One Piece, Chapter 912: Amigasa Village
It's more of a neat world-building chapter, which is fun to read but doesn't really lend much to actually typing up a huge review. But hey, you all love your manga reviews, and One Piece is about the only thing I'm still reading weekly (I haven't caught up with Taizai and Titan for about a month or so). This chapter's basically Luffy finding out about a lot of things about Wanokuni, culminating in him meeting up with Zoro and facing off against Basil Hawkins.
Still, there's a not insignificant of things that are told to us, and some are easily hidden with the other big emotional beats in this chapter with Tama discovering that Portgas D. Ace is dead -- of course, apparently Wano is such a secluded country that even news of the Summit War hasn't even reached its borders. Interestingly, Luffy never really told Tama about the fact that he and Ace are brothers.
Tengu-dude is called Tenguyama Hitetsu, who gives an introdump about the village they're in, which is always neat -- worldbuilding in One Piece often drops little details that become relevant some time down the line. and in this case, Amigasa Village (Amigasa is a word for a different style of straw-made hat) was apparently attacked by Drake a couple of years ago, killing and/or defeating the five great samurai guarding the village. Oh, and we get the backstory of how Tama met Ace in the first place, where Ace treated them with kindness and basically brought food to the starving people.
Luffy brings Tama to a nearby town, with Tenguyama telling him a bit more about how Kaidou's factories have fucked up the land, and then Luffy 'borrows' one of Tenguyama's swords... who reveals to us that the sword is actually Nidai Kitetsu, the second sword in a set of three -- with Zoro's cursed Sandai Kitetsu being the third, of course. I've never really thought that the whole whatever-grade swords would really come into play into the story outside of Wano, but I've always felt like that's a neat little bit of worldbuilding... so it's definitely fun to have the story of Zoro's cursed Kitetsu swords to come into play and tie in with Tenguyama's story.
And then, of course, after a bit of a drama with Tama recalling how she met Ace, Luffy ends up meeting Zoro, now a sort of a runaway ronin beating people up in the wasteland, stealing their booze and eating poisonous meat without realizing it... it's pretty neat, and of course Hawkins comes up with the whole talk about joining the strongest side. Now the question is that is he just a Kaidou lackey, or is he going to propose an alliance similar to how Bege did in the Whole Cake arc? We'll see in two weeks.
Again, I'm not quite as enamoured with Wano as the majority of the readership, although that's partly because we're moving back into a slower "discover this new land" style of storytelling which has always felt the most "chill" of any One Piece arc, so that slower pacing, especially after the huge bombshells in the Reverie and the ending of the long-running Big Mom arc, really end up making Wano unfairly bland in my eyes. I still enjoy it, though.
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