One Piece 1165 Review: Battle

One Piece, Chapter 1165: Echo

This one is a bit of a very action-heavy chapter, and one that's... mostly physical choreography. I want to stress what a rarity this is in modern-day One Piece, and most particularly in such a tightly-paced arc like God Valley. The nature of One Piece as a manga and story has evolved a lot to be more focused on narrative and story as opposed to action, but this is a nice return to that side of the spectrum. 

Essentially the entire chapter can just be summed up to Garp and Roger clashing against the reversi'd Rocks, and figuring out through their newly-found Voice of All Things powers that Rocks isn't in control of himself. 

But to dumb that down to just a sentence like that is really doing the chapter a disservice. I am terrible at describing action scenes, and I honestly won't try -- just look up the chapter on your own. But there are a lot of great small moments like Roger and Rocks's sword clash Garp punching Rocks in the face; Garp grabbing Rocks's leg and judo-swinging him away, and the combo move between Garp that closes out the chapter. I particularly love that Garp's attack ends up looking like a non-rubbery version of Gomu Gomu no Gatling, with a bunch of fists erupting on Rocks's shadowy body. Garp and Roger figure out that they need to move everything into one massive blow, apologizing to the crying Rocks... and while we do see Rocks's shadowy body dissipate, I'm not 100% sure the battle is over yet. I don't mind if it does, though. 

There's also some emphasized scenes of what the two of them interact with their respective crews, telling them to go back to the ships; a somewhat formalized truce between Roger and Garp; a brief attempt at Roger in recruiting Garp to the piracy side (and Garp giving his 'I need to protect the Marines from the inside' reason);  and even some discussion about what kind of Haki would pierce Rocks' demonized form. 

Pretty cool stuff. The rest of the chapter... doesn't really show us anything we don't know, again, it just expands on scenes we could infer would happen from previous chapters. But it really is nice to see all of it happen with the backdrop of the epic Garp/Roger/Rocks three-way fight in the background. Silver Axe and Shiki are both escaping; Big Mom and Kaido get into an argument about their debt before Streussen gets Big Mom to escape; Stussy getting separated from Whitebeard (and seemingly going on with Ganzui and... Gill Bastar is revealed to be a random previous Horo Horo no Mi user?); Whitebeard meeting someone obviously Marco's dad, called... Polo...; Gloriosa falling in with the Roger pirates to escape; Saturn (or Imu in Saturn) saying that God Valley 'never existed'...

It really is a chaotic runaround, and it is interesting to see where some of the secondary Rocks pirates end up. Most notable are two things -- Rayleigh and Gaban leave the rest of the crew to cast off and run back to help Roger, which is very surprising because I thought we are narratively going to trim down the secondary cast. But also, we get to see Monkey D. Dragon finally doing something badass, pulling out his rifle and aiming it at his supervisor to demand them let survivors on board their battleship. Yep, we're seeing Dragon finally slowly grow to the revolutionary he'll be in the future. 

And as Rocks is seemingly taken down by Roger and Garp, the narrator speaks in the background about how all information about God Valley, the combatants, and the chaotic disbandment of the Rocks pirates and their era of piracy has been purged by the government... but the echoes of this era still happen to this day. 

It's a bit of a shorter review from my part because, again, I don't think I can do the manga panels justice by going through them one by one, but I do really feel this is a great action sequence, and a nice dramatic climax to God Valley and the foreshadowed Rocks/Roger/Garp three-way. Good stuff. 

Random Notes:

• The attacks that the two of them unleashed are called 'Kagutsuchi's Ace' for Roger, and 'Infinitum Explosion' for Garp. Roger has always has a Japanese-themed naming scheme for his attack, but adding the Ace at the end is interesting. 
• One thing that does bug me is that we don't get any real clarity on how Whitebeard just ended up wandering off on his own, when last we see him he was clashing with Rocks. I guess Rocks just... barreled past him? Hmm?
• In the midst of it all, we get another sky-split, of course, and it's notable that despite all the legends clashing in God Valley (the Yonko combo move; and the strongest warriors in the place fighting Imu) this hasn't happened yet prior. 
• No, seriously, that random Horo Horo no Mi user looks pleased with himself. His idea of a 'ghost' is a bit different from how Perona has her own ghosts, but the lips and tongue are still the same. I like this fact that different devil fruit users have different interpretations of how the powers are to be used... which really does reinforce that the Bomb Bomb Fruit really is meant to be used with explosive boogers. 
• So I don't really care about the power system stuff since I genuinely do think that the Armament/Conqueror stuff has been a huge ball of messy confusion ever since Wano. But the way that Roger and Garp describe it, Rocks is covered with so much Conqueror's Haki that the two of them's combined Armament and Conqueror abilities aren't punching through. 
  
• No, wait, the World Government send CP-6 to cover up God Valley? Really? CP-6? J- Jerry? Jerry was behind the censorship of God Valley? What.