 Hello and welcome to the Grand Line Review, your source for everything One Piece. And today, after more than 700 video things, having been posted on this channel, exploring the various intricacies of One Piece, it's time to finally tackle the consistently intriguing topic of Gear Fifth. And to be clear, Gear Fifth has a pretty strong discussionary history within the One Piece fan base, and I believe the topic was first seriously brought up on April 27th, 2015, which was the release of chapter 784, which contained the full revelation of Gear Four. And after very briefly taking that in, people quite swiftly turned their attention to the future, and we now find ourselves five and a half years later, with the concept of Gear Fifth still yet to come to fruition. However, with everything we now know and have experienced since, I think we can give this idea a much more solid examination. Before we do though, I must say it's time for a quick round of gear racing, a very simple minigame, the rules of which are as follows. Here we have three elite racers who are going to compete in a contest of speed around this here track. And your job is to guess which one of them is going to win the race. If you guess wrong, then you will need to pay up by subscribing to the Grand Line Review. And if you guess correctly, then you get to stand on this fancy winners podium. But make your choice now, who will win this race? Will it be Afro Luffy, Nightmare Luffy, or Airhead Luffy? Please make your choice imminently because the race will begin in three, two, one, go. All right, not quite off to the greatest of starts for Airhead Luffy having not moved at all. Meanwhile, we have Afro Luffy out in front with Nightmare Luffy just sort of absorbing shadows and growing ever larger just behind him. But what's this? Afro Luffy has become distracted by a piece of meat. Nightmare Luffy has now grown so big that he is larger than the course itself, thus leading to both of their disqualifications and meaning that by sheer default, the winner is Airhead Luffy, who still has not moved whatsoever. So if you chose either Afro or Nightmare Luffy, you know what to do, hit the funky red button and please do comment below if you are a new member of the Grand Fleet, welcome. But getting into things I do think it's important to first address the very potential reality that gear fifth may never actually exist. It's not the most fun of things to do and we will move on from this swiftly, but with one piece as it currently stands, we are rapidly running out of time for such development, leaving us really only with the possibility of Luffy busting out a gear fifth to use against Kaido on Wano, or for it to be something of a final form for the last saga. With that said though, going forward, gears may not be overly important in comparison to other aspects of the series. For example, we've now spent the last two mega arcs focusing on expanding Luffy's mastery of armament and observation hockey, neither of which have resulted in a new gear as of yet. And there is still the potential of exploring Conqueror's Hockey further or even the ever present possibility of Luffy awakening his devil fruit, which may very well signify that gear fourth is our full stop to Luffy, but perhaps continuing to expand horizontally from there with some new utility based forms. That's the really cool thing that Oda has done with gear fourth. He's given it a super long shelf life with all of the different incarnations, rather than making it a straight up one form power up. But when we're talking about gears in general, a good question would also be to ask, well, why would Luffy need a gear fifth? What would be the reasoning for him to take such a drastic step upwards? Because we can actually track this motivation through other forms. Gear second was developed as a direct response to encountering the Rokushiki techniques of CP nine. Those six abilities effectively turn them into superhumans. So Luffy just decided to do the same, most notably including Soru as a key component of gear second. And then the power development of gear second was necessary to overcome Cypher pulse Tekai technique. And then gear third was basically an expansion on that. It created a way for Luffy to have access to a maximum amount of power in order to break through the impossibly tough iron bodies. However, in the one piece world, this was still not enough because Luffy's speed upgrade was hard counted by those with observation Haki and his power upgrade was hard counted by those able to use arm and Haki. So gear fourths of various forms were a direct response to that. And honestly, with gear fourth, Luffy has more or less reached the pinnacle of reasonable power in one piece. I say reasonable because yes, there are still characters like Kaito, Big Mom, Whitebeard, et cetera, all those guys that exist on a God tier level. But by and large, Luffy is pretty much already sitting at the top. The only thing that truly separates him from a character like, say, Katakuri, for example, was an advanced application of Haki. But in terms of raw strength and speed, well, gear fourth was plenty to keep up with him. So we do need to ask ourselves, what overwhelming threat would constitute the development of a gear fifth? And currently, I only really see three potential answers to this. The first of which would need to assume that gear fourth is coming imminently in response to the overwhelming strength and speed of Kaito. In this case, Luffy's biggest obstacle is inflicting any actual damage on Kaito because his basic and even gear infused punches are pretty much worthless against Kaito's sheer bodily toughness. But we do have an answer for this in the works with Luffy's study of advanced armament Haki. In theory, that is supposed to provide him with the new found ability to face off against the world's strongest pirate, but there will still be quite a strength gap. Right now with advanced armament Haki, Luffy isn't really making himself stronger so much as he's developing a strategy to use his existing strength against Kaito in a situation where he is not just entirely nullified. That still doesn't put him anywhere near the league of the strongest creature in the world. So if gear fifth is going to be a basic strength speed upgrade, then this would be the time to do it. The problem being that I don't really know how Luffy achieves that. The only new feature Luffy has to service that evolution is the advanced armament Haki. And whilst I could certainly see Luffy creating a new gear fourth form to make the best use of that, gear fifth is much harder to imagine. And of course, just to put my bias out there, I'm one of those people who personally believe that Luffy will never be physically as strong as Kaito, Big Mom, the White Beards, the Rogers and all that. I've all mentioned God Tier characters and Luffy will just become the pirate king in his own unique way. Now, lots and lots of people disagree, which is fine because Wano is going to give us the answer to that fairly soon. Either Luffy will become the strongest pirate in the world right here and now to beat Kaito or he takes him down as part of a group and will never reach that level. It really is going to be as simple as that, which brings us to our next gear fifth idea because after the inevitable fall of the strongest pirate in the world, however that may happen, Luffy really isn't going to have too many problems responding to strength or speed. Every opponent from here on out is going to be empirically weaker than Kaito, which means that Luffy is more than likely going to be faced with developmental threats. And after mastering advanced armament Haki, there are only two other steps that Luffy has yet to contend with and one of which is the idea of advanced conquerors Haki. Now I'm not going to go too deeply into what this may or may not be, but given that the themes of the most recent mega arcs are furthering Haki, I do think it makes a lot of sense for our next arc to do the same with conquerors. You know, Luffy faces an opponent whose mastery of that area forces him to evolve his own conquerors Haki. And then you have a potentially natural path for a gear fourth form, a natural evolution that incorporates all three brands of advanced Haki with the same sort of theory as applying basic Haki to gears, which resulted in gear fourth, which to be fair for a Wano gear fifth, I suppose you could do with just observation and armament. With that said, being forced to delve into advanced conquerors Haki, a concept that I will stress is not anywhere near confirmed to you know actually exist. Although there are very strong hints, but once again, this doesn't necessarily mean that Luffy would need to take that into a new numbered gear. It could once again be a utility form of gear fourth designed to make best use of that newly acquired skill. Because that's the problem I keep running into. Gear fourth is actually just so versatile that I can see scenarios where Luffy just keeps using and evolving it for the remainder of the series. And the only reason I can solely come up with for that to not be the case is because one piece is a story, a Shona manga story specifically and introducing a new numbered gear would be a great way to generate excitement and hype for some sort of final saga. And when I think about it that way, I go, yeah, Oda kind of has to do something like that, doesn't he? Because by that point, it would have been almost a decade since gear fourth was introduced and perhaps it would be a bit of a stale note for a climax to be based on. At the same time though, Oda really doesn't have to do anything or at least nothing that we can accurately predict. Maybe Luffy's upgrade won't have anything to do with gears and it'll be something entirely new. But assuming that it is, let's move on to the other remaining threat that Luffy may need to deal with which is devil fruit awakening. As of right now, Conqueror's Haki and Awakening are the only utility areas that Luffy can be outclassed in. Although I do have to say that Awakened Devil Fruit users really don't have a great track record against Luffy because he's too an O for that having dismissed both Dolphamingo and Kartakuri. To be fair though, they were both similar types of Paramesio users because discounting Kartakuri's special branding, they were both predominantly generation style users, meaning that they very much focused on conjuring a substance being mochi and strings respectively, which of course went on to have the effect of the user changing their environment into that substance. We haven't actually seen any other Paramesio Awakening outside of this specific sub-brand, which means that there is great potential to run into all sorts of Paramesio problems in the future with other fruits that may not subscribe to the generation style Awakening. And here I am specifically thinking about Blackbeard because he will be something of an ultimate threat and his Paramesio, the Gourgouronymi, is quite the troubling one. Although oddly enough, Luffy is practically built to counter it if his rubber becomes glorious enough to simply absorb the shockwaves. Still, Blackbeard continues to be a tricky one because he could also awaken his other devil fruit, potentially the Ami-Ami-Nomi. And if he does acquire a third Zoan-style devil fruit, then that could also result in an Awakening making Luffy triple outclassed and forcing him to evolve by awakening his own devil fruit, which may not necessarily result in his environment becoming rubber like our established Awakening, although we can't discount the idea entirely either. But if there was a gear fifth, I feel like this would be the most natural path because an Awakening would give Luffy access to an entirely new set of tools to craft it rather than sharpening the ones that he already has, which is what we're currently doing with Haki. And even if it did have an environmental-style effect, who's to say that can't be a gear? You know, gear fifth, bounce world or something. But I do bring that up because I know there can be some opposition to the thought of a new gear not being directly related to a bodily change for Luffy, which to be fair would also not be the standard Shonen thing to do, but then again, one piece isn't exactly your standard Shonen. I mean, I would love to see a gear that sees Luffy take more advantage of the battlefield than it does his own physicality, but at the same time, you could also achieve that with gear fourth and an Awakening combination. But there is at least one other idea out there, one that is much less based on the idea of Luffy responding to a particular threat. And this concept is known as gear reverse. And I do need to say that this is not a thought of mine. In fact, I'm not entirely sure where it originates from, but the oldest source that I was able to find was five years ago on Reddit by a user named LDR Blue. But they essentially just brought up the basics of gear inspiration being based on cars and the fact that cars have a reverse gear option available. So instead of thinking forward all the time, we could also think backwards, which I don't know, depending on your semantics, I guess would not technically be a gear fifth, but we are so balls deep into this topic now that we're just going to proceed. And to be honest, the first thought that always comes to my mind when I see a gear reverse style thing being discussed would be Gold Experience Requiem from part five of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, which without going too deeply into it, because we don't want to do that, has crazy time powers and can revert anything back to quote unquote zero. And whilst we will certainly never go that insane in one piece, there are some potential Luffy style applications that can be taken from this, one of which I could see being regeneration. And in this way, I'm very much thinking about how Carter Curry makes use of his special paramecia, which can regenerate his body in a similar style to that of low gear foods. So with that in mind, a fun way to use gear reverse might be to have Luffy incur damage or an injury and then just restore his rubber body, reversing the damage. Well, maybe not by restoring, but reflecting something like the Mirror, Mirror, Know Me used by Charlotte Brulee, which just straight up reflects all damage, but that is even crazier speculation than I think we've signed up for right now. All I really know is that I do quite like the sound of gear reverse because it feels like a more unique solution than just amping things up again into gear fifth. Because once again, I maintain that apart from the God level warriors on the planet, Luffy is basically sitting at the top in terms of power already. What separates him now are utility pursuits, future sight, advanced armament, conqueror's hockey and unlocking a devil fruit awakening with all of them providing a potential avenue into a new numbered gear or a new gear fourth form or just a completely separate upgrade to be used in tandem with existing gear fourth forms. All of which are highly possible and I look forward to seeing what road Oda selects. But what do you guys think? Please do leave your thoughts in the comments below or even join my Discord server. And if you'd like to see more videos like this, then please do go and check out some of my other content or even subscribe to the channel for more glorious one piece business uploaded straight until YouTube feeds. But for now, this has been the Grand Line Review and I'll see you next time.