Just to put into perspective the atrocious pacing of One Piece as of late, chapter 1000 was animated into episode 1014, we are now on chapter 1021, 30 episodes (not including the two "specials we got") later. Each chapter is 16 pages without the cover, give or take. That's almost an episode and a half for each chapter. Some anime cover the manga with 4-5 chapters covered in a single episode. If we're lookingly solely at content covered in each episode, One Piece is by far one of the worst anime for making filler, we could honestly say that 2 of every 3 episodes is actual content, and the third is filler, that puts one piece at some 30% filler. And don't get me wrong, I think the trade-off is acceptable since we are getting a new ~canon~ episode every week, but I'd honestly rather have filler episodes every so often simply because it's getting hard to watch and One Pace isn't able to put the episodes out every week, just from a purely logistical standpoint, it wouldn't even make sense to put an episode out every week when each episode contains 10-12/16 pages of the related chapter, so I'm kind of forced to stick with it.
Then again, every couple of months or so, we get an episode where the source material is good enough that, even with the bad pacing, it's worth its salt in the content it covers alone. I could make that case for a lot of the chapters, but honestly, Onigashima is already a bloated mess and we're not even 2/3 of the way through it a year and a half later, when it took the manga in little over 2 years, so we're basically getting six months of filler in an already long and, quite frankly, sloppy raid. It's certainly no Alabasta, and even by Dressrosa standards, which focused WAYYY too much on less than intriguing moments/characters, not that it was bad (at all, quite great, really), but it wasn't as concise as it could have been, and Onigashima is like that on steroids (or Mink medicine). And here's the thing, Oda isn't perfect, he wrote a lot of characters for Wano and these are characters that are cool enough, but, do they ~really~ enhance a story that's already 1000 chapters long at this point, over 25 years in the running? Looking at like Batman or an American comic series, these super long ones at least have divisions, it's not like a trove of new characters are introduced every week and we need to know and keep track of who they are for 30 years. And even though Oda has slowed down, and we're not getting a flood of new characters introduced to us every chapter like we were in Dressrosa and have been in Wano, Oda isn't focusing on only the characters essential to the story, and that makes for a grindier experience. This isn't Enies Lobby or Marineford where there's still a BUNCH of story left to reveal, we're basically in the end game and it feels like we have to care about these random characters who will be inconsequential very soon. This is all to say that when a chapter and episode like this come along, it really breathes new life into an increasingly tedious experience. Again, this isn't at all to say that what Oda is putting out and what we're getting (when we get it) with the anime is bad, even though I wouldn't call Wano my favorite arc, it's absolutely nowhere near Long Ring Long Land, it's just already not superb and we're getting it bogged down in the anime with 33% filler every episode.
So when an episode like this comes along, I really enjoy it. Robin is one of my favorite characters and Oda really made her character arc flourish in this interaction. In fact, Sanji, Robin, and Luffy have all gotten really great exposition in Wano, and this is one of the chapters I think does the most in that respect. Needless to say, I was very excited to see it animated, and even though there was a good amount of sluggishness to what was 12 pages covered in the manga, it was a great adaptation. One of the better episodes we've gotten in awhile, at least of the ones that are sluggish and aren't really produced (like a lot of Roof Piece has been). I get that, too, from Toei's standpoint, they want to throw their money at the hype, especially Luffy's and Zoro's hype, so I'm assuming those fights will get the treatment as well. All in all, when Toei does One Piece right, it's incredible, and there are quite a few chapters coming up (I say coming up, but realistically, it'll be another year before the rest of Wano is animated), so if they do right by those chapters, there's a lot to look forward to even in the middling anime. Because I do prefer seeing Luffy and the Straw Hats, and all the rest of my favorite characters animated with voice and a great soundtrack behind it, it makes the experience feel more personable and more alive. Don't get me wrong, Oda is a great Mangaka and the manga is exceptional, even as a black and white, literary experience, it's definitely one of the better manga out there.
All that I can really say about this episode that I haven't been getting at with the rest of the post is that they gave Robin the exposition she deserves, and even if it was kinda goofy at times, it was still a badass sequence and they did a good job with it. 8.5/10.
