Current state of the fight: both fighters can see the future, both have Devil Fruits that allow them to stretch and contort in unpredictable ways, and both are nursing life-threatening injuries in their abdomens. There's less than an hour left before Luffy's supposed to exit the mirror world and reunite with his friends, so it's time for him to pull out all the stops and finish this stupidly long fight once and for all.
Luffy's new Snakeman form isn't a significant departure from the usual Fourth Gear transformation. It's a bit leaner and meaner, and it emphasizes speed over raw power. His most important trick is his enhanced Gum-Gum Culverin, where he can redirect a punch in mid-air while maintaining its acceleration. If he moves fast and erratically enough, he can circumvent Katakuri's Observation Haki, so now this fight is both a high-speed anarchic brawl and a mind-bending game of 3D chess where the chess pieces happen to be fists. There's at least one corner of my brain that has reservations about the over-stylized nature of One Piece's flashier animators, but that issue is on hold this week because an episode like this is exactly where those guys belong. It looks jaw-dropping from beginning to end. This climactic fight episode is hectic, silly, and absolutely massive in impact and scope.
This is an adaptation of a pretty famous manga chapter that was all zany fight choreography with minimal dialogue. This episode does a good job spreading the action out over the course of twenty minutes without losing steam, but it's not without its crutches. Mainly, the anime is still pushing the Rayleigh flashbacks in order to pad the runtime. I didn't need a filler scene where Rayleigh demonstrates Fourth Gear's speed weakness, but I really dug the cutaway to Rayleigh and Shakky pouring one out for Luffy just as he and Katakuri are delivering their final blows. "Only those who are living in the present can make a new epoch." (But maybe let this show live in the present for a bit instead of flashing back every five minutes.)
The Katakuri fight is an important fixture of Whole Cake Island because it's the arc's last opportunity to portray self-indulgence as heroic and positive. This fight has nothing to do with what's going on in the rest of Totto Land anymore, it's just two dudes beating on each other to feel alive. The violence, the chest-thumping machismo, the aimless self-destruction—for a moment, these things are good, but they do exist in a context that will unfold in the story's final moments. As of this episode, the true outcome of the fight is left up in the air. Surely it'll be Luffy who walks away when all is said and done, but the question of who really beat who is of little consequence. This fight was for them, not us.
In the grand scheme, the Katakuri fight is a mess in execution, but it's the kind of mess where the soul of the work is able to spin that imperfection into strong self-expression. The emotional weight of the experience is incredibly back-heavy, with most of the leadup meandering without enough propulsion to keep things interesting until the spontaneous bouts of extreme enthusiasm happen. But when it's good it's transcendent, and even at its most blunt, it always preserves that One Piece-y sense of humor. How can you not love a 'roided out goth boy screaming about how tough he is while transforming into a donut for no other reason than because he just really loves donuts?
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 ...