 Hello and welcome to the Grand Line Review, your source for everything one piece. To date we have a review of episode 872, A Desperate Situation, The Iron Titan Trapment of Luffy. And surprise surprise, I have the mixed feelings about this week, and a lot of that has to do with the main event itself being Sulong Pekoms. Now I'm a manga guy and these reviews mainly focus on how the anime adapted the source material, and I have to say that this episode is extraordinarily different from the chapter in And in this case I think it's very important to point out that difference, in the manga Pekoms transforms very swiftly after exiting the mirror world which looks absolutely awesome, and for the most part the anime made it look pretty awesome as well. But from there he then drops the gun and proceeds to get punched by Oven after that he gets held down and we just don't see him again for the rest of the arc. It was quite underwhelming in a way because after seeing the damage that Carrot was capable of in Sulong form, to have someone as absurdly powerful as Pekoms knocked out in one shot, well it was… it was kind of crap. So of course the anime saw this as a good chance for some filler and decided to expand upon the role of Sulong Pekoms. Now I like that idea quite a bit, because I always felt that he should have been significantly more powerful than he was shown to be, and he really should have gone on a huge rampage through Oven's army. And that's kind of what does happen in this episode as he plows through chunks of nameless fighters, and even smacking down the Charlotte decouplets. By the way just a side note anime watchers, if you ever want to handy guide to determining what is filler, almost anything featuring the decouplets is filler. They had almost no role in the manga whatsoever, so whenever they're on screen that is the anime quote unquote expanding upon them. Anyway that was cool and all, but I did heavily question what happened as soon as they brought Sanji into things. Now remember Sanji and Pekoms have essentially no connection whatsoever. I mean yes Sanji sort of met Pekoms on Fishman Island and did actually meet him on Zoe very briefly before he was shot by Beige, but that is not enough to justify Sanji halting his escape in mid-air to comment on Pekoms' Soulong form. Like I mean he has a mission, a very desperate mission, he needs to get Luffy the hell out of there, but he's just stopped to comment on this dude that he doesn't know or cares about whatsoever. Not only that, but he then later laments Pekoms being taken down and halts himself mid-air once again to shout Pekoms' name, and it just sounds wrong because these two characters once again they have no relationship at all. And also once again Sanji is wasting valuable time feeling for a character that he really has no business feeling for, but that said the anime does make an attempt to fill in some sort of connection when Soulong Pekoms whacks Sanji down, which has problems of its own though, like after being hit why is Sanji just sitting there? Surely he would literally kick into action either by continuing to run or by engaging in combat with Pekoms. It made Sanji look really weak to just have him sitting there after being hit, he was very helpless. Although he did sort of like the moment of internal struggle with Pekoms getting temporary control of himself and allowing them to escape, but it very much came at the expense of some very out of character Sanji moments. The other thing I really question in regards to Soulong Pekoms is the flashback. I liked it because he looked fearsome as hell, and it's always nice to see Pedro again, but I don't think it was placed in the right spot of the episode. Primarily because it revealed the entire Soulong form long before Pekoms had actually transformed into it, so it removed a lot of anticipation of seeing the end result in the modern day, because we'd already seen it in a flashback. Thinking about it that scene probably would have been better placed during the transformation. Like say Pekoms pops out of the mirror world, looks at the moon, begins his vague changing of shape and then we go into a flashback, you know if the flashback was indeed needed at all, because in the end it was a glorified filler like so many other things. Still I think it could have worked better than it did, and it's all down to placement. Something that did work fairly nicely though was the new solution to dealing with Pekoms. Like I said in the manga the dude just got smacked down and we never heard from him again. In this episode he was given more of a warrior's ending brought down by a shower of arrows. It was quite sad really and a well earned moment for a character who had gone on such a journey of betraying his crew in order to honor the wishes of his dead colleague. He deserves so much more than a punch. Although Oven Strike did look admittedly pretty cool. He had some alright animation engaging in his devil fruit powers this episode and I think that is very much needed because Oven still feels quite underwhelming in the anime for someone so incredibly powerful. Toei are going to have to put in some real effort in the upcoming episodes to change this perception of him as the dude who just stands around and does very little. Although speaking of standing around and doing very little I feel like there's not nearly enough chaos happening this episode. I mean for quite some time now we've been painstakingly bearing witness to Oven gathering an entire army outside of the mirror lying in wait for Luffy and when people do finally emerge nobody is dealing anything. They just stand there while the decouplets are another singular Charlotte sibling attempts to fight. And most of the fault there is simply due to Toei extending the scenes far beyond what they should be doing. You know it's like let's add a scene of Pecum's fighting the decouplets. Alright well what's the rest of the army going to be doing at that time then? Nothing. They're just watching. They feel more expectators than an army which is annoying because it removes a huge layer of danger that was present in the manga. As things are now when the anime feels a lot like Sanji could just beat the handful of active combatants even Oven and then calmly leave the island because the army never does anything. There is very little sense of urgency and that's entirely the result of Toei actively needing to halt the progression of the story so that they can produce 48 episodes a year. It's like a strange one piece limbo we find ourselves in and it is unfortunately very apparent during this episode. It makes it so that when we have huge moments like the germa arriving to the rescue like it feels like we did not need their assistance at all. Things were progressing slowly but surely here as every Charlotte sibling and army member was lining up calmly one by one to be disposed of. However with Gemma's arrival we were once again treated to their transformation sequence and yes this is 100% filler and they should have been in their raid suits already but the sequence does look great and I guess I was never complaining in a series like Digimon when we saw the same Digi Evolutions time and time again. To be fair it was like 11 or 12 at the time so we should take that into account but it is decent use of filler material. I mean if you're going to recycle something then at least make it good animation and this is exactly that. Plus it is a pretty alright way to build some anticipation for the next episode which looks pretty germa heavy from the preview. And some other miscellaneous thoughts about episode 872. There was a moment I really liked in the beginning when Pekoms was running in the mirror world. At one point he threw Brulee and she yelled, tiny tiny thing but the performance from her voice actor was on point and it gave me a nice chuckle. There was a particular shot panning up the mirror where there were three decouplets sitting which looked kind of cool when it was completed however it was recycled twice in the episode and it felt really lazy seeing it again those two subsequent times. And then there was that one part where Brulee just had a massive head for some reason. But yeah in essence it was a bit of a meh episode. I like what they tried to do with Pekoms but I thought it was clunky. Not bad but certainly not great. And that pretty much does it for episode 872. 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