 Hello and welcome to the Grand Line Review, your source for everything one piece, and today I'd like to get into a bit of a tricky topic, which is Ryoho, a latest exploration of the very, very slowly expanding world of Haki. Oh well, sort of, look, it's complicated. And there are some misconceptions attached to Ryoho that I'd like to go over, in addition to explaining what we know of how it works and the surprising amount of times we've seen it used in the series, particularly pre-timeskip. There was a lot of advanced arm and Haki used pre-timeskip very weirdly enough. Before we do that though, I'm going to need you to channel your willpower into a tangible pressing of the subscribe button for the Grand Line Review, which will not only teach you Ryoho, but will also grant you regular One Piece content uploaded straight into your YouTube feed. Which of the two is more beneficial? I don't know, but you also don't have to choose. Press the red button, take both, and welcome to the Grand Fleet. Now to begin this whole Ryoho discussion, I have to start with what is rapidly becoming one of the biggest current misconceptions in One Piece, which is that Ryoho is not what you think it is. And I do have to apologize because I'm quite guilty of falling into this bad naming habit. But as we currently know it, Ryoho is basically just another way of saying the broad term armament Haki. And we learned this from Gilgoro during the whole Sumo Inferno thing where he figured out what Luffy was attempting to do and he stated, what you call Haki is known as Ryoho here in Wano. And it means flowing cherry blossom, which is delightful. And that's not even the only time he literally equates the two. As seven chapters later, he went on to say the following, all I can teach you of Ryoho or what you call Haki is that which covers the outside. Here specifically referring to the armament usage that we already know about being the invisible armor and the black coating. So with this it would seem that Ryoho is just a native term that has developed on an isolated nation, meaning armament Haki. It's effectively the same thing that occurred on Skypea where they use the term mantra to refer to observation Haki. However, due to reasons, within the one piece fan base Ryoho has been a term adopted to mean the advanced application of armament Haki, which focuses on emission and striking opponents or objects from the inside, which is a very uncomfortable thought, but it is something I see get confused a lot, particularly in my YouTube comments. Because at its core, it would seem that Ryoho and armament Haki are the same thing. Ryoho is not the advanced technique, or I guess it is, but you would call it advanced Ryoho perhaps, or not because no one's going to do that. The thing about the term Ryoho is that I can see why it's taken off though. As humans, we have this desire to name things and when those names become a bit too long, we have a sub-desire to short the names, which we can see demonstrated all the time with Luffy. I mean Don Quixote, Dol Flamingo, Naaah, and Stofi now. And that's the same with this particular next level application of armament Haki because no matter which name you use, be it advanced armament Haki, advanced color of arms, or even advanced Buso Shoku Haki, it is just far, far, far, far too long. And it's ever so much easier to just say Ryoho, especially because that's the term we learned when focusing on this advanced application. But I will say that it also doesn't help that Hylgora uses both the terms Haki and Ryoho in an attempt to translate to Luffy, so I can see how it's given the impression that they might be two different things. And as per usual, reading scan lations obviously does not help with this at all because they almost always muddle up technical explanations. And like I said, even I am guilty of muddling this up. In fact, I refer to Zora needing Ryoho in a recent chapter review, but I will endeavor to be more accurate in the future. But also because I like to be somewhat balanced on this channel, stay tuned for an explanation of why everything I just said might be wrong, which I'll go into later in the video because despite its simplistic nature, Haki is incredibly vaguely defined and not at all clear to digest. However, if what I've said is wrong though, I place the blame solely on Hylgora's tiny tattooed shoulders. But accepting my definition for a second, let's get into an explanation for this advanced use of Armantaki, which is what the video was kind of meant to be about before I got semantically distracted. And once again, I think we can go back to the words of Hylgora to give us some insight into this field because he goes through the stages of Ryoho. It can be used for defense like invisible armor or it can be converted to offensive use to great effect. But when you go one level beyond that, the Haki you wield can penetrate the enemy's interior and destroy them from the inside. And this statement would basically detail the three stages of Armantaki use. The first being the often forgotten about invisible armor, which is where you apply a thin layer of Haki and let's be real, the only reason why this opening stage exists is to avoid questions about why we'd never visibly seen Armantaki prior to its official introduction. But it does exist and going one step further is the more iconic Armantaki being hardening, which involves gathering a much more potent force of Haki resulting in a now visible effect of blackening of the area in question, which can be either a body part or a held object like say a sword, which is how Rio is most commonly applied by the samurai of Wano. And now we have the third stage of Armantaki, which Higoro describes as penetrating an enemy's defense, basically emitting or projecting Haki into an opponent or object to strike them from the inside. And if you're familiar with Hunter Hunter, this whole Armantaki idea is kind of similar to basic Nen usage. And if you're not a fan of Hunter Hunter, then well, stick with me anyway, because it's a decent way to explain it. Combat in Hunter Hunter is all about aura control and there are six main branches of aura usage, two of which are enhancement and emission. Enhancement focuses on strengthening the properties of your body or objects. However, if you go one step to the left on the Nen ring, you hit emission, which is purely about projecting aura. That is Armantaki. The basic form is enhancement and the advanced application would be emission. Except very, very importantly, in one piece the advanced Armantaki does not seem to involve a separation of Haki from the body like Hunter Hunter would with aura. According to the visualization, advanced Armantaki seems to be more akin to expanding your field of Haki so that it strikes an opponent before your fist or sword would, which is why learning this technique would in theory allow Luffy to break through Kaido scales. It's less about breaking through them actually and more about bypassing them entirely in order to strike the more fleshy, vulnerable dragon flesh. And we've seen a rather surprising amount of this application in the pre-times get portion of one piece. The example that most immediately comes to mind being of course Rayleigh's tutorial on Rusukaina, which are depicted very differently in the anime and the manga, by the way. The manga version sticks more cleanly to the whole concept as it looks like Rayleigh has expanded his field of Haki in order to prevent the elephant thing stamping on him. Meanwhile, in the anime, it looked like more of a burst of Dragon Ball-esque style energy, which was cool but retrospectively kind of inaccurate. Then we also have Sentomaru who is undoubtedly one of the finest Armantaki users we've seen in the series. Although he might be kind of forgettable because he hasn't appeared in like a decade but he did rather boldly claim to be the most defensive man in the world. Assumedly in a literal sense, I mean, I guess he could just get emotionally defensive. Then again, he has demonstrated a level of advanced Armament on par with that of Rayleigh. So as much as he looks like one, Sentomaru is no joke. However, probably the greatest display of advanced Armament in the series thus far comes from the pre-time skip error with the admirals who appear to have been capable of omitting their Haki at an incredible distance containing the area of at least the execution platform at Marineford. And yes, this was a combined effort from all three of them but knowing what we do now about how this is performed, this is still an incredible feat to have achieved and it really does make me wonder just how three admirals might stack up against any given Emperor of the Sea. And also I suppose I should mention the often forgotten about example being Bola Maragold who used advanced Armament on Luffy during Amazon Lily which makes a lot of sense because the Kuja tribe are basically born into learning Armament Haki. But not quite done with the pre-time skip error yet there is even some thoughts that our humble straw hat swordsman could have made use of advanced Armament all the way back in the Alabaster arc which is of course where he discovered the iconic ability to cut steel which for the longest time we had known as being the ability to sense the breath of all things which honestly isn't all that different from Rayleigh's explanation of Haki in chapter 597 where he describes Haki as an ability to sense spiritual energy. And then of course old mate Yogoro originally described Ryoho as the following in Wano there's an invisible power that stems from the body that can be infused with the blade. A good katana will cut steel when you want to and it will not break a sheet of paper if you do not wish it so. It is all according to the desire of the swordsman which is almost word for word Koshiro's explanation to Zoro so it is effectively confirmed at this point that Zoro was actually using Armament Haki along before any of the straw hats albeit in a very specific manner. The question remaining is was this an advanced application of Armament Haki? Because in many ways it would make sense because advanced Armament would allow Zoro to effectively bypass the steely exterior thus slicing and dicing does bones or even both on Mikuma from the inside much like what Luffy plans to do with Kaido just with fists instead of sharp things. Although this is another tricky thought because it would mean Zoro basically skipping the first two steps of Armament which you know I suppose there's nothing to say that you need to follow those three phases in order because Haki is still quite vaguely defined in nature but it also may not necessarily be advanced which brings us to the point I alluded to earlier on in the video about why my initial explanation might be wrong. This is because things complicate further because the people of Wano have no term for what we know of as the other two brands of Haki Observation and Conquerors and as such there is an idea that the term Ruo is actually referring to what we would know as a combination of observation and Armament. The logic being applied is that observation is invoked to sense the breathable things and then basic Armament is applied in the invisible state to strike effectively. So as much as I went to great lengths to define Ruo at the beginning of the video according to what we know from Hiogura there could still be a lot more to it and perhaps it does warrant its own term if it is indeed a combination effect. Something which would be very difficult for the Wano Samurai to recognize but you would think that someone like Luffy might pick up on the idea. Maybe, maybe not. Then again talking about Haki and Swords is also tough because Swordsmen tend to use Armament in a very different manner to that of hand to hand fighters. Swordsmen focus on imbuement rather than hardening of course and there's also the currently unexplained Black Blade Phenomenon whereby a sword appears to be permanently imbued with Haki such as Shusui which was achieved by the legendary figure of Rima and it's hard to know exactly what to call this but it would seem to be some sort of higher level Armament perhaps even higher than what we currently know of or just a different application of the same level. I don't know, Haki is weird. So are Swords by the way, Swords are very weird as all throughout the series they very much been shown to have their own distinct personalities and quirks in an almost magical like manner and here I'll throw up a spoiler warning for anime only watches or for those of you not quite caught up with Act 3 of Wano I have some quick relevant stuff to go over and if you don't want to be spoiled then skip to this time otherwise well here we go. So obviously with the whole sword thing I was mainly referring to Enma there which appears to have some sort of life or at least trigger of its own whereby it draws out the armament Haki of its wielder involuntarily I might add and this in and of itself might even force an advanced armament application by forcibly projecting Zora's Haki field much more so than he naturally would but at this point that's fairly wild speculation. What is less speculative though is the clash between Roger and Whitebeard who both appear to be making use of the advanced application in a very rare way because in this case we can visibly see the point at which their Haki projections make contact as well as their temporarily coated black blades and very recently in the manga we've also seen many of the vassals make use of advanced armament to hurt Kaido in battle which is quite the achievement but it also adds quite a bit of confusion because Kaido himself refers to this ability as Ryoho which doesn't make the greatest of sense because he's a global figure and he should be well aware of how to correctly refer to Haki. So this does add some potential evidence to the thought that Ryoho is something more than a vague term that translates directly into armament but look in the end we come out of this video with maybe a couple more questions and we went into it with but the basic takeaway however is that Ryoho as referred to by Hyogoro who specifically mentioned covering the outside is a direct reference to Armataki. Whether or not Ryoho encompasses a form of observation as well is arguable and it's a fun argument however regardless of what the clear definition ends up being Ryoho is still not what people think it is. Ryoho is either a direct or literal translation of basic Armataki and not a specific term designed to define the emission effect or Ryoho is a completely new sub branch of Haki formed from a combination of observation and armament in which case it is still not a term designed for the emission effect because that is one of many potential uses for it along with the breadth of all things and et cetera. So then Ryoho means Haki and Haki means Haki and that concludes our intensive three week course 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 into your YouTube feeds. But for now, this has been the Grand Line Review and I'll see you next time.