After recapping the whole series through One Piece Musou 3's story mode, is it just me or is the 2nd half of the series lacking emotional moments so far?
I mean everything up until Fishman's island is filled with memorable emotional scenes like the goodbye scene to Vivi in Alabasta with the hands up, Luffy and Usopp making after Enies Lobby, Robin's I want to live, Zoro's first encounter with Tashigi reminding him of his past, Zoro taking Kuma's blast standing for the team, Luffy putting his hat on a crying Nami, Sanji getting on his knees and thanking Chef, etc... almost every arc ended with some real moving stuff. Marineford was sort of the top of that with Whitebeard's standing death and the aftermath. Even going off from Saobody 2 years later with Rayleigh wishing them off was nice. It felt like there was a lot of character development for the main cast.
But then Fishmen Island...was ok, but can't think of any real memorable stuff and Jinbe's backstory was zzz. Punk Hazard was a ton of fun and a real entertaining arc, but not really emotional, and now Dressrosa's only real emotional moment stuff was Law's backstory which was good, but in the present while being an entertaining arc, there's no real emotional moment. Maybe Sanji taking the hit for the team facing off against DoFla to let the Sunny escape. The Toy stuff was ok, and the dwarf people stuff was totally a miss (who cares about the princess??)
It's like the first half of the series was an adventure filled with touching moments while the New World so far has been a big entertaining summer action flick. I get that part of it is that Luffy and Crew are so strong from their 2 year training upgrades that they've been steam rolling through these arcs, with Luffy finally kind of maxing out at the end of the Doflamingo fight and that the characters have grown a lot already at this point. But I'd like to have more memorable character development stuff. I wonder if Oda's peak was Marineford and he's losing his touch somewhat.
I dunno, I need to re-read the post-time skip stuff one of these days, but that just kind of stood out to me going through all the arcs again.