Pun intended, the One Piece Whole Cake saga was quite a treat. In this story, we get a much needed backstory for Sanji, develop a different piece of the crew, and explore an incredibly fun setting.

While Sanji spends much of the series aggressively hitting on every woman he meets, Whole Cake shows us the lengths Sanji will go to to protect the people he cares about the most. Throughout this entire arc, Sanji makes choices against his own self preservation to try to keep those that are important to him safe. These acts revealed who Sanji wished to protect and how badly. I'm hopeful that future sagas will display the emotional state of more of the members of the crew, particularly Zoro and Robin who often act very stoic.

Like in part of Dressarosa, our team is separated for the vast majority of Whole Cake. While I again felt the real lack of the fraction of the team that was missing, this choice did give Oda the opportunity to more deeply characterize the members of the Staw Hats that were involved in the conflict as well as throughly introduce a whole new cast of heroes and villains. The shear number of players in Whole Cake was very apparent even in the introductions to each volume, which sometimes required an additional page of character descriptions than in previous sagas.

While I have found the fights in these books to be a little over the top, it's hard not to be engaged with what Oda introduces here. From the 1000 Sunny sailing through the tube of a wave like its surfing to a land comprised of food, I rather enjoyed the silly craziness of this arc in a way I haven't felt since the crew's encounter with the Foxy Pirates in Water 7.

Although I had my issues with this saga, Whole Cake was one of the parts of One Piece that I've read so far that I have enjoyed the most consistently. In this saga, Oda effectively mixes political ramifications, big emotional gut punches, and wild fun action in the best of ways.