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One Piece
Episode 752

by Sam Leach,

How would you rate episode 752 of
One Piece (TV 1999) ?
Community score: 3.6

Last week our heroes arrived at the mysterious location of Zou, a monstrous living elephant supposedly carrying an entire civilization on its back. This week, Luffy and the Barto Club find the Straw Hats' ship, the Thousand Sunny, trailing behind the elephant safe and sound, meaning that Sanji and the others must already be up on top. It's been a solid 90 episodes since the whole crew has been together, so we're inclined to make haste.

That said, we still don't make it to the top of the elephant by the end of this episode, as we've got another info-dump load to cycle through first. We get an update on the Revolutionary Army, as Monkey D. Dragon sifts through the reports of Sabo and Koala's adventures in Dressrosa. It's nice to see Dragon and Koala discuss their mutual friendship with Robin, but I was far too distracted by the fact that Koala is suddenly cartoonishly over-endowed compared to the last time we saw her. Even by modern One Piece standards, it looks obnoxiously bad and I can't believe human beings chose to draw her like that. Robin gets it pretty bad in this episode as well.

Boobs aside, this scene connects us to an update on the Blackbeard pirates. Blackbeard himself has stayed hidden from our sight since the time skip, but we do get to see Lafitte and shiryu again as they answer a call from Burgess, who it turns out has tailed Sabo and Koala back to the Revolutionary's headquarters. I don't know if Blackbeard has any real stakes in anything the Revolutionaries are up to, but we know Burgess has it out for Sabo after the events in Dressrosa. The scene ends with the implication that there's going to be a battle between the two sides.

The rest of the info-dump comes from the two most recent additions to the Seven Warlords: the self-proclaimed son of Whitebeard, Edward Weevil, and our good friend Buggy the Clown, who appears to be using his new Government pardon to run a pirate mercenary business. The Weevil scene mostly just confirms a lot of the talk we heard last week about how this guy is overwhelmingly strong and hunting down the leftover members of Whitebeard's crew. On top of that, this full view of him makes it clear that, despite his strength, he looks like a big doofus without an original thought of his own, always doing what his bossy mother tells him. I'm fifty-fifty on whether he's legitimately the son of Whitebeard at the moment, but the story clearly wants us to doubt it.

The last scene in this episode involves Luffy and friends' efforts to climb the elephant. Kanjuro is able to use his art powers to make a super cute, super ugly doodle of a dragon that comes to life and allows everybody to ride on its back. I love seeing Robin break character to blush and internally fawn over how cute it is. As it scales the elephant, we wave goodbye to Bartolomeo and his crew. I'm gonna miss Bartolomeo, but when we see him again, I hope we get to see some of his obnoxious punk side instead of him just being a fanboy 24/7. It was getting a bit old, in my opinion.

After last week's awful looking episode, it's nice to get one that at least holds itself together. It's not super ambitious production-wise, but it doesn't need to be, since this is another episode all about the updates on what the other big picture characters are up to. I can't say that it avoids doing anything bad, since the women do look really terrible. It's a shame, because it was almost a perfectly fine episode without any hiccups. Fanservice is a-ok in my book, but not when it's this tacky and unpleasant to look at. It's like the people drawing it have no respect for the fact that this is a cross-generational franchise, or that it's actually some people's favorite show.

Other than that, perfectly fine episode.

Rating: B

One Piece is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.com.

Sam Leach writes and records about One Piece for The One Piece Podcast and you can find him on Twitter @LuckyChainsaw

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