One Piece: Brook's Powers Explained

One Piece: Brook’s Powers Explained

Now, usually when people talk about the most interesting One Piece powers, they refer to Luffy having mastery over his Devil Fruit, Zoro having some type of Nine-Tails Sakuna-type Devil inside of him, and Law’s Room abilities.

However, what nobody seems to speak about are Brook‘s powers. People overlook him because, on the surface, he seems fairly simple: he’s the skeletal swordsman who usually does the classic anime delayed attack. However, there is surprisingly a lot beyond this basic ability, as Brook seems to be a very complex character.

Starting out with his Devil Fruit, Yomi Yomi no Mi, this crew allows their user to have a second chance at life by returning their soul to the real world, which already sounds extremely OP. But at first, it didn’t seem that way. In his original life, Brook couldn’t use any of his powers whatsoever, so eating this fruit kinda seemed like a detriment when he died.

However, Brook’s soul was returned to the real world, though not to his original body. This meant that he had to wander the sea in search of his body, which at that point was already decomposed. Even so, Brook can possess his own skeleton and use it as his mortal vessel. Now, this makes absolutely no sense because skeletons don’t stay together on their own, but it is a series where old men can punch islands in half with one hit.

Being a skeleton does give Brook some perks, though. Having no flesh to weigh him down, he is way lighter than the average person, being able to run on water and jump higher as a result. A common misconception about Brook is that he’s immortal, which is just not true. He literally states in Chapter 443 that his second life will have an end. Brook can still feel pain as well, however, he is immune to effects such as electrocution and cold temperatures.

So now you may be thinking that the Yomi Yomi no Mi isn’t all that, Brook gets revived and he can live a second time, so what? However, during the time skip, he found many different ways to use this power to its maximum capabilities. In Chapter 643, he explains that the power that holds him in this world is his soul, and it seems that he’s gained many techniques due to this realization.

One Piece: Brook's Powers Explained

For instance, he can now leave his own body and essentially act as a specter, being able to phase through objects. In fact, Brook can now use his soul to do all sorts of things, such as sway people’s emotions, repair his own skeleton, and what I like to call “Soul hacks.” One of my favorite instances of Soul hacks was when he used his Soul King ability on the chess piece soldiers.

The attack was successful because the soldiers are made out of weak souls. However, for other homies, such as Zeus or Prometheus, they are not at all affected by this because they come straight from Big Mom’s soul.

But I can’t talk about this ability without speaking on Brook’s true specialty: music. In his previous life, he was a musician for the Rumbar Pirates, a crew that specialized in performing and being the musician for the future pirate king. He has to be the best of the best. He is said to be able to play any instrument but is usually seen playing bass, violin, or piano.

My personal favorite, he’s also a great vocalist as well. To put into perspective how amazing of a musician Brook is, his music is literally able to make animals like Laboon happy. He’s also known across the world as Soul King due to his escapades during the time skip, in which he tore the Grand Line on some Rolling Loud type, essentially becoming the Cardi B of One Piece.

But if Brook is Cardi, then who is Uta? Anyways, he can use his musical capabilities in combat as well, being able to perform multiple techniques such as Lullaby Fletch, in which he puts people to sleep by just playing his violin, and by combining both soul and music, he can move people emotionally.

So the last thing that we have to touch on is Brook’s swordsman skills. He wields a shiko mizue named Soul Solid, and in conjunction with his fencing skills, he is actually a pretty adept swordsman, maybe not to the likes of Zorro, but special nonetheless. His most famous ability without a doubt is Hanuta Sancho, which is essentially just a delayed slash attack that I mentioned earlier.

However, basic fencing is only the beginning of Brook’s sword skills. By using the chill of the underworld, he can generate ice with his sword. This makes him the only Straw Hat to have ice powers, and it’s not just some icy cut here and there. This is full-on ice generation on some Todoroki.

Now, it’s difficult to find out where Brook stands in terms of power. Usually, he’s a support character and he never really gets into any meaningful fights. But here are the feats that we do have. In chapter 890, he was able to blitz Big Mom while she was on Zeus. Granted, she was a little bit out of her mind, but even so, he jumped from the Sunny, cut Zeus in half, and Big Mom couldn’t even tell what was going on until it was too late.

There’s also an anime-only scene where he blitzes Oven, so if you want to use the anime, Brook’s speed would be consistent. However, he seems like a dex-only type character since in the anime he attempts to hit Big Mom with one of his strongest attacks, and it does nothing.

One Piece: Brook's Powers Explained

This is an emperor we’re talking about, but even Nami was able to shock Big Mom at the end of Whole Cake. We haven’t seen anything in Wano to put Brook above his Whole Cake power level, so yeah, I think that’s where he caps out. I’d put Brook in Commander level, which is just a safe assumption, but it’s so hard to tell.

I mean, he never got to fight against a Tobiroppo member, he didn’t get a meaningful fight in Whole Cake, and he didn’t even fight one of Doflamingo’s officers. Brook is really just that character that comes in clutch, and I mean clutch clutch, ’cause he’ll just do stuff out of nowhere, and you’ll be so surprised as to what happened. His performance on Whole Cake is just the most loyal I’ve ever seen.

But in general, it’s just hard to nail down what his true power level is. Thank you.