One Piece 1187-1190 Review: Sword Collection

One Piece, Chapters 1187-1190

Been a while since I did a One Piece review. Again, I'm doing this as a little catch-up while I juggle some IRL stuff that has been making it slow for me to blog anything in real-time...

Chapter 1187: The Root of the Problem

This one picks up where 1186 left off, with Luffy punching Imu, and there's a brief bit of macho posturing from Loki before Imu zips back up and uses the ringing Omen black flames to summon a gigantic extending black sword, "Stigma, Blade of Hatred", to stab Loki through the shoulder. This is an interesting ability and the fact that Imu has been naming his abilities based on swords becomes a bit more relevant in subsequent chapters. 

Regardless, the wounded Loki gets thrown across the battlefield, landing to where Gunko is frozen in ice next to most of the other Straw Hats. The Ragnir hammer conks down on the ice cube and starts to melt it, although Gunko/Shuri doesn't come to in any of these chapters. 

Luffy and Imu have their 1v1, with Imu doing the same 'Stigma' ability that uses bell-shaped flames to create little flame buddies that latch onto Luffy, and giant blades and pillars of black flame try to track where Luffy is jumping around. The chapter cuts away to Zoro and Sanji below, but the final shot is Gear Fifth Luffy facing off against Imu, and Imu calling him 'Joy Boy' and Luffy not giving a shit about that. 

This chapter also spends half its runtime with two battle setups, which is always cool. Zoro confronts Saint Summers, and both have their own nice one-liners. Summers is confident about Omen, while Zoro says that Sanji's going to kill the other God's Knight. Sanji, meanwhile, goes through a bit of a brief crisis because this giant avatar of Rain God Zaza is in the shape of a woman and he can't kick it... so he'll settle with beating up Killingham. 

It's a bit of a longer scene and a nice spotlight for Sanji's own complexes, but essentially we flash back to the moment where Sanji and Scopper were talking about Conqueror's Haki earlier in the arc, and Scopper says what everyone probably expected -- Sanji has the traits of being a king, or the potential to have it, but has a 'streak of masochistic instability'. So Sanji's going to get a moment in this arc as well where he's going to unlock Conqueror's Haki, and it's actually tied to his character. That's absolutely going to be welcome. 

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Chapter 1188: Vohu

1188 starts off with a strange flashback of what appears to be a phone call between Imu and Joy Boy, which might be their first encounter... although we don't really get much context about that. 

Imu and Luffy fight across these couple of chapters and it's just a nice sequence of fight scenes -- which honestly has became a bit of a rarity in One Piece these days. Imu's abilities continue to vary, with him opening up with an attack that resembles Luffy's own Snakeman with an extending fiery arm that changes direction mid-air. Imu continues to barrage Luffy with his little fireball imps, and Luffy randomly transforms into "Gomu Gomu Genie".... which is unexpected? Not sure what this form really ended up doing other than being a bit bigger than usual.  

There's a nice comedic scene where Luffy insists that "Loki's death will not be in vain", while Loki complains that he's still alive. There's a couple of shorter moments, like Jinbe protecting Loki from stray attacks (and Ragnir fawning over Jinbe); Brook speculating on the identity of Imu (as the head of the God's Knights) -- and Imu even actually recognizing Brook's identity from Esperia.

After another sequence of Luffy dodging Imu's fire balls, Imu then summons "Blade of Nothingness: Vohu" and this curved blade causes the plants all around Imu to dry up and to clear Luffy's hiding spots... and Imu charges in and stabs Luffy through the chest. "Joy Boy is not that weak!"

It's a pretty neat sequence that sets up the next couple of chapters. Luffy has been playing around a bit too much, and while I don't want Luffy to be an emo serious protagonist, I do like that we're acknowledging a little bit that Luffy hasn't really been taking stuff seriously in the New World, and he's starting to hit a bit of a Sabaody-esque ceiling. I get that Gear Fifth is something that runs on joy and comedy, but it being properly challenged like this is neat! Nice shades of Alabasta, too, with Crocodile impaling Luffy on his hook. 

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Chapter 1189: King of the World

We continue with Imu brutalizing Luffy, with Imu impaling Luffy and stabbing him against a tree with Vohu. And turns out that Imu's powers, as we find out in this chapter, is essentially something that people have been comparing to an inventory select screen. Imu has access to the 19 blades of the founding families of the World Government, and Stigma and Vohu are some of them. 

We cut away to other scenes, but Imu does a speech about Monkey D. Luffy and his hateful brothers, summoning "Blade of the Sea: Fragarach" (which seems to draw moisture from plants?) and the Axe of Xingtian. All of these are weapons based on mythologies in the real world, and we get some other weapon names being dropped by Summers and Killingham, whose Omen power-up also grants them access to these weapons. Shepherd summons his own family's sword, Gram, which we've seen briefly in the Loki/Imu battle. Killingham, meanwhile, summons the Rimoshifu family's spear, Longinus. We also get 'Tohu' and 'Muramasa' name-dropped. That's cool, and a neat little twist for the fights against the God's Knights that would otherwise be a bit repetitive. The chapter ends with Scopper swooping in to save Luffy from Imu in a very epic clash.

With the rest of the Straw Hats, however, Usopp finally does something, activating Observation Haki for the first time in a decade of real-world publication. Luffy and Imu's fight is far away, but Usopp is realizing that something isn't right. With moments given to multiple other Straw Hats like Brook, Robin, Luffy and soon Sanji, it is nice that Usopp is apparently not forgotten by the writer. There is a bit of a conversation between Brook and an angry Ragnir about Shuri, with Ragnir seeing Shuri as a threat, and Brook confirming that he sees Shuri as his daughter. 

Things are interrupted when Hajrudin, Gerd and Chopper arrive and accidentally slam down a whole-ass ship down on the already-wounded Loki. Hajrudin gets a brief flashback to Elder Jarl telling him to go where he needs to go. Loki also gets a flashback to a conversation he had right after Harald's death with Scopper and Shanks. Shanks tells Loki about Imu's status as the king of the world, and essentially tells Loki that he just isn't powerful to take down the King of the World... and the time isn't right to do so anyway. 

In the present day Loki tells this to Hajrudin, who gets a nice brotherly moment. But more importantly, this information about the King of the World has been given to our heroes. Robin also has a little cameo with Saul, calling Chopper in to presumably talk to the owl.

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Chapter 1190: Those Whose Death Brings Celebration

1190 is an unexpected Imu vs Scopper fight, following up from the previous chapter. It's a snappy one to read, mostly just showcasing some more cool abilities from Imu (who shows off a couple of new blades like the Honebami Toshiro) and Scopper (who does an 80K version of his 800 Tribal Leaders attack). Again, it's a pretty fun fight scene. 

Scopper just has a lot of badass moments in this chapter. He yells at Luffy to basically take things seriously, and being the Pirate King is going to be someone "whose death brings celebration" to the world. It's a nice little tough love moment and I am excited to see Monkey D. Luffy get some character growth and trying to get him to take things seriously. Scopper tosses Luffy away, letting him 1v1 Imu for a chapter. It's a nice little moment, even if it's straightforward, but it's very important to get these moments in. 

Scopper also gets to taunt Imu a bit, yelling at Imu about how he's so afraid of someone that resembles Joy Boy; and there's a very cool scene where Scopper says that he doesn't give a shit about the 'words of Joy Boy'... and more likely the dream of his Captain. Gol D. Roger. A very cool moment.

The chapter ends in a massive giant explosion and clash, with Haki lightning zapping all over the place and chopping up the giant branches of the World Tree Adam. Again, a couple of well-paced, pretty cool stuff! But as what we expect from a story with someone else fighting the main villain, the chapter ends with Scopper with one of his arms sliced off by Imu, defeated. It's a very cool exit from the battle for Scopper, and I definitely have been converted to liking Scopper a lot. Now I would prefer for this to be a proper last stand with Scopper being a casualty, but him being maimed is also an acceptable bit of stakes.