Richie

Richie is a sizable lion who wears a savage expression in combat yet can pull a silly face when idle. The anime is inconsistent about his eyes, switching the sclerae between white and scarlet depending on the animators, with white tending to mark a playful or friendly mood and red signaling fury. In the manga his coat is golden brown beneath a pink mane, whereas the anime recolors his fur green and his mane purple. Following the timeskip he has put on weight and taken to wearing a one-piece garment patterned with white and orange rhombuses, topped by a white frilled collar.

Imposing build and ferocious looks aside, Richie largely behaves like a house cat, prone to goofy spells whenever he has nothing to do. He is clever enough to pick up human-style mannerisms but is otherwise dim, with his mind fixed on food most of the time. His crewmates occasionally misread his theatrical hunger pangs as genuine emotion, mistaking them for him being touched by some sad or moving moment that has just unfolded.

As a hefty lion, Richie fights by biting and clawing his targets, and he hits hard, with jaws powerful enough to wreck a thick iron cage that even Roronoa Zoro doubted he could slice, and the strength to send Monkey D. Luffy crashing through a wooden building with one swat. His wild, witless nature makes him easy prey for quicker foes, though, as Luffy bested him simply by whirling him about, and his appetite is a weakness, since Usopp once stopped him cold by tossing him an egg.

During the Orange Town Arc, as Buggy overran the town, Richie and Mohji roughed up the dog Chouchou, only to be knocked out by Luffy and later used by Cabaji as a shield. In the cover-story adventures that followed, Richie dozed off during a leadership dispute between Cabaji and Mohji, dreamed of captaining the crew and slaying a dragon, sleepwalked his way to beating both rivals, and was named the new captain, before he and the others were captured by the Kumate Tribe and rescued by Buggy and Alvida.

Richie went on to join the assault on Loguetown, where the plan to torch the Straw Hats' ship fell apart in the rain. He turned up picking his nose when Ace boarded Buggy's vessel, reappeared during the Buggy and Alvida Alliance's bid to free Buggy from Impel Down while comically obsessing over food, and was later seen daydreaming of onigiri, candy, and cake after the captain's return. At Buggy's Delivery, located on Karai Bari Island, he sat behind Buggy at a feast celebrating Donquixote Doflamingo's defeat. Once the Seven Warlords system was scrapped, a Marine fleet under Stainless confronted those on the island, and Crocodile wrecked the warships to fold Buggy's outfit into his new Cross Guild.