Robin - "Wait, Oda increased our bust size AGAIN?" Nami - "Typical Oda."

This won’t be a regular thing of me blogging the anime here. I already do OP coverage at Metanorn for their MetaJump posts, but since the perfect storm happened (MetaJump on hiatus with year-end business, chapter 651 of the manga still not released and I already wrote some stuff down on Google+), I’ll go ahead and add a few pics along with my thoughts.

The happiest Sanji will ever be in the series. It's all downhill from here.

While the plot didn’t move too much forward, Sanji’s pervishness reached dangerous levels and the 3 Princes did make their debut. I had never seen color art for them before, so I was surprised and a bit disappointed that Fukaboshi’s hair was blue instead of blonde. Like, I never thought Fukaboshi was a playboy, charm-the-ladies type, but he actually looks kinda ugly. I still couldn’t give a shit about the other 2 Princes since it just felt like they were rambling instead of saying anything of significance.

Gear Second looking as good as ever. Even the brief bit of animation with him turning off Gear Second looked good.

Last episode, I wasn’t really too impressed with the small bit of Fishman Island we saw with the mermaids, but this episode did a much much better job with art style and animation. Sanji swimming with the mermaids and Luffy’s Gear Second and Haki powers all were really great looking, but most importantly, the backgrounds provided the visual color feast that I’d been expecting from Fishman Island since I had read it (and still am) in the manga. I really liked the imaginative style of Skypiea way back, so Fishman Island could be my favorite location since the trip in the Sky.

Thank god Sanji didn't see Mermaid Nami back there. It'd a been even more of a bloodbath.

About the mermaids, I thought they were actually very average looking in 527. I’m not gonna bother myself to go back and check if some new girls showed up for 528, but the mermaids that were present seemed better looking in both an artistic sense and in looks. I mean yeah, the girl on the right side of the above pic looks like she has a football head, but the girl on the left and most of the others were as beautiful as one would expect mermaids to be. Sanji’s frequent nosebleeding was funny at first, but the more he does it, the grosser it looks. He basically kinda “blew” “it” on a girl’s chest, but you gotta be surprised that the mermaid girl was actually scared for his sake rather than wanting to add injury to injury.

What do you mean by "illegal entry"?

With Christmas this weekend and New Year’s the following weekend, I wish everybody a great and also safe holidays.