This chapter is a complete mess.
Revelations, and moments go by so fast, you miss them. Confirming Izo and Ashura's deaths after the fact was a very poor decision, and it makes me question how Oda wants me to feel after this arc. Pyrrhic? Cheery? It's hard to say because he crams so much within less than 20 pages.
Wano seemingly ending in 2 chapters at most makes me worry how many things go unaddressed or under developed. All of this goes back to what I was worried about since the arc began: Wano may be too much for Oda to chew.
Bringing in more and more figures and plotlines into a single arc overstuffed it. Plotpoints dropped and left all over the place, and there were several stretches that made me wonder if that sequence was even necessary to include. As if Oda did not think about the resolution to something through.
Wano has some genuinely amazing ideas. Samurai warriors who lost their way and need their spirits revived to return the home they lost is an excellent premise to work with. The Scabbards had a good basis. Oden was their savior and they wanted to give back to him. But they failed to be more beyond their devotion. The most well developed of their entourage, Kin'emon, meandered following his fight with Kaido, where all that was reminded was how devoted he was to the cause. A waste of time that would've been better served at developing the other plot lines still waiting to be addressed. And that's what the Scabbards mostly amounted to. A collection of 9 time wasters who's involvement largely stopped mattering after a certain point. And the fact it's 9 makes juggling them a nightmare. The Scabbards, I feel, represent a lot of the problems of the arc distilled into a faction of characters. Some of them who were established earlier were nonfactors, while others continued to persist even after they long served their purpose.
Linlin and the Big Mom Pirates were definitely too much for Oda to work with in a natural way. It shows how stumped he was that he essentially had Linlin bouncing around the arc as a plot device in service to the good guys instead of another threat as a result of the consequences in WCI. A character, deemed a second Kaido by characters in the story, was reduced to a little more than a side show to Kaido, as Oda could not devote time to two Emperors. The less said about the rest of the crew, the better.
All of the setup for Zoro, while mostly a B or C plot, didn't lead to anything. An opportunity for Oda to explore the second Straw Hat basically went nowhere. I know a lot of people are disappointed in ZKK not happening, but that's just a byproduct of the real issue. Oda simply didn't want to deepen Zoro's place within the story or something that can explore/redefine him in a way that can make us better appreciate his character. Zoro is still a great character. I'm not letting Wano's disappointment change that for me, but there was a missed chance to make it better, imo. And Wano was just the perfect setting given Zoro's concept fits the premise of the arc. And true, Oda didn't have to do this for Zoro, but the problem is, he established several things for Zoro that went nowhere.
There's loads more to say, but I'm not interested in writing a thesis on mostly negativity. And the arc wasn't all bad. Act 1 was a very quaint little journey for the first two Straw Hats, I enjoyed the historical references sprinkled throughout the arc. Oda's appreciation for his country is palpable. Toko and Yasu were very wholesome and a good reminder of why I should care about the conflict, and some of the Straw Hat's fights were the best highlights they've had in a long time. But for the most part, Wano just wasn't the epic I was hoping it would be, and I'm in no rush to reread it. A bloated and confused hodgepodge of characters synonymous with action figures in the way they were mashed against each other and tossed aside from like a child who's attention span hasn't fully developed.
