One Piece 1122 Review: Impact Dial

One Piece, Chapter 1122: The Time is At Hand

So yeah, I'm... not the biggest fan of this chapter? I don't dislike it, and I appreciate the subversion in a way, but I don't know if it's just me being grouchy from my illness or still kind of 'reeling' from the Nika-form Bonney thing (which after seeing how much relatively weaker it is, makes me feel a bit more mollified). 

Apparently Vegapunk's message is still kinda going, but he's not really saying anything much. Some random generic citizens all over the world get inspired by Vegapunk's message to go after the One Piece.... yeah, Office Worker Ossan With Bad Pharaoh Cosplay; Skullhat and Budget Jeet are totally going to be the new Supernovas. We also get the explanation how the prisoners in Impel Down can hear what's going on, since apparently Vegapunk's technology just hacks into all the snails, and they can't shut down all of the snails in Impel Down. 

We get some reactions from some major players, like Koby... who's in a bed and growls about how he's going to stop Luffy from stopping his dream. I mean, sure. Maybe, like, save Garp first, and do that later? Just a thought, maybe you need some priorities. Buggy plays to the crowd and makes his Cross Guild goons swoon over a "it's not my world, it's our world" speech before Crocodile and Mihawk tells him to get his ass down. Blackbeard also reacts to this, kind of, with Devon and Augur in the process of bringing Caribou to him. 

We have the Iron Giant being tackled by Topman, and we see two panels of a Den Den Mushi falling down and seemingly being caught by an explosion. It's still One Piece so some death-defying shenanigans may occur, but I don't think a fucking snail should be able to pull a Pound. 

Emet talks to Luffy a bit, and keeps saying about 'Joy Boy', and Luffy finally realizes that Emet mistook him for someone else. Emet notes that he kind of figured it out that Luffy and Joy Boy isn't the same person, but he's nostalgic and he just woke up from a hundreds-year nap and they just feel so similar. He apologizes to Joy Boy, noting that he "could not make Joy Boy king", which... is interesting? Luffy yells about his identity, and the Iron Giant responds to 'D'.

We get a pretty cool shot of the four Gorosei assembled as the Sunny flies through the air and Emet looms to fight them, and I think the sheer scale of how much bigger Ju-Peter and Topman are compared to Emet, Ethan, Saturn and the giants.

Iron Giant unties a knot, which... I'm honestly not sure whether that knot is inside of the gianat's body or somewhere outside? It's a reference to a random minor scene forever ago, with Haredas, the weather wizard that trained Nami, showing off some wind-sealing knots. And it's honestly just something that comes out of nowhere as Emet unlocking that knot just unleashes a fuck-ton of Conqueror's Haki. It blasts a bunch of Marines out, and we see the black lightning emerging out from a long-shot of the island. 

The blast hits the four Gorosei point-blank, and Topman, Saturn, Ethan and Peter get knocked out of their Zoan Beast (?) modes. And then we get to see Topman, Ethan and Peter get teleported into the Big Room of Authority, where Marcus Mars is just sitting on his chair with the most displeased expression on his face. And... I guess when Luffy, Bonney, Sanji and Franky did their combo attack thing, they actually did send Team Rocket blasting off again? It does explain why Marcus never flew back to Egghead to menace our heroes. 

And... notably, Saturn is not back yet. It is notable, again, that so much attention was put into Saturn being physically on a boat sailing to Egghead, and he summoned the other four Gorosei there with magic kuchiyose-no-jutsu style summoning circles. So something Emet did undid the summoning technique, and that something is also similar to whatever Luffy did that knocked Mars back. I'm going to guess it's the Conqueror's Haki more than anything, but I... honestly feel like this really came out of nowhere. It wouldn't be as bad if we had any kind of foreshadowing -- even Luffy (and Bonney) being able to wound or disrupt the Gorosei with Gear Fifth had some logic due to the whole established idea of the Gorosei being afraid of Nika. But this random Haki-storing rope being in the Iron Giant all along feels like a completely random development. 

Oh, and Imu is keeling over in his room, thinking about Joy Boy, but who knows if he's keeling over from pain because he's connected to the Gorosei, or because he feels the Haki... at this point the mystery's honestly kind of annoying. 

The Thousand Sunny lands on the Giant Pirate ship, and we get some reunion scenes with the rest of the crew and some (mostly offscreen) catchup happens. While all of this is going on, we get to see Saturn look at the now-hopefully-destroyed Emet going "...". 

And then we get a flashback to Emet -- still sparkling new -- talking with Joy Boy, who is completely silhouetted. He sure has a straw hat! Emet also has an 'X' on his arms, which presumably is going to tie to Alabasta somehow? Joy Boy is also sitting on what appears to be a Poneglyph, though no idea which island this is. There's some exposition about Joy Boy storing his Haki into the knot for the future, but I'm mostly more interested in Emet having enough of a personality and sentience to be happy that Joy Boy will stay with him, in a sort, all the way to the future. 

Anyway... hopefully Egghead Island wraps up soon. I can't say I find the Joy Boy and Emet stuff a particularly good payoff for just how long the giant robot has been going around going "Joy... boy..." over and over again, and I'm someone who's mostly been okay with a lot of the revelations in Egghead Island. It can't all be bangers, I guess, but I really wasn't the biggest fan of this one. 

Random Notes:

• The cover page is Smoker with the truncated "Hero Academia" in the smoke. This is actually a replication of the fan-art that Horikoshi sent in to One Piece all the way back in the Dressrosa arc, before he became an established mangaka! That's honestly quite amazing -- that Horikoshi managed to start a manga and conclude his manga (I'll have to get caught up in the last 10-20 chapters) but also that One Piece, this behemoth, has been running long enough to inspire a high school kid, have him grow up to an age where he can start publishing a manga, and even conclude it... and One Piece is still running strong! 
• One thing that really does make me wish Oda does more is to give some recurring characters as mooks in Buggy and Blackberad's organization. It's not much to ask for that, isn't it? Like knowing random names of all the captains in Whitebeard's divisions or having names for all the Kid Pirates, Law Pirates, Oniwabanshu, et cetera? 
• We notably don't get to see if Saturn is weakened by water. We only ever see him tossed around in the air, or back on the land. 
• Some people mention that the idea of 'storing energy' is kind of similar to Impact Dials... which, again, if the Weather Knots or the Impact Dials are meant to be relevant, it'd be nice to just see them be mentioned in... not even in Egghead Island, but even a brief mention here and there in the post-timeskip era would've been nice. 
• I love that while Topman, Saturn and Ethan are posing as if they're badass warriors that are trying to endure a hit, Ju Peter is posing like he's about to dive into a fucking pool thanks to how the worm mode was posing before it's taken out.