 Hello and welcome to the Grand Line review, your source for everything on peace. Today we have a manga review of chapter 922, Beast Pirates Governor General Kaido. And before we start with anything I just have to highlight a certain comment I received on the chapter review last week from Mr. McClebband. Next chapter we will go back to Reverie. Quote me on that. Alright well you were very wrong and you have been quoted just as requested. Moving into the actual chapter though I had no real idea what to expect going forward from last week but somehow after spending the better part of my life reading the series I still did not predict Luffy just immediately jumping in and punching Kaido in the head which is ridiculous in retrospect because it's like the one thing that Luffy will do in any given situation. The punch itself looks pretty cool. The scale of the panel is fantastic really showing us just how massive Kaido is in dragon form. However what this panel is noticeably lacking is any kind of impact which is absolutely a purposeful decision made by Oda and what I mean by that is if we look at examples of most of the great punches in the series they're all given extraordinary attention to detail in terms of the point of impact which is generally highlighted by a spiky white speech bubble looking thing but also the lines in the background that draw the eye to the focal point of the strike as well as portray the devastating speed of the attack and finally the added textures that work towards making the hit feel real and visceral. Meanwhile this panel of Luffy punching Kaido has none of that and that's pretty terrifying. I mean there are some token motion lines around the punch but this panel makes Luffy's elephant gun look like one of the weakest attacks we've ever seen in the series which like I said is exactly as intended because it serves to show us once again just how much of a complete beast Kaido is except this time it does so with comparison to the main character the strength of whom the audience is very familiar with and we know that an elephant gun is pretty damn strong. Speaking of strength though I've seen some people wondering as to why Luffy didn't just go full on Gear 4th and mean it would make logical sense to do so given that he's up against Yonko but the answer is more than likely to be narrative-related rather than logic-based. Essentially it's all about dramatic build-up. If Luffy goes straight into Gear 4th then we really have nowhere to escalate from here however with this strike Luffy has now officially punched three out of the four current Yonko so all we need to do is sock shanks in the face and we will have a complete set. I suppose at the very least now he has met all of the Yonko even the former one Whitebeard so at this point it would seem that there are really only two other major world figures that Luffy has not encountered one being Eme and the other being his own father Dragon and I guess there's probably other major hidden figures out there like Vagabunk but meh. Back to Kaido we got a glimpse of his offensive power this week through one hell of an attack that obliterated the ruins of Odin Castle although my favorite part of that sequence has to be that small panel of Nami watching it in pure horror before we as the readers have even seen the damage. I really enjoy the way Odin used light here to convey the incredible power of the attack and the shadows across Nami's face are a nice little touch sadly it's kind of ruined by the hand in the foreground because let's be honest it's a pretty bad drawing of a hand. Odor is a master of many things but hands seem to be a consistent flaw in his style which is understandable because hands are an outright pain to draw but it's unfortunate in circumstances like this where they get put in the foreground and become very very noticeable. In any case Kaido's attack is pretty overwhelming as expected and it's even crazier to think about just how much stronger he may be if he was sober and just on that a drunk dragon is something I never knew I needed in my life until now that face he's making whilst confronting Shutenmaru is just hilarious although I can already tell that some people are going to absolutely hate it because it makes a yonko look goofy and in their world of boring characterization that takes away from how intimidating super cool and awesome Kaido is but really these kind of quirks are just what makes one piece one piece without these flourishes of character everyone would just become a stale one note cool for the sake of cool character and we'd have a boring shounen manga on our hands. So drunk at Kaido is something I quite enjoy but I can't help but notice the huge parallels being drawn between this and Big Mom's hunger tantrums these two yonko seem to have a very similar theme happening whereby they both have crippling conditions that threaten to destroy their entire empires so I'm starting to very seriously wonder if the drunk and emotional character quirk is going to end up being one of the main driving forces towards Kaido's defeat kind of like how the hunger tantrums almost destroyed Totland I'm hoping not because they feel like we've already well and truly explored that angle of a big antagonist by now but at the same time the drunkenness and Kaido's suicidal tendencies are pretty much the only flaws that we see in him right now every other aspect of his character is completely overpowered just like Big Mom so we'll see actually you know what imagine a situation in which Big Mom arrives on Wano and actually has a hunger fit while Kaido is drunk and the two of them start fighting as a result I don't think it'll happen because that would surely just destroy all of Wano but it's a fun thought considering the similar nature of their traits and you know I come to think of it just how many breweries worth of alcohol does a dragon that size need to get drunk anyway and just on this whole dragon business Kinamon does say something interesting this chapter in that he claims that Kaido is able to transform into a dragon now after last week there were two main schools afloat that developed within the fanbase one of which was the dragon type zoan fruit idea and the other was that Kaido was originally a dragon that had eaten a form of the Hitohitonomi like model ogre or something and that might be reading too much into the semantics of this which is never a good thing to do with an unofficial translation but it seems like Kinamon may be implying that the dragon is not Kaido's base form but now that Luffy is actually confronting Kaido directly there are a couple of different directions this could take the one I'm hoping for least is the idea that Luffy loses the fight gets captured and thrown in some sort of prison it's just happened one too many times for my liking most recently of which on Holcake Island actually and I suppose the logic behind it happening here would be that it would give him a good reason to find and make an ally out of a useless kid who is presumably still rotting away in a cell somewhere I am still not keen on it though and there surely has to be a more clever way to get kid involved here I kind of know maybe Hawkins seeing an opportunity to take down Kaido in his cards and releasing kid something along those lines although it does look like it's going to be quite a slow road towards winning Hawkins over who pretty much sent Kaido after Luffy and lore this week although that was a decent move to prevent the drunken dragon from potentially rampaging through Okubori town so at this point I think the only thing that will sway Hawkins is a particularly positive reading from his tarot cards he's just an odd character at this point really he doesn't seem to have a solid amount of driving force which is generally fueled by ambition for example Luffy's driving force is to become the pirate king lore's driving force was to get revenge etc every character sort of has it but everything Hawkins does at the moment seems like he's just letting the cards dictate his actions and I really hope there's a bit more to him than that because otherwise he runs the risk of becoming a somewhat boring character and the final thing I want to touch on this week is that we had a particularly heartbreaking panel where we saw the flower capital in the context of the rest of Wano so remember that superbly beautiful spread of the city we saw many chapters ago now well turns out that gem of a location is entirely surrounded by factories that form a truly desolate landscape on what should be a stunning country and I'm becoming pretty certain that we are going to get a contrasting shot of Wano in the eventual arc flashback that will show exactly how much Kaido has desecrated this nation but that pretty much does it for chapter 922 if you enjoyed this video then feel free to like favorite or subscribe and if you are in any way inclined to help support this independent channel then please also feel free to check out my patreon discord server or twitter the links to which are in the ever handy description below and finally please do comment with your thoughts on the chapter this has been the Grand Line Review and I'll see you next time