Term · One Piece
Alabasta
A kingdom of sand where the rain stopped falling everywhere except the capital, and nobody called that suspicious for years.
In Otakana the clue reads: Desert kingdom hit by a three-year drought
- Type
- Term
- Series
- One Piece
- Letters
- 8 · Hard
Alabasta is a desert country ruled by the Nefertari family, and by the time the Straw Hats arrive most of its provinces have gone three years without rain. The drought is not weather. A criminal organisation running the country from underneath has been manufacturing it, then feeding the anger it produced into a rebel army the same organisation quietly arms.
The arc that follows is where One Piece first works at the scale it intends to keep. A princess travels undercover with pirates to stop a civil war, a dancing duck joins the party, and the villain's plan turns out to rest on a weapon buried beneath the palace. It takes the crew across a country on foot, by camel and by crab, and it is the arc most readers name when asked when the series got good.
Oda built the place out of ancient Egypt and the desert cities of north Africa: obelisks, tombs with traps, a capital called Alubarna, and a river the whole kingdom depends on. Alabasta also holds one of the poneglyphs the larger plot is eventually about, which is why the country keeps mattering hundreds of chapters after the crew sails away from it.
Spelling ALABASTA
Eight letters, four A's, and one real trap. The Japanese reads Arabasta, and plenty of fan translations kept that R, so a lot of readers hold the wrong first consonant. ALABASTA is the English spelling and the L is what the tiles want. After that it is generous: an A in the first, third, fifth and eighth positions leaves very little of the row to find.