Luffy’s luck just isn’t what it used to be sometimes.

What They Say:
Luffy, Usopp, Robin, and Zoro are in a pinch sailing on the middle lake – they’ll need help to turn the tides of their battle! Meanwhile, Trafalgar Law unleashes his uncanny powers on the G-5 – and the rest of the Straw Hats – with terrible and bizarre results!

The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
As the Punk Hazard arc continues, we’ve been getting a good bit of forward motion but not a lot of what you’d call plot material itself. Which isn’t bad as One Piece has always had a slow ubild towards revealing more of what’s actually happening in any given story. And even if it gives you things at the start, there’s always the twists and turns. But there’s still a fair bit of mystery going on here as the two parties of Straw Hats continue to make their way across the place, dealing with very different things. Getting more of what Luffy and his group are dealing with on the outside in the cold zone is certainly interesting since the gang of half man half animal creatures/pirates he’s come across are at least visually intriguing.

Unfortunately for Luffy and the others, the group they’re going up against has really put them in a pickle by destroying their boat out from under them, which really impacts Luffy of course, but there’s also all the cold water sharks that are itching to eat them up. It’s fun to see the group in a position where they’re really unable to do anything to survive as everything is against them, at least until Brook shows up and saves them with style. That’s always part of Brook’s shtick so I tend to not mind it much and he puts on a decent show here after he does the initial first deed of making sure the gang is going to get shot to death in the freezing water. But he plays things up a bit in dealing with the pirate crew in how he attacks them. And it all leads to luffy and the others really getting their chance at revenge, which is done comically well with how threatening it is.

This dominates the episode and it’s something that works well to really drive home the point. But the show also gives us some time with Smoker and his crew as they deal with Trafalgar, as he’s changed a fair bit since he was last seen. With the way the three parties came across each other before at that particular door, there was a lot to like with the reactions of it all, especially since Nami and everyone else just ran off from it. Where that group of Straw Hat’s adventures go off the rail is while on the run, they end up doing a big body switch within the four of them that comes out of the blue and makes no sense. But has some hysterical reactions. This runs at the same time that we get the small bit of back and forth that happens between Smoker and his group, with Tashigi pushing her chances pretty well, as they try and get past Trafalgar to figure out what’s really going on here. It’s just the start of things but it’s given some decent weight from the get go.

In Summary:
One Piece keeps things moving right along here and even though we don’t really get much of anything in terms of actual story progression or, well, content, it does provide for a good bit of fun. The gang is in two parts and they’re each coping with some weird situations that only get weirder still, especially with the goofy tried and true body switch that gets thrown into things. I like how the show feels at this point with both groups just trying to survive and move along as quickly as possible, and getting some engaging stuff with Smoker and his group, but I’m getting close to wanting some fraction of an answer about what’s going on and why so it can get moving forward in a better way. This is definitely a fun little episode though and kept me smiling throughout it.

Grade: B

Streamed By: FUNimation

Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.