One Piece, Chapter 911: A Great Adventure In The Land Of The Samurai
Yeah, I've been really late in terms of manga reviews, huh? I'm sorry. I just sort of don't quite have the same enthusiasm to even catch up with a lot of these reviews, which is why I haven't done any Attack on Titan or Nanatsu no Taizai review in a fair bit -- I still read them, but by the time I do it tended to be too late to post a review that anyone really cares about, and honestly these shonen chapters tend to have pretty little content in a week-to-week basis. So from this point onwards, at least until I find my groove back, expect only One Piece and My Hero Academia reviews on a weekly basis. It's a bit of a shame since there's a large amount of people that come here for manga reviews, but I've been so slow in catching up and reading them. I'll maybe do something anime-related in the future? We'll see what I decide to watch in the upcoming months.
Anyway, this chapter of One Piece starts off with a bizarre bit of flashback which I genuinely didn't think was necessary, and honestly could've been done as part of the previous chapter. It's basically just "the crew gets separated again!" with Sanji getting everyone else off the ship (or at least just Chopper and Carrot, as we see) and something with that weird octopus. Apparently it's going to be fairly more important? Octopus-dude doesn't actually show up outside of the flashback, though.
Interestingly, Luffy loses his Vivre Card (which will totally bite him in the ass), and encounters a bunch of pirates chasing a little girl, who reports to a certain "headliner". We get a badass backhand slap from Luffy, and he just intimidates the heck out of the giant baboon nearby. The pirates are apparently hunting down this little girl O-Tama, who apparently speaks in an old dialect, is an instant ally and a supporter of the Kouzuki Clan... and has the Devil Fruit ability to rip off chunks of her cheek as little chunks of her cheek and feed it to the giant baboon to tame it. The komainu (otherwise known as lion-dogs a staple of Oriental culture) is also revealed to be her ally... and this is all a reference, of course, to the legend of Momotaro, a common folktale in Japan that involves the titular character befriending a monkey, a dog and a pheasant. In this case, the monkey is a gigantic baboon and the dog is a mythical beast, but eh.
Basically we then get this extended scene of Tama giving Luffy a bowl of rice, only for Luffy to later discover that Tama is super-poor and only gets to eat rice once a year, much to the anger of her master, a Tengu (a sort of Japanese forest spirit commonly seen in a lot of Japanese culture stuff). But Tama doesn't tell any of this to Luffy, though, giving him all the rice out of gratefulness, and Tama ends up drinking from a river contaminated with poison from Kaidou's factory.
And then we get the bombshell that Tama is apparently waiting for someone who promised to come here again, namely... Ace? Yeah, okay, that's an... interesting bit of tie-in. Tama and her Tengu master is obviously a shoo-in as Luffy's allies, being sympathizers to the Kouzuki clan and buddies with Ace, and being very pleasant people. More interestingly, though, is the fact that Basil Hawkins is revealed to be the enigmatic "headliner" that the generic pirates on the beach are reporting to. He's ostensibly working for Kaidou... but tells his henchmen to keep this a secret from Kaidou himself, implying that he might pull a Bege and try to backstab Kaidou. Or it might just be misdirection.
Regardless, it's still a slow-paced setup chapter, and I see the following couple dozen chapters to be paced similarly to this. Again, it's a bit annoying after all the buildup to the climax of the Big Mom arc, as well as the entire Reverie arc, ended with what's basically a "wait and see~" cliffhanger. We'll see just how impressive Wano turns out to be. Right now it has that nice sense of old One Piece exploration and discovery vibe, but that can't last for the entire arc.
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