One Piece (2026-)

Episode 1168

Episode 1168 of One Piece leverages a few familiar strengths to make for a solid, exciting entry.

This week's episode had a lot of the usual good One Piece stuff, and that's perfectly fine. The show has had weirdos with cool attacks and vaguely cryptic background lore for basically its entire run, and this has both of those things in spades. If you've stuck around for over a thousand episodes of the show, you're probably as excited as I am to see big punches and cool mysteries in ancient writings. And if you haven't, well, why are you watching these out of order? But if you like what you see, this is a lot of what the show does, and it's great.

First, the big weird punching. Loki and Shamrock exchange words, and, interestingly, Shanks and Shamrock have an ongoing connection. I wasn't sure if we were going to get another amnesia setup, or another evil clone setup, or maybe Shanks thought he was dead, or some other excuse for why we've never heard of this Cooler Daniel version of Shanks up until now. Instead, it turns out it's just something Shanks never thought to mention, which seems like an odd call, but what can you do when there's melodrama at stake? It's a bit like being an hour into Return of the King and finding out that Aragorn has an evil twin brother, Waragorn, who fights for Sauron. Still, he's cool, and that does like 60% of the work anyway.

Speaking of how cool he is: Shamrock has a weird and cool power. This has to be some of the best evidence yet that Eiichiro Oda is actually twelve years old, because this is the kind of special attack born of youthful exuberance. “My guy has a blade that shoots out red stuff but it's not blood and it's not a cloud it's actually a shapeshifting substance that becomes Cerberus yes literally Cerberus and then each dog head has a sword blade stick out and all the spiked collars spin until their heads pop off and fly around like missiles and attack my enemies and I can still sheathe my sword and leave like heh nothing personal kid.” Just outrageous, I love it.

Lastly, we get the amazing sequence with the Viking legend on the big tapestry. This whole section is lovingly crafted and artfully delivered. The way we shift from sepia-toned recountings of ancient lore to vertical bubbles as screen wipe transitions into Robin hovering cubes in her mind palace - it's superb. It makes what could otherwise be a mere reading into a great event, a further widening of an already vast and expansive world. The One Piece onion has yet more layers to reveal to us, even to this day.

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