One Piece Vol. 22: Hope!!
- ISBN
- 9781421524306
- Publisher
- VIZ Media
- English release
- Pages
- 216
- Chapters
- 196–205
- Anime
- Season 4: Alabasta ep. 93–130
Chapters 196 to 205, and the second half of a fight the previous four books have been arranging. Luffy is back on his feet with an answer to the problem that ended the first meeting, and what the answer is belongs below. Crocodile does not need to beat him: a cannon hidden somewhere in the capital will destroy both armies at once, and the rest of the crew is looking for it against a clock it cannot see. Underneath the castle, meanwhile, Crocodile is having the king lead him to the thing he actually came to this country for, which was never the country. Both threads start elsewhere and finish elsewhere, which makes this the volume of the arc that reads worst alone. The anime took it in during season 4, which ends at chapter 217.
Spoilers — why this volume matters. Tap to reveal.
The fight is engaged here and settled in Vol. 23, which is worth knowing before buying this book on its own. What this one holds is the scene at the back of it that the rest of the run depends on. Crocodile forces King Cobra down to an ancient stone beneath the palace, looking for an ancient weapon called Pluton; Nico Robin reads the stone, tells him it says nothing about Pluton, and he tries to kill her for saying so. Luffy pulls both of them out in the next volume, and Robin is aboard the ship by the one after that, so this scene is where the crew's seventh member is actually recruited. The volume is titled 'Hope!!', which is a straight description of the cannon plot and a dry one of everything else here. The civil war is still the villain's design when the book ends, and the reader has now watched him arrange it across five volumes.
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