 Hello and welcome to the Grand Line Review, your source for everything one piece. And today we have a review of episode 904, Luffy Rages, rescue Otama from danger. All right, so for those of you who have been watching these reviews weekly for the last month or so, I want you to say it with me. This episode had some good moments, but it also had a lot of terrible ones. This episode is nothing. It doesn't stand out in any way, shape or form from anything we've had from the Wano anime adaptation for the last couple of months. It's filled to the brim with padding, most of which adds nothing to the story, the characters or the world. Although actually I must say that there was at least one filler moment within this episode that I quite liked, but we'll get to that because to start off with, let's have a recap counter, shall we? This week, we experienced a mighty two minutes and 30 seconds of recap. This is of course abysmal on its own, but even once the quote unquote episode started, we had close to a further minute of material that we saw at the end of last week's episode. So combined with the opening, we are now at five minutes, 30 seconds into an episode without having accomplished anything. The thing that I need to quickly laugh about though is that if this wasn't bad enough to have this much reused material right up in your face at the beginning, during the episode, we actually flash back to the recap. Like we see the whole giant sumo slap play out again, which we already saw at the beginning of the episode and right at the end of the previous episode. So at this point in the last like 20 minutes of one piece material all up, we've seen this event three times now and I really don't understand how people can keep defending this, but you know they will anyway. You know what actually, excuse number one for the flashback of the recap is going to be, but grand line review. After the giant sumo slap, they showed new material of Orishima landing on Holden. And the most I will give you is that you are technically right. New material was shown, but it didn't tell us anything new because the episode had already established that Orishima landed on Holden. We saw him go flying three times now and we cut to a scene where Orishima was on top of him. There is nobody in the audience who would not have been able to put two and two together. Therefore going back and showing us the obvious is a complete waste of time and quite demeaning to the audience actually. Even if that audience is young teenagers and children, it still insults their intelligence. But while we're here, I will address the filler bit that I liked, which was Holden emerging after being hit by Orishima. This was actually really cool to watch. There was a nice moment where Tama was stopped and a super powered Holden lifted Orishima, showing us that this guy does have some serious strength. This adds something to the character. It makes me feel like, oh damn, this guy is so much more dangerous than he looks. And it builds him up to be a potentially legitimate threat. I loved that. And I guess while we're being positive, something else I really enjoyed was the introduction of speed. I love how the anime has perfectly captured her horsey facial expressions. I couldn't help but grin every time she made one actually. Plus her vocal performance was wonderful as well. So I'm very much looking forward to seeing more of her character adapted going forward. And you know what? Let's go crazy and keep the positivity train going. Oddly enough, probably my favorite part of this episode was when we cut away to the citizens of Wano just living their daily life. In the manga, this is kind of a non-event. It's a page or so of information designed to generally hammer in the plight of the Wano citizens a bit more. And you know, did what it said on the box. It was fine. However, the episode chose to dwell on this scene quite a bit. And I think that that was a good move. Rather than trying to extend dramatic scenes with a sense of urgency, like Luffy Zoro and Kiku fighting the dude guys, or Luffy yelling over and over for hold them to get out, this is where you can take the time to casually explore a scene. Not when something needs to be done immediately, but when people are just living out their day to day life. This scene, as well as the one with speed took quite a long time to complete for what they were, but I was invested because it felt real. And it was accompanied by a nice chill and slightly somber soundtrack that works really well with that sort of pacing. What doesn't work is what I mentioned before, using this sort of lazy chilled pacing in moments that demand immediate action. And there is no better example than pretty much the entire episode here, with Luffy having several scenes of him just yelling hold them's name, or more accurately what he thought hold them's name was. Which by the way, once you've yelled at 50 times, significantly lessens the impact of the joke. So for some context in the manga, Luffy yells hold them's name once and hold them immediately goes, I'm right here. And corrects how his name is pronounced. It's swift and it flows beautifully. Sure, it might have been missing that cool moment of displaying hold them strength, but that's fine. I also think it's quite a strong display to jump into action immediately after encountering a problem. As opposed to having your name yelled out a million times before you take your sweet time and show up. Plus this episode made me realize that I get so sick of watching anime Luffy because his character just gets relegated to the role of doing the same thing over and over for the sake of filler. Really, Mayumi Tanaka must get so incredibly bored while performing Luffy when the animation director says, all right, so now you're going to yell boldiboo for the 22nd time. Just make sure you do it slowly enough to cover for our rubbish business practices, okay? And a couple of people are once again going to take this and go really grand line review. It's one moment, get over it. You're just nitpicking, but it isn't just one moment. It's an entire body of work. Moments like this happen en masse in pretty much every episode. I mean, the prime example of that is last week's where Luffy just went, whoa, whoa, whoa, for like 45 seconds. Yeah, talking about them in an individual episode review, it's one moment, but combined with all of the other moments I talk about in that review, as well as all the ones from the other reviews, and you have a horrible body of work. These little horrendous decisions made solely to stretch the anime out are a cancer that is doing its best to kill what, in my opinion, is one of the greatest stories ever told. And these are just the moments I talk about. In every episode review, I have to limit what I choose to criticize because I don't want to waste my time more than necessary. So I pick out a few key, especially bad things, and use them as an example of the broader episode. And overall, it's almost always just disappointing. The thing is, it's not even fun for me to crap on the anime like this. I want it to be good. The fan base at large wants it to be good so that they don't have to be ashamed admitting that they like one piece to other people who have no other experience of the series. And as a result, I've got to put this to you guys again. Do you want me to continue these reviews? And I ask because I honestly don't know how much value they offer as opposed to using this time to making like another one piece 101, a top five list, a discussion, or a devil fruit encyclopedia, or you know, literally anything else. And maybe I can come back every now and then and review big events, but right now, I feel like I have the same thing to say about every episode. There were some good things, but it was mostly stretched out garbage. Here is the garbage, here is how they stretched it out. This has been the ground line review and I'll see you next time. So yeah, let me know, but in conclusion, this episode was not the worst of Wano so far. It's a tiny step up from the last three weeks, but not much though. The art style is still captivating. The animation is great sometimes, so it's mostly still a visual treat. I just feel like it's well and truly fallen back into the sad product that it was. But that pretty much does it for episode 904. 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