One Piece 881 Review: Jinbe the Helmsman [also other manga catchup talk]

One Piece, Chapter 881: A Wave Room

Not really feeling up to doing manga reviews this week. Thought of doing a Shokugeki no Soma, Kingdom, JoJolion and Magi recap thing, but I genuinely can't bring myself to talk about them. Soma is mostly just fun fluff but nothing particularly innovative. Kingdom's great, but also mostly war stuff. Magi was mostly crap. JoJolion was just fight scenes, but honestly feels tame and uninteresting as far as JJBA is concerned. I tried reading Black Clover, but genuinely forgot the entirety of the plot and forgot where I left off. Apparently it's crap. So, eh. I tried reading Gintama, but forgot where I left off as well, though Gintama's good so I'm sure I'll catch up to the manga sometime in the future.

This chapter of One Piece is pretty cool. Bunch of fighting scenes, and while it'll probably read better in tankobon format for the simple reason that it feels like more of the same 'escape from Big Mom' stuff that really feels fatigued at this point. We do get the Straw Hats on the sunny escape from the big tsunami wave, because apparently we get to see Jinbe's role as helmsman as multiple members of the crew point it out. Jinbe drives the Thousand Sunny through the falling homie tidal wave as if he's surfing, which is pretty cool image.

We get a pretty badass moment from Nami as she smashes the final mirror, and tells Chopper and Brook to basically stop questioning "the Captain's orders", which is pretty cool. I felt like there's a particularly unnecessarily slow bit of sequence because we have two pages spent on Luffy conversing to Nami and the others via a shard of broken mirror while the entirety of the Big Mom Pirates contingent there stares and tries to figure out why the mirror leading to the Sunny broke. Very unnecessary.

Thankfully Katakuri decides to continue the fight (with a cool bit of Luffy smashing the mirror and sucking in the shards into his mouth to keep a communication line open, while Katakuri just smashes things with gigantic elephant-gun-esque leg stomps, and his own ability, the 'Willow Mochi', basically a crapton of mochi feet slamming down. Not sure why Luffy makes a weird funny face, that felts weird. Katakuri pulls out a trident, and pulls a Joseph Joestar and goes "next you will say..." Honestly not a ton happened, really, although we did get a couple of cool looking panels and set pieces.