It's safe to say that with how huge One Piece is, periodic recap episodes are almost a must to aid the fans to keep up with the humongous well-written world of One Piece. The primary goal from these special episodes was always that, quick standalone recaps that one can watch and save the countless hours that they would put have they went with the Anie binging route, and it's nothing to be ashamed of. However, as bad as it seems, not every recap manages to leave a nice memory about it, does this also concern this special? Following the same trend of “Episode of X” releases,this special focuses on Sabo and his perspective on the event that overlapped Dressrosa, for what've seen from the canon plot, Sabo was only introduced almost midway into the arc, it turned out that he was already there before any of the chaos unraveled.
We all hate useless flashbacks, flashbacks that are told so much that it throws you in some hurtful Naruto nightmares and its endless recursive line of the same flashback repeating over and over again. We've already seen the history of the three brothers on so many occasions before that we could tell it from start to finish as if it was a contest. I mean, yes, it's crucial to the special seeing how it focuses on a character that we've only got introduced to through a flashback arc, to begin with, but still, Dressrosa was a dragged out nightmare already, so there was no need to massacre this recap in the same brutal way.
On a whole, it was really enjoyable and fun to dig through some highlights from the Dressrosa arc whilst getting new content that the canon lacked, even though most of it was Sabo monologing about how Luffy has grown from a crybaby to a strong, capable man.
I still like how the Anime did a lot of things better than this special, they even included altered dialogue and even completely different scenarios for some reason. The only thing I thought the special did better than the Anime was Sabo's flashed out fight against Diamante and Luffy's fight against Don Chinjao, although, I like the how latter was set up in the Anime more.
On these two specific fights, the animation really stood out and asserted its dominance as a higher produced piece of animation.