Discussion Recent One Piece fights

[I Am Atomic]

Recently, the fights in One Piece are just bland to me. Its basically boils down to, who hits the hardest.
Recent examples are, Rocks vs Roger and Garp. It ended with "we need to hit harder"
In Elbaf, its "need CoC to bypass immortality or stronger CoC to bypass their defence" which makes each characters power up bland.

There are exceptions when its more hype battle than an extreme one, for example Luffy vs Lucci. That was cool just because Luffy was blitzing Lucci.

Idk what do you guys think?

 

[Sachsenhesse]

Its just a blueprint for the anime. Oda delivers the storyboard and the anime studio the action.

 

[Zmsp]

One Piece has always been like that.

Crocodile and Enel needed the water/golden ball gimmick because they were logias and haki was not a thing yet, but I guess it'd be hard or even more repetitive to always find a natural counter to logias. I personally liked it that way, and I still think Haki/Power systems is the worst part of One Piece, but it's not like things have massively changed recently.

Even Kaido had to be defeated with CoC much more so than a giant fist, that was just to escalate things visually.

 

[Kuroiyaiba]

Its just a blueprint for the anime. Oda delivers the storyboard and the anime studio the action.

Gotta admit I didn't watch the anime for like six years. However I did watch several (best of) fighting scenes and while I think the animations go all out in fights I, have a hard time enjoying them as much. Can't exactly tell why, so if I have to choose I go with the manga fighting scenes anytime. That said the manga fighting scenes (Loki's dragon form in action aside) are also less and less impressing me. I'm currently starving for good lore drops, and especially longing for Oda to shed some light on the true history but it feels like Oda is recently juggling with cliff hangers rather than going for proper continuous lore drops. More and more minor reveals that still open up more questions and to me this is rather tiresome leading to me being less, active over here.

All that said, I'm content with Imu and I enjoyed the giants standing up for their country in the recent chapter, it's just that the Zoro fighting scene did not hit me as hard as it would have in the past.

 

[DeadlyBeast]

I'm more neutral in general on the recent fights but I get the sentiment. I think the core of it is most OP fights since the start of the series are not the actual fights and are more like skirmishes where people trade quick blows and/or have back and forth without much progress. I think these fights have always been a bit boring.

But when it comes to serious fights where there is 1 v 1, OP has overall done decently. The last of these that went pretty well is Luffy v Kaido which in our real world time was a while back. The main issue now is the way Oda has been doing the story has shifted post Wano to fights that don't have true 1 v 1. Instead we are getting mini 1 v 1 which just have some moments and then rushed end without any fleshed out combat sequences (think Luffy vs Kizaru - I wish we got a really heated multi chapter fight here considering how long we waited for an Admiral fight).

At the heart of it, Oda has created a monster that is too big too handle. The OP world is so large and there are so many characters now Oda is mismanaging it all. Now every arc we get half or more of the crew doing pretty much nothing (Jinbei, Robin, Chopper, etc in this arc). The characters are just wasted. Then there is so much plot he has to get through he ends up shortening fights and getting rid of the best part, the actual choreo of it all.

Personally as the story grew I'd hoped he'd stop doing the old tired structures of fake count downs, fake out losses, poorly manufactured tension, plot points that really go nowhere or serve little purpose, etc which overall just waste space and use that to actually speed the plot up so he can make it more manageable on handling of the characters and world building. But instead he cut the action. Now we get fights like this arc, the fights with Gorosei, fight with Kizaru, Garp vs Aokiji, God Valley fights etc. Some of these were fights we dreamed of years ago since we wanted to see the best of the best but aside from cool moments they've mostly been disappointing.

The reason I'm still neutral despite all these negatives is Oda still shows us glimpses of those fights here and there so I know the story is capable of it. I expect a future arc will ahve true 1 v 1 fights again and we will get good detailed combat.

So yeah, I'm still stuck on hopeful and am not ready to throw in the towel yet.

 

[white_light]

Fights are kinda the least important thing to me in One Piece so I find it hard to care.
I really liked Luffy V Kizaru a lot, mostly because of meta reasons of people malding over admirals tying with yonkos.

But idk I like a satisfying punch a lot more than the drawn out fights in this series.