, like yeah he uses magnetism in a very unrefined way but it fits the character - plus, the skeleton mecha, the metal bull and the final laser cannon were all really cool. Also I think he's by far the supernova who got the most natural shift from mainland Wano to Onigashima. Law, Drake and Hawkins were getting involved into all kinds of subplots that promptly went nowhere, while Kidd just befriended Luffy in Udon, regrouped with Killer and the rest of his crew and then went to war against Kaido. I guess there's not a lot of substance to the character aside from being rude and headstrong and his bond with Killer, but that's enough. I see him and Killer as kind of a pair, and Killer is the one who expresses their philosophy a little more explicitely. Which leads me to...
Killer - what a surpirse this character was. No lie, I think his fight with Hawkins might be one of the best ones in Onigashima. Sure, other fights were more spectacular, but this one felt so personal, and it felt like not only a clash between characters but a clash between lifestyles. We were told at the beginning of the post-skip that there's only two ways to survive in the New World - serve the emperors or fight them, and here we have two characters representing those two opposite choices. And it was executed so well, Killer being the one who suffered the most (he's basically disfigured because of the Smile he ate) and yet standing his ground proudly against the man who chose the easy way out was very cool. When he tells Hawkins to F off with his luck predictions, we rely on our own strenght, aah, so cool. Just classic One Piece. And the tower card at the end... That fight was just perfect in my opinion. Killer's fighting style is a bit whatever though, but he got to participate in the rooftop battle and every character involved was spectacular there.
Kidd and Killer as a pair added a lot to the story in my opinion.

Law in my opinion has gotten a bit old, we've seen his tricks over and over and the bulk of his development as a character was in Dressrosa. He felt a little just along for the ride sometimes. But his new goal of finding the meaning behind the D is a very natural development for him, and I liked that. And like Kidd, yeah he might have lacked in substance a little but he sure provided some spectacle. Although he was handled in a very messy way during the Wano portion of the arc, like, what was the deal with him getting captured? But whatever...
Also Law and Kidd's final blow against Big Mom felt more satisfying than Luffy's one against Kaido, for some reason.

Another thing I liked about the Supernovas is that they provided some break from all the samurai and dinosaurs fighting styles. Magnets and mechas! Voodoo! Music! They all still feel like very fresh characters even when they're underused. I guess this is another field where Drake gets the short end of the stick...
Anyways, I hope they manage to stay in the story somehow.

I'm only 4 episodes in, but this is pretty good?
The characters work, Zoro in particular cracks me up and Luffy is every bit as dumb as he is in the manga but in a more grounded way. Koby is perfect, Kuro and his henchmen worked very well.
I also like how they kept the story but changed the plot's structure, it keeps things fresh and different enough, the fight with Kuro happening inside Kaya's mansion in particular is a very inspired choice. Having Koby and Garp take a more active role in the plot also works, it's more fitting for the TV format.
The locations are great, the acting is good, the action works...
There's a couple of changes I haven't loved (mostly the way a lot of things about Usopp felt rushed), and it's not really anything mindblowing, but it's just minor complaints from me. They did a great job. Can't wait to see Mihawk.
It has also mostly passed the Girlfriend Test which is not something I was expecting

The Celestial Dragons having their own intelligence agency that does all sorts of shady stuff was a pretty fun and plausibile idea, imo. Same for the WG having a secret branch that does deals with people the WG is not supposed to do deals with. And I suppose having the two be the same agency makes sense for the sake of simplicity.
Tying the concept to CP9 made everything a lot messier, though. My biggest perplexity about CP0 is that they seem to be teleporting around the OP world, first they're in Dressrosa, then at WCI while also supervising the Reverie and also fighting the Revos at Baltigo, and a few days later they all show up in Wano and now they're in Egghead, and every single time they show up for a different reason!
Also it's not clear if their identities and professiona are secret or public, Lucci being the most notable member of the agency is kinda lame, and the mask thing makes no sense.

Overall I'd say CP0 is a perfectly valid idea that got executed very messily.
But eh, at the very least it gave us the Legend! And the scenes with them dealing with Orochi and when they get found out by Drake were also very cool imo

She was cool up until Kyoshiro "killed" her. Then she turned into a generic princess character and never recovered

It's just my two cents but the Five Elders were also "regretful" about the order they were about to give when they decided to blow Ohata to smithereens. Then 20 something years later you see them casually talk about great cleansings and erasing lights from history. They even destroy an entire island very casually.
They're just hypocrites, just like most of the Navy's upper echelons. Maybe something will come out of Saturn and Vegapunk having met each other but in general I wouldn't read too much into the stuff they tell themselves.
Love to hate them, though.

Kin'emon was fantastic. He got a ton of great scenes, from his hilarious misunderstanding of Yasuie's message, to declaring Luffy will be PK, and finally taking down Kanjuro and his last stand against Kaido. Him having a wife and his personal bond with Momo made him more three-dimensional as a character. And his closeness to the Straw Hats felt natural since they spent so much time together.
He had been a bit whatever in PH and Dressrosa but here he really shined.

The others got a bit fumbled, I liked them overall though. Oda crammed so many interesting ideas into these characters: the lost brothers, the ex-criminal who turned cynical during those endless 20 years, the man who got so enraged his face changed, a graverobber and his fox, the traitor who would have been ready to die for the cause anyways. They're not really Straw Hat level since they're a bit too similar in terms of characterization, but you don't usually get these many backstories for a group of supporting characters and overall it was a neat idea.
Unfortunately not much of that stuff paid off in the plot. The dramatic Kanjuro fight being offscreened only for him to get up N times, Izo and Ashura dying randomly (Ashura's scene was good though), Kawamatsu doing pretty much nothing in the whole raid, Dog and Cat's fights being awful, and perhaps what stings most, Denjiro disappearing in the background forever after all the hype he got and randomly showing up just to cut Orochi's head.
Feels like Oda wanted to juggle too many things.

I'd say they worked very well up until Kaido defeated them, and that fight was awesome, but then they should have stayed down. Maybe keep Kin'emon around but that's it.
First of all they made Kaido look very ineffective, for all the brutal hits he gave them he couldn't fully KO a single Scabbard. And then they didn't really get to do much even after they got up, so...
Also Kanjuro was a bit wasted, his betrayal was very dramatic and he worked very well as a villain but it all felt underdeveloped afterwards.

A mixed bag overall. I think this is the biggest flaw that post-TS Oda can't escape from, if he made the various storylines develop in a more natural way instead of cramming the Scabbards' revenge tale, the Straw Hats Pirates VS Beast Pirates fight, the Worst Generation burying the old guard, the Yamato fiasco and the payoffs to the Zou stuff (+ a ton of other smaller things like undercover Drake and CP0) all into a big royal rumble. Something had to give.

@Coookie Right... There's actually quite a lot now that you list them all.
I think VP's fruit bothered me more because he looked so gross before he cut off his brain.

But yeah, the way Punk Records came to be begs for an explanation.
The satellites too, in my opinion. How does one create copies of himself? At one point I thought the six Vegapunks might just be AIs in cyborg/robot/whatever bodies that can access Punk Records, and thus, having access to all of Vegapunk's memories and thought processes, also "are" Vegapunk.
But the fact that each of them embodies a trait of the original personality doesn't really fit with this interpretation... I hope this stuff gets explored more.

But Luffy is very much still a meatheaded simpleton even now that he can straight up see the future, I'm not sure how interpreting the Mr. 3 scene as an early instance of CoO changes its meaning.

And what Luffy did boils down to "sensing" which of the statues was the real Mr. 3, which is pretty much exactly what CoO does anyways.
Of the very early proto-haki instances it's always been the one that I felt fit with the final version of the power system in the most elegant way.

It's very likely that there's at least a couple of panels that can disprove this, but during the King fight I headcanon'd that the flame goes off while he's attacking, kinda like a videogame boss fight.
Otherwise there wouldn't be any point to turning the flame off, a speed boost sure is not a worthy trade-off for literal invulnerability, no?

Fullalead would be amazing, when was the last time One Piece had a strictly pirate-themed setting? Sabaody? Jaya?
Between Rocky Port, the Wang Zhi dude, the treasure of the island, the Davy Back Fight origins, and the place having been the base of operations of the Rocks pirates there's already plenty of stuff to explore. Not to mention Garp and the Blackbeards being there...
The "that treasure" thing in particolar really sounds like a teaser for future events imo.

That said, I think Oda is just referring to Elbaf here

There was also that time when Zoro hit King's belly and he just randomly exploded. The Seraphims haven't done that yet though.

Yamato has a strong case for joining the crew, but before that happens he should get access to a time machine. In the meantime, whenever Yamato is not on screen, the other characters should be wondering: "Where's Yamato??"

@Lemony said in Chapter 1116: Inner Conflict:

I feel like this is kind of a argument that ends up boiling down to how much do you want to put Oda on the hook for that. Yeah, it isn't perfectly thought out. It's a 1100-chapter series being published for over 25 years, big deal. It happens. But at the same time, you can handwave it, as people have been doing, and it's not that much effort to do so. If you are already pissed off at the series for other reasons, it's just another thing piling up for you to complain. If you're not it's just something you can make up a good enough reason and it's fine. I doubt "why weren't the roger pirates hunted down" and the quality of the answer to this question is what's making or breaking the plot, honestly.

It's honestly this.
Even then, there might be a story reason involving the rat... I mean, Shanks.
Though it's weird that if Shanks is somehow protecting the Roger pirates, he let all the stuff that happened to Ace happen. But it's also true that the WG didn't really chase after Ace either (except for the whole newborn hunt thing...), they basically got him handed to them by Blackbeard.

But all in all, it is a story.
The newborn hunt thing served to justify Rouge's 20 months (!) pregnancy, making Ace's age compatible with Roger's lifespan. We know he wasn't originally planned to be Roger's son.
The infamous line a Marine uttered to Koby all the way back in chapter 6 was also mostly there to service Koby's character development too, forcing him to make a stand against Luffy.
And Robin's entire character is about having been on the run all her life and finally finding a family with the Straw Hats.

It's hard to make every little detail like these collime in the span of 30 years of story.
As for me personally, the one time I really rolled my eyes was the Elders going "in over 800 years we never associated the rubber fruit with the rubber god lol!"

So long after the fact, I can say that pulling the "I'm going to join your crew!" card with Yamato wasn't really that great of an idea. It created unreasonable expectations for the character - he'd have to get a striking flashback, a unique fighting style, some funny or endearing interactions with the crew, a greater struggle with Kaido and a bigger sense of catharsis when he finally went down.
Then of course none of that happened, because Yamato was a Wano side character, which is fine. But if he was to become a crewmember, I was expecting much more from week to week and in the end it became frustrating and a lot of the Yamato stuff ended up feeling like a waste of pages. In hindsight, though, there was nothing wrong with Yamato as a side character, in particular as Momo's mentor and "other half". That's the role he actually played in the story, and he worked well enough for that - aside from, again, all those pages wasted for the fire subplot that didn't really accomplish anything.

Can't understand how people still expect him to join the crew, after the ship has already sailed and after the character didn't get any of the typical developments a crewmate gets. Even Jinbe's delayed joining made sense, since he had a higher standing than Luffy back in Fishman Island, but that's not the case for Yamato. And Jinbe got more of the typical treatment anyways, some of his scenes with Luffy in Marineford and Fishman Island were very heavy, he had a flashback and he interacted a lot with the other crewmates, particularly with Nami.
So Yamato should come back randomly one day, join the crew for no reason, being uber stronker than anyone else, already knowing Luffy's endgame without having sailed with him, and being instantly beloved by everyone without the audience getting to see how that bond formed? That's 100% Poochie territory.
Isn't it better if he just remains a side character that will probably play some important role (alongside Momo) in the grand finale? Oda knows better than to make the last crewmate a Poochie. He can still do amazing backstories, Kuma and Bonney just got one, why couldn't the last crewmember get it?

I started reading when Brook was already in, but what really sells him in Thriller Bark, more than Luffy asking him to join, is everything that comes after.
One full chapter of bonding with the crew while some mysteries about his past and motivations still linger. Him saving Franky and Robin and impressing them with his backstory, which at that point is still under wraps. Then the Laboon twist, and the recovery of Brook's shadow becoming one of the main reasons Luffy fought Moria for, with Zoro even commenting that now they have to recover one more shadow. The afro scene! The fact that in the fight against Oars he was already doing team moves with the crew. Then, his flashback which is not only moving but also very unique still 55 volumes later, culminating in a crying scene (THAT is what every single crewmate has actually gotten).
And last but not least, Brook of course has that striking design (not that Yamato's is bad but it's not a gentleman skeleton with an afro and a yohoho). All this from Vol. 45 to 50.
Meanwhile in the same amount of chapters Yamato speaks to Luffy like twice and to Franky for one panel. There's no twists or mysteries to his story, and I wouldn't rank his half-a-chapter long flashback among the best of the series. The emotional center of the arc still lies very clearly in Momo with a side of Kin'emon.

...and then of course, Brook joined while Yamato didn't.

Skypiea-era Oda would have had a field day with the Egghead tech. Remember how much he got out of the Dials?