One Piece 920 Review: Save the Future

One Piece, Chapter 920: I Love Oden

A very interesting chapter! It's mostly just information dump about the whole time travel bombshell from the previous chapter, and confirming a lot of what we could already infer from the previous chapter... but it definitely does a pretty dang great job at doing it. We start off with Kin'emon telling us about Oden Kozuki as a character, how he's a shogun that kind of always wants to expand and build connections between villages, although he's also kind of a rowdy sort. And then, of course, he got executed by the next shogun as a criminal. And then Kaidou set their goddamn castle on fire. 

We also learn that Momonosuke had a little sister, Hiyori, who... who Kin'emon doesn't really elaborate upon much beyond that. We do know that Momonosuke's mother, Lady Kozuki Toki (Toki = time in Japanese) is the one responsible for sending Momonosuke and the five samurai retainers -- of which we still haven't met the fifth one -- into the future. Thank god for One Piece immediately establishing that this "Time-Time Fruit" can't send people into the past, and can only send them into the future, because being able to travel into the past is going to raise a whole can of worms that I genuinely think would be such a huge chunk of unnecessary complication to One Piece's already complex storyline. 

We get to see Kin'emon, Momonosuke and company arrive at Wano 20 years after Kozuki's death, and apparently there's still a bunch of loyalists (led by one Jibu'emon) who have been patiently awaiting the arrival of Lady Toki's prophecy 20 years later. Kin'emon then did a pretty necessary recap of the INSANE journey that the Wano characters have been through, going in reverse-chronological order of how we met them. how Kiku was left at Wano to gather intel, while the four left to gather allies, losing Raizou at Zou, Kanjurou at Dressrosa, and finally nearly meeting their end at Caesar Clown and Law's hands at Punk Hazard -- with both Doflamingo and Caesar Clown being affiliated with Kaidou, hence their interest with the Wano samurai. 

It's  genuinely interesting how close they all came to being completely annihilated, huh? 

Also, other scenes that happened in this chapter -- Zoro gets himself lost again (and no one noticed?) and we get a brief scene of Inuarashi reminiscing about Oden. Not quite sure where the former is going, although it could just be a way to prolong the eventual Zoro/Sanji conflict? Zoro was pretty pissed off at Sanji leaving the crew prior to the Big Mom stuff. 

And then this all leads to the final declaration by Kin'emon, noting that they have gathered a lot of allies. the Straw Hat Pirates, the Heart Pirates, both Mink factions and the samurai... and they'll commence a raid on Onigashima to take Kaidou's head. Definitely pretty damn hype, and, again, all of these are so, so much more exciting than the pretty mellow and forgettable starter villains that we went through in the earlier chapters of Wano-kuni.