Once again we're entering the wonderful world of One Piece flashbacks. Luffy's half of the Straw Hat crew arrived on Zou in the aftermath of a lot of unseen drama, so everything is presented as vague and mysterious as possible while the characters in the know slowly fill us in, story by story. In the last episode we got the explanation as to how Sanji's group outran the Big Mom pirates, and now this week we start to learn what went down in the recently destroyed Mink city of Kurau.
The ones responsible for the destruction are the Beast pirates, the crew led by Kaido of the Four Emperors. The man leading this specific faction of the crew is a mammoth man named Jack, who's referred to as one of Kaido's top henchmen. We saw a tiny glimmer of Jack's human form during the end of Dressrosa when he and his crew went to rescue Doflamingo from the navy's hold, but the newspaper claims that he has since died at sea. In this flashback, Jack remains in his mammoth form throughout. There could be some poetry in a mammoth being the villain of an arc taking place on the back of a giant elephant, but maybe that's thinking too much about it.
Jack is looking for the ninja, Raizo, who we remember is the friend that Kin'nemon and Kanjuro were hoping to reunite with on Zou. The Mink's swear up and down that they know nothing about a ninja, and this episode mainly exists to demonstrate the Mink's fighting power as Jack and his men are unimpressed by their lack of information. The ordinary citizens have no trouble fending off the lower rungs of Kaido's crew and we're told that Minks are born as natural fighters. Even the babies are strong. One of the most entertaining scenes in this episode is one where a mother and her child fight side by side, beating up pirates in a decently directed and staged fight sequence. The implication of this story, however is that things take a turn for the worse as the stronger individuals of the pirate crew start to take center stage.
Having read the manga, I'm noticing how weird this arc is regarding the mysteries that it's laying out for us. A few episodes ago we were being asked to wonder if the Minks would be enemies of the Straw Hats, only to unveil that they're extremely friendly. Before this reveal, there was Wanda's line "You'll find the corpse of your friend there!" and then, of course, the twist is that she was talking about Brook the skeleton, who is otherwise safe and sound. This is a pretty funny set-up and payoff, but it highlights the thing that's starting to bug me: how vague and mysterious the characters are being about everything, when they actually have no reason to be other than to trick the audience. There's another, much more dramatic twist to come in a few weeks and currently I'm seeing all the ways that the show is milking the setup and realizing how inelegant it is.
After three stellar episodes introducing the Zou arc, we've fallen back into completely competent and average production quality. That's to be expected, so I'm not too let down, but it still doesn't leave me a lot to write home about. Seeing the Minks in their daily life, and then later seeing them kick ass together, was pretty entertaining, though it's all starting to feel like a low budget Disney show with all these anthropomorphic animals in the spotlight.
Japanese studio to handle production slated for broadcast, streaming globally― Kadokawa and Singaporean game developer and publisher Garena announced on Monday that they are co-producing an anime adaptation of Garena's Garena Free Fire battle royale shooting game, with a Japanese studio handling the animation. Kadokawa's Kadokawa Qingyu subsidiary is the production manager. The anime is planned to b...
Healer Nanna's powers have one very unique caveat: she has to have sex with the person to heal them. See why Rebecca Silverman calls it "a cute story, decently racy, and generally good, fluffy fun."― One of the fun things about Seven Seas' Steamship line of racy manga aimed at a female audience is finding which romance tropes are prevalent in any given release. While every genre has its tropes and s...
What's the perfect recipe for waifu supremacy? Lucas and Nick look at fan-favorites from Yu Yu Hakusho to Spice & Wolf.― What's the perfect recipe for waifu supremacy? Lucas and Nick look at fan-favorites from Yu Yu Hakusho to Spice & Wolf. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.Spoiler Warning for discussion of the s...
Train to the End of the World and Voice Actor Radio are getting a lot of love these last few weeks! Discover which other series stand out in our weekly user rankings!― Let's have a look at what ANN readers consider the best (and worst) of the season,
based on the polls you can find in our Daily Streaming Reviews
and on the Your Score page with the latest simulcasts. Keep in mind that these rankings...
Crystal Kay previously sang themes for 2004's Fullmetal Alchemist and Nodame Cantabile― Recently, Anime News Network was able to sit down with singer-songwriter Crystal Kay and talk about not only her involvement with anime over the years but also what it was like to grow up in Japan as the child of a Korean-Japanese mother and an African-American father. Anime fans likely know of Crystal Kay throug...
The plot is excellent in the romance camp. Everything that happens is to get Eui-joon and Gunwoo together, and it works pretty well.― You can read The Dangerous Convenience Store in English two ways. The first is to read it on the manhwa site/app Manta, which has all seventy-five chapters and four bonus stories available. The second is to read Seven Seas' print (or ebook) edition, which, as of this ...
Some older mysteries inch closer to resolution as the true nature of the Abyss slowly comes into view, and long-posed questions start to be answered.― Sometimes, being a fan of Akihito Tsukushi's acclaimed Made in Abyss series means acclimating to suffering. Like many Western devotees, I was introduced to this bizarre, squishy, disturbing world via the 2017 first season of Kinema Citrus' fantastic a...
60th, final episode of previous anime streamed on YouTube on Friday― The official Twitter account for the anime of Penguin Box's Odekake Kozame (Little Shark's Outings) manga announced on Friday that the manga will get a new anime series. Update: The staff revealed a visual for the new series in a press release on Saturday. The previous anime series debuted on YouTube last August, and its 60th and f...
As Slam Dunk reached its final stretch, I can see why this series is considered the sports classic that it is today.― This is the largest batch of Slam Dunk episodes that I've reviewed thus far. Originally, I wanted to review the show in more even seasons, but given its overall pacing and release, it wasn't easy to find a moment where it felt right to stop and start again. However, as we approached ...