One Piece Preview Teases New Worst Generation Fight

One Piece's anime will finally be heading back to the Wano Country arc after a detour filler arc hyping up the upcoming release of the 20th Anniversary film, One Piece: Stampede, in Japan. This will be continuing off of a pretty notable cliffhanger that revealed another member of the Worst Generation was also on Wano and heading straight for Luffy.

Episode 897 is titled "Save Otama! Straw Hat, Bounding through the Wasteland!" and the preview teases that the strange fortune teller Basil Hawkins will be getting into a new scrape against the recently reunited Luffy and Zoro.

The Worst Generation Pirates were some of the most notable going into the New World, and it seemed like every one of these young captains would be a challenge to Luffy. After seeing just how powerful Hawkins was in a previous battle with Zoro, fans will get to see this again as he and some of Kaido's forces will band together against Zoro and Luffy.

Zoro seems to be carrying that previous injury from Hawkins with a heavy weight as it looks like he instantly jumps into the fight. The preview sees him get suddenly more intense when Hawkins arrives, but the preview sees Hawkins getting just as intense to counter it.

As Luffy and the other Straw Hats all gather at the Wano Country, Luffy learned from Otama just how influential Kaido has been over the country. It's been left in a state of terror and destruction, and it seems like other members of the Worst Generation have allied with Kaido after seeing demonstrations of this destruction. Another member, X-Drake, was responsible for destroying Otama's village, and it seems Hawkins has worked his way up Kaido's ranks for destructive tendencies like this.

Given how strong each of them were, if we're to assume they're all around the same tier as Luffy, this further just hypes how much power Kaido still has to show. It also raises an interesting parallel suggesting Luffy could've gone this route too. He easily could've submitted his crew to a higher power!

Eiichiro Oda's One Piece first began serialization in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. It has since been collected into over 80 volumes, and has been a critical and commercial success worldwide with many of the volumes breaking printing records in Japan. The manga has even set a Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book by a single author, and is the best-selling manga series worldwide with over 430 million copies sold. The series still ranked number one in manga sales in 2018, which surprised fans of major new entries.