>>281532191


Amazon Lily: 7/10
>Starts to setup what's about to come in an intriguing way that has some neat adventures going on, but I miss the other Strawhats and still am kinda annoyed at Oda for relegating their stories as anime fillers. The first arc where it feels like Oda is cutting important content for the sake of the anime. Hancock is funny but gets a bit too one-note after falling for Luffy.

Impel Down: 9/10
>An amazing arc, the setting feels genuinely hellish and we get again all of the elements that Oda is best with in the same arc, with the emotion, adventure and the action. Magellan feels like a genuinely unstoppable force, and Blackbeards presence is sinister and acts as a cool setup for his own grand plan. Mr. 2 will forever be my goat, his sacrifice was the emotional high-point of the arc.

Marineford: 9/10
>This is the point where it becomes clear that for all of his progress, Luffy truly still is a rookie. I've yet to see any other Shonen MC get this sort of a character arc, and Ace's death was so sudden and unexpected that it really made me skip a beat. But it's an incredibly effective choice from a storytelling standpoint, and Luffy needed it to happen. Ironically enough, in a story where it sometimes feels like there are no stakes, this the one arc where there were far more at stake than the reader expected. "Of course Ace wouldn't die, this is setup for him to take over the Whitebeard Pirates", is what it says to you, just before Ace gets killed in a way far more brutal than anything we've seen so far.

Return to Sabaody: 9/10
>Again, like Jaya, this feels like this could be the first chapter of a story in many ways, and it feels like we're really setting out for something even bigger. The new Strawhat designs are cool for the most part (Aside from one: Franky's my favorite character and I'll never forgive Oda) and it's neat to see how much stronger they've gotten, yet they still feel like the same characters, which is important.