One Piece: Jaya Arc (144-152) Review

It's been a while since my last One Piece Review, nearly a year to be precise. Real-life had kind of forced me to put this off to the side for a while, but with a more reasonable work schedule and being able to keep up more actively on various things, I finally had time to get back into this. Despite having been a year, I do remember a lot of different things about those first hundred or so episodes (I have been skipping filler), if nothing else One Piece has shown itself to be a memorable show.

For those not familiar, I am not going to worry about spoiling things in these reviews at this point. As a review for people interested, if you weren't sold on One Piece by my first few season reviews, seeing reviews of the middle arcs isn't likely to sway you. Once I catch up (In however many years that takes) I'll do a full series review, but for now, this is just a guy looking at a long-running popular anime for the first time.

Jaya Arc was a pretty good place to pick back up after a long break. It feels like it is carrying on with the tone the rest of the show has had thus far. It has carried all the good and bad that comes with the show, though to be fair the bad was pretty minor. I am starting to think there is just no getting around one of One Piece's favorite narrative techniques to advance the plot, Luffy does a series of dumb things that somehow land him where he needs to be. Very minor in this arc, but this is a pretty constant annoyance of mine with how often the show has relied on this trick.

I kind of like that the arc doesn't build up a big enemy like the last one to take on Luffy, but is more building up Luffy as the kind of Pirate he wants to be. While this has been done before, I think this is the first time where the central focus was on Luffy's love of adventure. It's always been a core aspect of his character, but his hope and passion have never really been pit against someone that is the antithesis of that. And in the world of One Piece, those types don't seem to be the ones who survive the true terror of the Grand Line. Honestly, this arc does more to firmly establish what kind of world this is than doing anything to expand on the characters themselves, and at the end that was fine. It does feel like it drags a bit at times, despite only being an eight-episode arc, but never much.

It also adds a lot of intrigue to the world at large. With the defeat of Crocodile, one of the Seven Warlords of the Sea, there is an issue due to the balance of three powers. It's not been explained in any real detail, but it seems that the government is very interested in keeping Seven Warlords from the strongest pirates to keep some kind of balance, even though they don't like working with these pirates. This also seems to be continuing the ever-building presence of Black Beard and White Beard, as well as beginning to bring in The Red Hair Pirates under Shank. There is a lot about the world being hinted at and built up in this arc, and that seems to be the importance rather than the story Luffy himself is directly involved in.

It's not an arc that gives me a whole lot to say, but it's another good edition to One Piece. In a series of arcs fluctuating pretty greatly in quality so far, this is one that ends up on the positive end of that.