One Piece: Episode of Sabo - 3 Kyoudai no Kizuna Kiseki no Saikai to Uketsugareru Ishi

Great, enjoyable movie. An special all about one of my favourite characters Sabo. The updated animation on the dressrosa scenes are really well done. However it seems like there was much too content to fit into one film and as a result seemed like it would be a bit confusing to people not watching at some points and let some characters have very few scenes still it was very enjoyable overall

One Piece episode of Sabo... Overall I enjoyed it, but definitely have some complaints.

For a special called episode of Sabo, there really wasn't enough Sabo. Like, the majority of the special is the Dressrosa arc in hyper-speed or something, and most of it just feels like padding. Counting all the new material this probably wouldn't have even been 15 minutes long...

As I just mentioned, the pacing is way too fast, and full of stuff that's really irrelevant to what most of us want. Like the Law, Fuji, and Doffy bits felt so slapped in there.
Again, another issue with the pacing is some stuff felt ... really... not so impactful. Luffy's reunion with Sabo, Sabo's fight in the Colosseum, Luffy and Chinjao etc. The anime did all of those scenes much better.

The animation and art is... not as good as I'd hoped. I wouldn't say it was bad, but some parts were clearly better done than others. Some Toei art quirks are in here too.


Too much of it was recycled content. I know there's obviously not much canonical material to pull from and all but still.

Overall, and this is probably gonna be an unpopular opinion, but this really felt like a cash in on Sabo's crazy popularity right now. I didn't hate the special or anything, I love Sabo too and seeing more of him was definitely a treat. It's just I really don't feel like what Toei did here was necessary at all. If you don't care for Sabo, don't bother. If you're a diehard Sabo fan, give it a watch because the sliver of new content was definitely enjoyable.

I was really disappointed by this special. They marketed it as a special about Sabo with "content never seen before in the anime/manga." This is about as far as you can get from that, being almost entirely recap of Dressrosa with a couple new scenes from Sabo's perspective. That's it.

What I really wanted was some sort of side story featuring Sabo and some of the other revolutionaries like Koala and Hack. They could've done a continuation of Robin's separation story in Tequila Wolf and had them do some sort of mission together. I don't care if it ends up being non-canon, it's not a whole ... lot different in concept than 3D2Y was, and that was also non-canon. It doesn't even have to be something like that, just anything other than this would be good. Why would you market it as something unique and new when it's literally the furthest possible thing from that?

What they did was cash in on the hype about Sabo. A lot of Sabo fans might disagree with that, but as a Sabo fan myself I'm just being honest. We were promised something and we got the exact opposite of what we were promised. That's not cool.