Hypetooled by Vergo, Doffy, FUCKING DAIFUKU, FREAKING COULDNT DODGE SOME RANDOM YU GUY.
PH and Dressrosa were especially bad because those were the arcs where Law started to steal a lot of the SHs spotlight as well.
Sanji kicks Vergo to the wall. Vergo gets MILDLY irritated at Sanji, goes for him, Sanji gets a crack on his leg (but but but explosion nerf). THey keep fighting, Sanji kicks Vergo again, smoke comes, fight gets interrupted. Later, sanji feels his leg hurt and monologues to himself that things could have gone bad if he had kept fighting Vergo.
Vergo later has actually a bamboo staff that he never pulled against Sanji, and also a full body CoA version where he's at his strongest, which he also didnt pull against Sanji.
Bad signal. The "redemption" is that Vergo was stated as being EXTREMELY powerful in CoA. So it's a given that trading blows with him was always gonna be bad for Sanji. We were in the era of "my haki is better than your haki" fights. There was no deep to it at all.
Dressrosa? Gets complimented by Doffy, doesn't get a single hit in, gets parasyted. The counterattack against BM's ship later is very cool, dont get me wrong, but bad showing against Doffy.
Zou? nothing happened.
WCI? First, I love WCI. It's a great arc. But, being so starved for a decent Sanji 1v1 didnt help me at the time at all. He blitzes Oven once (not a one shot, he just sends oven flying and oven is back up immediately), fails to repel daifuku during the wedding. Okay scene stopping big mom's attack alongside Luffy. During the rescue, well, one could say that fighting almost the entire BM family was nothing anyone could do and he does manage to repel daifuku later above the ships.
But no 1v1.
Wano? Now we are slowly, but surely, going back to track.
- Uses Page One as training dummy.
- Saves the girls from Hawkins and Drake.
- The Black Maria thing, Oda sneakily makes Sanji fodderize BM's male underlings and makes Sanji tank BM's attacks for a long time. Sneak, but actually good shit right there, considering Sanji's inability to pull up his CoA otherwise it would hurt BM.
- Queen fight starts. Sanji has a good show against Queen, but gets surprised and caught by the snake move. Exoskeleton kicks in. Sanji gets a durability boost and some regen. yay. Fight continues, Queen gets hurt, but it's not near enough to take him down. Sanji then combines all his tools and enhances his flames for Ifrit. Queen gets DEMOLISHED from it. Hits 1Billion bounty. Good shit.
Now try to remember how long all of this took.
TEN FUCKING YEARS.
Also dont forget that FI/PH was when Oda went 200% overboard with the pervert gag.
See what I mean?