After spending an extra review’s worth of time with the Fishman Island arc it’s time to bring it to a close, thankfully. Okay, the finale has some classic One Piece “satisfying villain beatdown” about it, but really thanks to not really caring about either the villains or the new good guys it doesn’t have the same impact as it has done in previous, or indeed future arcs. Either way, let’s take a look and get this arc out of the way for good…

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The Fisman Island Arc continues to chug along with an extended flashback in order to set up a lot of the characters and conflict that have already been of central focus so far and completely failed to gain my interest… In fairness, the flashback does hit heavy with the theme of illogical racism that is the core focus of the Fishmen, but once we get back to the present day I still can’t say I particularly care about any of them… Which makes me sound like a Fishman racist (whatever that means in real life) but I’m just talking about the lead villains and the stuff… Anyway, Let’s take a look!

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Okay so the plan was to split this arc in half but upon writing the first review (523 – 553) it was far, far too long. Despite not really liking this arc at all there were enough subplots, flashbacks and new characters that there’s just too much for one review if I want to keep it to a reasonable word count, so I’ve split THAT review in half and I’ll now review it in three. With that, here’s the original opening paragraph:

So we have finally reached it, the point where a lot of more casual One Piece fans often tap out of the show. Hell, I was really enjoying watching it back then but these episodes once a week? Nope, I ended up dropping it and it took a few years for me to get back into the show, and even then I just skipped to the final few episodes of this arc and then continued from there, so this is actually my first time watching a lot of these episodes, and boy do I understand why. At least I could get a few out of the way in one week, but that didn’t help much. Is it completely irredeemable? Well, no, but what’s good about the arc is mostly contained in the next half (um, two thirds…) of the story, these episodes are pretty poor all round… Let’s take a look anyway!

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