One Piece: Gear Second

[detlef]

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[BWYuko]

Wow, unreal stuff. Sadly, break next week.

Spoiler: show

Garp's fate here parallel's Jaguar's so much. Gotta believe he'll show up again later as another Blackbeard captive / bargaining chip during their showdown with the Straw Hats. Still, it feels like there's years of plot ahead. Even when the crew has escaped Egghead, the unpredictability of what happens next is so great.

[BWYuko]

Oh dear...

[Vaspinne]

Why am I getting excited? That looks stupid good to me

[Kanriel]

This might not be the perfect live action adaptation, but holy ever living fuck I did not expect to actually think it MIGHT WORK!

[Vaspinne]

Yeah that's my reaction. I was keeping my expectations rock bottom given what this is... but it actually looks pretty solid. I mean, I'm not gonna watch it expecting it to be some phenomenal revelation of a show, but I feel like with a trailer like that, I might be able to thoroughly enjoy it for what it is

[Vaspinne]

Conversely, in other hype news, August 6th

[Petitssk]

Conversely, in other hype news, August 6th

[...]

Jesus Christ, they are still fighting? I stopped watching in February and checked one or two months ago and, based on the thumbnails, it was still going on, so I didn't even bother watching.

[silverdragontyr]

The first trailer was really rough. I wasn't sure about it. This trailer oddly enough makes it look really good. The casting of literally everyone is perfect.

[Zealot]

I could tell who every character was right away, that's some good casting.

[BWYuko]

If they did Arlong's nose, why couldn't they do Usopp's? :C

The Kaku jokes will make NO SENSE when they get to Water 7! (yarite...)

[Vaspinne]

I dunno if anyone cares but Luffy "died" in the anime today. The ending was hype as fuck and between the preview from a week ago and the episode preview from this week, I'm actually really excited for next week and hype about the anime for the first time in a LONG time. The episode preview showed more then the preview from last week, and yeah, looks like they're dumping a LOT of budget into the episode

[BWYuko]

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Break next week :C

[Qalbert]

what an episode

[Lokus]

That episode was pretty ridiculous. Sucks that the anime still suffers from shit pacing and constant flashbacks to things that happened last episode/5 mins ago.

[Vaspinne]

Yeah it's fucking awful how much time filler baggage they pack in. Sticking pretty strictly to 1 chapter per episode. Would love if they eventually did a post-timeskip One Piece Kai where they get rid of all the extra crap. The pacing pre-skip was pretty solid, but maaaan, post skip is hard to watch. I know there's that fan-edit project out there, but the animation and music cuts can be a bit jarring at times

[BWYuko]

That episode was pretty ridiculous. Sucks that the anime still suffers from shit pacing and constant flashbacks to things that happened last episode/5 mins ago.

This was the reveal episode. It followed the pacing of the manga panels almost verbatim, save for the mentioned flashback overuse (which is a bummer for sure, but that's how they make 21 min out of 1 chapter these days). The fight proper begins next episode.

But yeah, I'm more concerned with how disorienting the animation remains at certain times. At no point in the manga did I have to pause, go back, and re-read panels to figure out wtf was going on. But I cite the bolo breath deflection as an example in this episode where they're barely providing viewers enough frames to glean what Luffy had actually done, what happened to his body/the terrain to make it happen, how it damaged Kaido, etc. Had to rewatch it to really understand what had transpired. DBS didn't have these problems with ultra instinct storyboarding, so idk what Toei's doin here. I understand G5 is chaotic, hectic, ridiculous, zany, unbound, etc., but as a fan the shaky-cam moments were a little too much; I wanted Kaido to grab Luffy by the shoulders and be like "HOLD STILL SO THEY CAN SEE YOU FOR A SECOND, FFS". Maybe the combat in the next few eps will be less egregious on this front. We'll see!

[Lucavi]

This is why I stick to the manga. I ain't gotta worry about shit for pacing, or filler, or how best the company tries to extract watch-time from people or any of that corporate shit. Just plot, baybeee.

[Tymon]

I only watched a video of the fight itself but that was a great example of animators thinking that they can just blend up a bunch of sakuga and no matter what it'll be impressive. Like yeah, tons of frames, probably tons of work, cool man. It looks fucking stupid in action, though. You can barely even tell what's going on.

I think the Tom and Jerry sound effects were an awesome homage given that Oda said that cartoon specifically influenced him here, but the visuals were waaaaaaaaaaay too excessive.

Consider the Snakeman fight. That had way better visuals than this did.

[Vaspinne]

It is un-fucking-believable how much better this week's episode was. Like, night and day. There might have been a bit of episode padding, but unlike last week, this week it wasn't really all that noticeable. And the animation was great, and the pacing actually felt really good and yeah, just WAY WAY better, holy shit.

I only had 1 little weird gripe

Spoiler: show

Luffy straight up having a SSJ power-up when he went from tired back to G5. The same exact 'power-up' transformation sound effect AND a fucking yellow aura lol. That threw me off a bit, but it only lasted a couple seconds so it wasn't terrible. Just odd