×
  • remind me tomorrow
  • remind me next week
  • never remind me
Subscribe to the ANN Newsletter • Wake up every Sunday to a curated list of ANN's most interesting posts of the week. read more

One Piece
Episode 997

by Grant Jones,

How would you rate episode 997 of
One Piece (TV 1999) ?
Community score: 4.3

As astonishing as it sounds, Wano's finale has only just begun. I have been talking about it for over a year now, but the sheer scale of this arc is something to behold. Hundreds of characters, dozens of locations, countless plot threads – it's all coming together and exploding at the same time. Even when things feel like they could not get any more ridiculous, Oda finds a way to add more explosions to the top of the giant skull mountain.

Still, most of this episode's runtime was moving characters from point A to point B. This is typical of the connective tissue episodes for Wano – there are simply too many characters to keep track of without doing check-ins with them and figuring out how they're getting around. Law, Kid, Killer, Zoro, and the rest do a lot of walking and talking to remind us that they are present and on the move. The best bit in all of these scenes has to be Queen talking via transponder snails. His reactions when he is communicating with the various Beast pirates frontline units as they are being taken out one by one are hilarious, as are the tiny snails doing their overacting as troops die.

The pièce de résistance of Episode 997 has to be the full moon sulong gang facing down Kaido. While all these transforming bestial warriors facing off against an army of giants led by a dragon is a breathtaking and amazing setup in and of itself, it also speaks to the scale of what Eiichiro Oda is doing. Wano is, arguably, the post time-skip arc of One Piece. Oda has been laying the groundwork for this for literal years, at least since Kinemon's introduction at Punk Hazard (and clearly well before then in ways large and small). So many arcs, so many backstories, all coming to a head here at Wano. The world of One Piece simply will not be the same once the dust from this fight settles.



Rating:


Grant is the cohost on the Blade Licking Thieves podcast and Super Senpai Podcast.

One Piece is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.com. Save on Anime Streaming Subscriptions with Funimation.

discuss this in the forum (721 posts) |
bookmark/share with: short url

back to One Piece
Episode Review homepage / archives