One Piece, Chapter 1198: The Island of Monsters
Zaza continues to glorp around, though, and Sanji hasn't done a permanent job of taking down Killingham yet. Zaza does reach the ship, yes, but without Summers it's not really going anywhere, and there's a cool moment where Sanji notes that he has no doubt that Zoro would've dealt with Summers. It is kind of silly that this whole thing hinges on the arbitrary deadline of Zaza reaching the ship when it should've been super-easy for any of our heroes (giants included!) to just break the ship instead of the God's Knight or the giant elemental woman, but eh.
A lot of this is just kind of distraction before the main events of this chapter. Sanji briefly gets confused when a silhouette he doesn't recognize shows up...
And then we cut away to the big Imu battle that we've been abandoning for the past couple of months while we deal with Zoro and Sanji.
We've got more dancing and singing trees. Hajrudin and Usopp are bamboozled, and Usopp compares this to the end of the world... and Imu has transformed again. His previous transformation was a rather tepid 'let's become buff' form, but in-between chapters Imu has accessed his inner Bleach fanboy and has transformed into a giant, titanic form that towers over even Loki, and this really does look like a design not from One Piece. I've seen it compared to a stylized version of something like a Dark Souls or Final Fantasy boss, and I wouldn't go that far, but it's still a great 'look at this unholy final JRPG boss fight' vibe. Oda's designs tend to be a bit goofy, which gives One Piece its distinctive style in character design...
But Imu's third (fourth?) form is a giant, lean figure. He's covered with robes that remind me of Arrancar robes or Kaguya/Obito's robes from Naruto. He's got a fancy kimono. He's got a cool new almost artificial-looking head with two gigantic horns, a hair of flame, two rings with eyeballs that rotate around him, and the 'weapon wheel' halo hovers behind him with the fallen-angel wings attached to the wheel instead of the body. His head is so cool, too, a jet-black artificial-looking face set inside a white helmet.
And he's just insanely titanic, and has driven Loki into a corner. We get the rather unfortunate debut of Loki's hybrid form, which has been foreshadowed throughout the arc but just kind of... it's cool, but it's also a draconic/dinosaurian hybrid form. I've seen people compare this to X-Drake or Page One or any of the other hybrid forms, and yeah, it's cool, but it's also not as brand spanking new as Imu is, and for as many times that this form has been silhouetted...
Although it is noted in the text box as Loki's SECOND hybrid form. So that's interesting. That's a whole barrel of questions that we're asking, but we don't get the answers to in this whole insane chapter.
Loki grumbles in confusion that Luffy has 'ran away', but Imu doesn't give a shit. He tells Loki that slavery will come to Elbaph either way, and he demands the 'ancient technology'. Loki doesn't know... and we get a badass two-page spread where Imu speed-blitzes and cuts down Loki in one super-fast blow. That's awesome.
Loki falls, and Imu seemingly deactivates his katana... which for all intents and purposes is a lightsaber, isn't it? That's so cool! A lightsaber is somehow like only the seventh most interesting thing in this chapter.
One of the interesting things is Imu still huffing in exertion, but also his monologues have changed, alternating between referring to himself as "I" and as "Mu". It does lead to question whether the different forms (and maybe personalities) are all sub-sets of the 'real' Mu?
Whatever the case, Hajrudin and Usopp evacuate Loki and Gaban. Usopp panics over Luffy's random transformation into 'that thing', and Gaban gives us more cryptic insights. He notes that Luffy is a Zoan user, and that this is a 'critical moment' for him. Elsewhere, Jinbe and Nami are also running (though we don't know in which direction), noting just how out-of-character it is for Luffy to cut and run.
In West Village, we see... Luffy? But his skin is all black, he's got a monkey tail, he's grinning with sharp teeth and he's got a monkey's nose. And he's making ukikikiki noises, which are the onomatopoeia that monkeys make in Japanese. He's still got the white clouds and scarf and hair.
And then Luffy, or this strange monkey form of Luffy's, just charges in and grabs Zaza by the hair, grabs her arm, and I think he blows into the arm so hard that Zaza explodes? She's a water elemental (and probably non-sentient, despite her being drawn with facial expressions) so we can get away with some brutality. But everyone is horrified, Monkey-Luffy is just cackling and making ook ook monkey noises... and it's clear that this is a form that appears out of control.
And I love this! I was one of the dissenters on how the manga has been handling Luffy's Gear Fifth, particularly in the recent chapters. There is one thing about Luffy having the strength of will or the strength of personality to not need to 'be' Joy Boy or Nika or whoever, but him just constantly shrugging off injuries and not getting any character development beyond yelling really loud has been quite grating. So this seems, to me at least, to be the result of Luffy forcing his body beyond the limits, all that unexplained bullshit healing and whatnot leading into something.
Many fans are obsessed with trying to find the label to this. Gear Sixth, or Nika or Joy Boy taking over, or an Awakening, or a failed Awakening, or this or that, which really doesn't matter to me. I mean, it's obviously based on Sun Wukong, which inspired the poster boy of Shonen manga, Son Goku of Dragon Ball fame. We've had Wukong comparisons to Luffy before thanks to the monkey theme. That Luffy has a monkey form or whatever isn't a huge surprise to me. It's that the manga finally has the balls to go through some of what it's only implied so far when Luffy seems to be a bit weird whenever he goes into Gear Fifth, but it's okay because he's laughing and beating his enemy. This is a somewhat darker take on that, and I'm all for it. If nothing else, just for the characterization that Luffy can potentially get from this experience!
Random Notes:
- Things will likely continue to be very slow for this blog in the next couple of months, but I do still have a bunch of prewritten articles. Some monster reviews that I've been working hard on for a while, plus reviews of VisionQuest should start popping up once I finish proofreading them. I don't think I'll be doing Steel Ball Run reviews due to sheer time commitments, or at least not in-depth ones. Likewise I don't think Netflix's One Piece season 2 will be properly reviewed here -- I just don't think I have the energy to do a lot of checking and nitpicking and making sure I'm listing the changes being made in these two adaptations. The fact that I really care about JoJo and One Piece will mean that it would drive me insane if I don't talk about everything, but it's also impractical for me to do so with my schedule.
- I'm also playing through the Ocarina of Time remake, which is just fantastic in general but has been taking up a lot of my free time.
- It's a bit more ambiguous whether Killingham has a metal heart like Summers does, but Sanji does have a dialogue in this chapter mentioning that he needs to go to the heart and Killingham panicking a whole ton when it's mentioned, so it's likely a safe assumption that all the Knights of God have the same metal heart weak point.
- It is a minor detail in the scheme of all things, but I do like the little detail of Zaza cutting off one of her arms just to drop the liquid gloop with all the children in it into the ship.
- In the middle of everything, Jinbe and Nami note that "there is Brook to worry about". Presumably Brook is off to deal with Gunko-Shuri on his own, but in the chaos of all things it's just relegated to something offscreen.
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