One Piece 719 was a satisfying chapter. It was simply devoted to ending the fight, with a few pages of throwaway, extremely silly flashback, with its real ending only implied (though very probably we’ll see it bourne out later), and the tournament arc proceeding nice and swiftly. Fun, silly and light, yet leading somewhere, it’s everything One Piece should be.

Naruto 644 was a whole chapter to say ‘we used our haxxx chakra to teleport everyone’. Yay?

One Piece 718, after a week off, was cute and finally brings most of the characters back together. There’s some silliness going on aboard the Sunny, and Luffy is still occupied – and blowing his cover in a big way this time – but it’s getting good!

Naruto 643 was again a little embarrassing. Fist bumps. An extra immense source of chakra duplicated when a corpse was reanimated with a dead man’s soul. And a giant blobby flower about to kill all the heroes. Let’s get the arc finished eh?

One Piece 717 was plenty of fun – some development for most of the little parallel stories, some great scenes with Luffy and a bit of a dark edge to these ‘toys’.

Naruto 642 had a horrible lull in the middle where people spoke about how useless they are, and then the key to beating the ridiculously powerful baddie turned out to be absurdly convenient for Naruto. Meh. Again, I’m left cold. 

One Piece 716 seemed slow at first, but it was all a build-up to the typical absurd-level-of-power bathos that Oda does so well. I was chuckling at the end, and am very keen to see how it goes on. Silly but fun chapter!

Naruto 641 had a lot of people standing around going ‘well, this is absurd and we’re so insignificant now’. Which kinda makes me totally detached as a reader, too. And the big build-up to a body-switch trick? Underwhelming too.