Basically the last chapter I reviewed was the end of Act 2 of Wano, and Chapter 958: The Promised Port is the beginning of the third act. And it seems like it's going to be a huge flashback arc! Even the first scenes of 958 is a neat little flashback from Oden's POV of the madness in Gold Roger's crew as we get to see some familiar faces. Crocus, Rayleigh, Buggy, Shanks...and Oden's kept in the shadows for most of this flashback. It's a neat mission statement for how we eventually will reach this Oden, the Oden that keeps getting referred to throughout the present day, this enigmatic legendary figure... and from around 960 onwards, it's going to be Kozuki Oden's origin story.
But we start off with some neat little present-day stuff, and it's initially just a showcase of Shogun Orochi's massive procession and just how assured he was about his victory. Obviously the Straw Hats aren't dead or killed off-screen or whatever, but as far as the Scabbards are concerned, they showed up at the meeting port only to be met with a massive storm, no fleet, no army, no reinforcements, no contact to anyone. The audience knows that someone betrayed the plans to Orochi, and the question of 'who's the traitor' still rings true... but that's a speculation for another day. We get a couple of neat scene changes from Kin'emon's absolutely distraught yelling and desperate description of the area with the happy festival scenes among the civilians. It's a neat little scene-setting, and while One Piece's guilty of this fake-cliffhangers before (particularly during Whole Cake), this time around it's done particularly well, and taking a fair amount of time devoted to telling a flashback is neat.
Chapter 959: Samurai gives us a brief little flashback of a scene that took place in Act 2, about how everyone in the Pirate/Mink/Samurai alliance are all happy and doing their job and how everything is going just as planned and stuff. There's some neat kabuto-style armour for Chopper, Luffy and Brook, and I do like the little argument between Zoro and Sanji (including slicing off part of the cliff that he had already sliced up before). We get a foreshadowing that the Minks will all be going Su-long in the fight, and a brief acknowledgement about how "Jinbe will come", which... I'm still curious about that cliffhanger. Also, apparently Kuri was burnt to the ground for their resistance, as we learn from an O-Tsuru scene and Kin'emon's angry ranting in the present day.
And we get a brief montage of bridges linking the sub-islands of Wano being blown up, and the apparent destruction of the Thousand Sunny by a bunch of flying monkeys (again, narrative-wise, of course it's not the case) and generally Orochi fucking up Wano's infrastructure to cripple the Pirate-Samurai-Mink alliance's infrastructure. We get a neat villain monologue from Orochi, noting that whether people (or, indeed, Orochi himself) believes the story of samurai jumping 20 years through time, it doesn't matter if he's in power since whatever the case, he can just order bridges blown up and block every route leading to Port Tokage.
The Scabbards are all crying and we get an emotional scene about how Oden helped them become samurai and how they were a shit ragtag bunch of fools before, ordering Shinobu to make sure Momonosuke survive while they carry out their duty and fight to the bitter end and stuff. Which... is a nice segue to the beginning of the flashback, with Oden giving his Nine Scabbards a speech about opening Wano's borders.
Chapter 960: Kozuki Oden Takes the Stage! And boy howdy does he. We start off with a pretty interesting, fast-paced backstory that basically goes through a lot of the stuff we sort of inferred from previous notes about the Wano characters' backstory, but now with Oden's role in it being basically properly established, we now get to see all of it in context. 960 sort of starts off pretty simply, with sort of a side-story revolving around a bunch of dudes catching a white-skinned boar. We get a fun little sight of young Kin'emon and Tsurujo, and apparently Kin'emon is kind of a punk thief while Tsuru has the absolutely hilarious threat of "I'll harvest your organs and sell them to pay your debt". Long story short, Kin'emon steals the white boar from the randoms, and heads into the city to sell it. Hyogoro's gang is after him, and he ends up befriending Denjiro, a local smooth-talker and swindler with black glasses.
960 sort of builds up Oden a bit, and we get a brief bit of Chuck-Norris-esque listing of just the amount of ridiculous deeds he did as a child. He's ridiculously strong, independent, and really wants to set out to sea. And he's also kind of an ass. 960 really played up his "roguish asshole" tendencies up, and he sort of flits the line between being likable and unlikable... although I suspect that cooking a bowl of soup atop the funeral pyre of his departed friend aside, a lot of the more assholish things he does is exaggerated by the second-hand reports.
The chapter ends with the fact that apparently Kin'emon has wandered straight into the midst of a gang fight by trying to muck around with the white boar, because they've summoned the Mountain God -- the mother boar, and a gigantic beast the size of a mountain. Chapter 961: The Mountain God Incident, of course, has Oden show up, beat the fuck out of a giant boar with his swordsmanship, and impress a bunch of local people with his badassery.
But we get a nice bit of young Kin'emon going on a futile raging attempt to fight the boar to save O-Tsuru. The story behind them is simple but kinda effective, with Kin'emon being the sort of dude that goes "it's fine if I died" while Tsuru's the one person that takes care of him and stuff. And Oden shows up, takes the blame for kidnapping the young boar, and then slices the mother boar in half and rescues all of the people inside, and miraculously no one died.
Of course, Oden ends up getting exiled from the capital after the conversations done in 960, and the narration noting that "Oden caused the Mountain God Incident" easily implies that a lot of the bad rap that Oden gets saddled with is basically distorted from the events that happened because Oden's the sort of dude that tends to claim the blame from other people's fuck-ups. Denjiro and Kin'emon become Oden's followers, and we get him meeting Yasuie after he was exiled from the capital... as well as Yasuie's sycophantic toadie... Orochi!
Chapter 962: The Daimyo and His Retainers basically blitzes through Oden's recruitment of his Scabbards, which... is a bit unfortunate, but I also admit that it's probably redundant compared to the far more exciting scenes we see in subsequent chapters, and, after all, Oden's story is not the full story of Wano. We get to see that even while he was young, Orochi makes use of his meek, unassuming look to profit from himself, stealing from Yasuie and blaming Oden for it. Oden, meanwhile, buggers off to head to Kuri, being interested in the whole crazy town of bandits thing.
And we get a brief montage of Oden recruiting the others. Kikunojo and Izo (of Whitebeard's crew fame) are brothers who danced to earn money, whose father was imprisoned wrongfully. Kanjuro, the "Demon of Kibi", stole hair from people... to make brushes, because Kanjuro's fucking weird. Raizou is a mountain bandit that was apparently an exile from the Oniwabanshuu. And then Oden goes off to head to Kuri to challenge the local boss, Ashura Doji. The narration is pretty neat, with Oden absolutely loathing the "if you enter, you can't leave" rule that Kuri also has. He gets a pretty cool line, too, noting that he's cast out his name and he's just merely a samurai. In a montage, he beat up Ashura and his goons, then apparently revitalized Kuri into a town with dignity, and this caused him to be reinstated as part of the Kozuki family and as Daimyo of Kuri. And, of course, he makes his followers into his retainers-slash-samurai.
We jump six years later, where the narration teases us with the Rocks Pirates apparently becoming active at around this point... but just like Oden and Wano, the story is still secluded from the outer world. Instead 962 ends with little Kawamatsu finding little Inuarashi and little Nekomamushi.
Chapter 963: Becoming Samurai has a brief flashback to even smaller Neko and Inu learning all about Wano, the sworn ancient brethren of the Minks, and setting out to see all the islands in the world ("are there more than five?") before arriving into Wano... and they are about to get cooked by the locals! Oden rescues them, and the little cat and dog dudes are adorale. We get confirmation that Kawamatsu is, in fact, a Fishman, having taken to calling himself a kappa to fit in with local lore.
Of course, Oden's apparently still lending money to Orochi, leading to his other retainers trying to steal money to give it back to Oden. This leads to the scene we saw in a flashback before (was it when Yasuie died?) of Yasuie telling Oden's retainers to take the money they attempted to steal and use it to better themselves with books, clothes, swords and whatnot, learning manners and becoming dignified. It's kind of an expected scene, but the montage was done well enough and I've ended up being quite attached to these silly goons that when the scene of them assembled and the narration notes how badass and regal these samurai look when Oden arrives at the capital to meet Sukiyaki, I totally believe it.
And 963 ends... with Whitebeard's crew arriving at Wano! The Mody Dick was fucked by the waterfall, and it's so interesting seeing young Marco as an apprentice, and some of the background characters from the Whitebeard crew show up here like a beardless Vista, Whitey Bay, Jozu and that one dude with the chain chomp.
And Oden... just charges in, congratulating Whitebeard for arriving in Wano and then attacks! Oden is apparently strong enough to match Whitebeard weapon-for-weapon, at least, and for Whitebeard to recognize that he's trouble. And, of course, Oden is all excited... to join Whitebeard's crew. We sort of know hiw this will pan out, how it will happen -- Oden, Izo and the Minks will hang out with Whitebesrd -- but it's still neat to see it all from Oden's POV.
Random Notes:
- Young Inuarashi and Nekomamushi are adorable.
- The cover story has Bege and Chiffon's family still look for Lola in Dressrosa. I think they're about to fight a bunch of random germ villains or whatever? That vacuum cleaner lady makes a brief cameo.
- I was wondering why Kin'emon was in his underwear halfway through 960, until I realized Tsuru made good her threat of stripping him of his belongings to pay his debt.
- The description of the "Harem Revolt" is just so out-there and ridiculous.
- I had to double check, but Izo is the crossdressing samurai dude that's part of Whitebeard's division commanders or whatever in the Marineford war. Literally the only notable thing about him is that he's from Wano, so it's neat to see his story interwoven with our Wano cast.
- Everyone has their intricate theories about who the traitor was, from Shinobu to Kanjurou to Kyoushirou to Hiyori to Carrot to whoever. Whoever it is, I hope the resolution's going to be satisfying with the breakneck speed we're going.
- It's kind of obvious that Denjiro's Kyoshiro, right? I'm not the only one that sees that? Which either makes him the traitor loyal to Orochi, or if he's feigning loyalty to help out the good guys from inside the system.
- Yasuie's reason for suspecting Orochi? "Oden would've done the stealing in a far more spectacular manner".
- That super sentai pose that Oden and his retainers make in 962 is just so happy-looking. I love it.
- Thanks to Kamen Rider Faiz, I know exactly what the term "nekojita" (cat's tongue) means, and I chuckled out loud at that scene.
- Chapter 963 reveals that apparently after Oden sliced the Mountain Boar God in half, someone stitched the big boar together with literal stitches, and it's still alive serving Oden. More than anyone else in this flashback, I want these giant pigs to show up in present day as backup.
- The scene with Oden and Sukiyaki note that this is the last time they'll meet, while the panel focuses on Orochi hiding behind a screen door. Is Orochi the one slowly poisoning Sukiyaki or something, or am I just thinking of Phantom Blood?
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