Monsters: 103 Mercies Dragon Damnation
So some time back, they adapted one of One Piece author Eiichiro Oda's earlier works, the one shot "Monsters". Like most authors, Oda went through various different one-shots before One Piece was published (and even then, there are at least two or three different 'Romance Dawn' chapters that Oda published before the canonical first chapter. But out of all of Oda's previous work, one stood out because it was retroactively made into part of the sprawling storyline of One Piece, which is Monsters -- with the zombified corpse of its main character Ryuma showing up in the Thriller Bark arc of One Piece.
I remembered reading the Thriller Bark arc and... honestly, without knowing the 'meta' reason and origin behind Ryuma, it really did feel like there was something that was intentionally special about him beyond just being another swordsman for Zoro to defeat, and while ultimately he was just a mid-arc boss fight while other characters would be the final villains, I felt like there was so much put into Ryuma's story that he felt different. The amount of backstory given to him felt like this was a character foreshadowing something huge in the future... and we did get that with the Wano arc. But it was a nice, pleasant surprise for me to know that Oda adapted Ryuma from his previous work Monsters, and did so in a way that wasn't confusing at all and felt rather integrated to the world of One Piece in general.
And we get the animation, and it's... it's gorgeous. That's the first thing I do want to say about this. The colours are vibrant, and the shots of Ryuma and Cyrano pulling out their blades against each other in the climax is easily the coolest shot in the OVA -- I'm a sucker for those grayed-out sketchy artwork. But the shots of Ryuma and Cyrano clashing in the tavern, and obviously the money shot of Ryuma killing the dragon are all very cool!
That said... not a lot of people talked about this, and I think a good chunk of it is that Monsters in general is very standalone. It's meant to be a one-shot, and while that's cool and the voice actors and animators did a great job at highlighting the core twist of the story (that Cyrano and DR are actually villains scamming the citizens and betrayed Flare), the buildup and the resolution are... very predictable. The characterizations are also rather predictable, with Ryuma being a stock goofy-but-ultimately-heroic shonen protagonist, Flair being there as the crying girl to be rescued (or avenged, in this case) and both Cyrano and DR are pretty simple card-carrying villains beyond the twist.
There is also the fact that anyone who's going to watch Monsters is 99% likely to know of Monsters from One Piece, so the huge twist that the goofy wandering swordsman Ryuma is actually a super-badass 'King' of the swordsmen isn't going to blow anyone's minds.
There are also some moments of confusion in the story that I felt could've done by rearranging some of the dialogue from the source material, specifically about the Dragon Horn. The twist goes that the village was actually ransacked and plundered by Cyrano and DR, and for a while it looked like there was no real dragon... but then apparently they actually do have a real magical dragon horn... I understood it, but I really felt like the exposition about whether a dragon actually attacked Flair's village in the past could've been done better.
Ultimately, though, am I really going to complain and bitch all that much? No, not really. I love that one of an author's earlier works got recognized and adapted, and I did enjoy the time I had watching the OVA (or, well, ONA because it's released online) so yeah. It's not something I felt like it was anything super special, but it was a nice watch regardless.
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