User blog comment:Awaikage/Chapter 811: The Year of Sanji Begins/@comment-24850639-20151228211804

Unimpressed with the chapter, borderline disappointed. And it was a pretty long chapter too, which hasn't happened in a little while. But I suppose thats because we knew the majority of the info we received this chapter already, and not much happened in terms of action. Even the cliffhanger was a bit disappointing in my books.

1) The fact that it will be the year of Sanji surprises no one. He has yet to make a present timeline appearance since 2013, he has yet to do anything noteworthy with his new timeskip abillities AT ALL (noteworthy as in monstrously epic or defeating someone important), and anything great he has done so far has been overshadowed by other crew members getting the spotlight. So no shit its Sanji's year, he's LONG overdue for his time in the spotlight. The thing is, based on everything I just said and now with the new wanted poster, we knew this already. So I was expecting Oda to be a lot more forthcoming with dropping hints about the deal with Sanji. We're aware of the bounty poster, the letter, Big Mom following them, and his role in cleaning up Jack's mess, but there is no clear link as to how this is all going to relate back to the main plot of the Zou Arc. You can only relate it so much without the man actually being there, same with Jack. So where the heck is this arc headed? I don't understand how we're supposed to get all these answers while still keeping the story in Zou, without taking a full halt on Zou altogether to tell us this story. He was gone the vast majority of Dressrosa, which was a LONG time, so doing the same on Zou just doesn't seem.......right.

2) Jack now seems like a distant enemy. His involvement with Zou was purely flashback up til now, and Ginrummy's "the samurai isn't here" after ALL those days of torture and destruction to me seems to indicate that there's no reason for Jack's crew to come back anytime soon. Big Mom seems to be the new priority now, as I'm sure helping Sanji get out of his predicament is a lot more important to the StrawHats than helping the Samurai find Raizo, or whatever the next step of Law's plan is, if there is one. The Monster Trio NEVER worries about each other's strengths, and that seemed to be case when they first heard about the letter, but now Luffy and Zoro seemed concerned. In other words, there is now ambiguity as to who the antagonist is of this arc. Big Mom and Kaido now seem about equally pissed with Luffy, and they've already evaded Big Mom's involvement twice. So unfortunately it kinda makes sense in a way that she'll start to get more heavily involved, especially considering that Luffy DIRECTLY challenged her, and then throw whatever the hell Caesar did to her in the mix.

So for all of us who were SOOOOO sure that we were headed to Wano next without a doubt, we lose to troll Oda yet again. I was assuming that this was the last chapter of 2015, so most of my disappointment comes from me expecting more cliffhangers on potentially big things, or furthering important cliffhangers that are already up in the air.