Luffy's Gear Fifth Is The Perfect Callback To One Piece's Roots

Apr 08, 2024

Gear 5 is one of the biggest game changers in One Piece in both the anime and the manga, and it's also the perfect callback to the series' roots.

Warning: Contains spoilers for One Piece episode #1071.The One Piece anime has finally gotten to Gear Fifth’s debut, and even more so than the manga, the form is a perfect callback to the series' roots. Gear 5 serves as the Awakened form of the Gum-Gum Fruit, and as such, using it allows Luffy to further enhance the rubber-based abilities he had access to in its previous forms. Not only is Luffy able to turn his surroundings into rubber and both bounce around on and stretch them accordingly, but his own body becomes able to move with even more fluidity and eccentricity, almost as if he were a rubber hose cartoon character.

Gear Fifth adds a whole new dimension to Luffy’s fighting style, but more than that, it serves as a perfect callback to One Piece’s roots. While One Piece has never stopped having a degree of silliness to it, the early years of the series had a far more cartoonish vibe to them, so Gear 5 essentially turning Luffy into a rubber hose cartoon character perfectly brings the series back to that idea. Episode #1071’s depiction of this takes this even further, and with how a lot of One Piece’s fighting has gone lately, Gear 5 works to add a lot of new life to the series, as a whole.

Related: The One Piece Anime's Biggest Issue Almost Ruined Gear 5's Debut

Gear 5 serves as a perfect means of bringing One Piece back to its cartoonish roots, and episode #1071 helps to sell that even better. In episode #1071’s depiction of Gear 5, not only are Luffy’s movements even more chaotic than they were in the manga with rapid camera work and his body parts flying all over the place, but they’re always accompanied by sound effects commonly associated with Western cartoons, with one impact frame even having a visual “SLAM” sound effect. All of that sells the gimmick of Gear 5’s homage to classic cartoons even more than the manga did, and One Piece is all the better for it.

Related: Luffy's New Powers Finally Justify One Piece's Controversial Art Style

One of the best things about Gear 5 is that its inherent silliness helps to fix one of the anime’s biggest problems: its fights. While one of the major hallmarks of early One Piece was its goofy fight scenes, many of the fights have become increasingly simplified over the years, with Luffy’s modern-day fighting style, in particular, often prioritizing punches and kicks over some of the bizarre moves he used in older arcs. Gear 5 having Luffy fight like a cartoon character, though, brings back the silliness that used to define One Piece’s fight scenes, thus fixing one of the biggest issues with the anime.

The idea that Gear 5 can bring back some of the silliness of the series' early battles is a sentiment that’s even shared by One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda himself. In an interview with Detective Conan’s Gosho Aoyama, Oda said he hated how serious battle manga have gotten lately and made Gear Fifth to help One Piece avoid that, bringing back the comedy and fun he feels are necessary to maintain the series’ charm. Whether it’s regarding the fights or the overall aesthetic, Gear Fifth works well to bring back the cartoonish charm of One Piece’s roots, and this intent was conveyed perfectly in the anime.

One Piece releases new episodes Saturdays on Crunchyroll.