I'm Luffy! The Man Who Will Become the Pirate King!

Sealed inside a drifting barrel after a whirlpool tore apart the little boat he had launched in, Luffy opens the series stranded on the open water. Sailors aboard a passing pleasure cruiser fish out the barrel, yet their ship soon takes cannon fire from a pirate vessel under the spiked-club captain Alvida, and amid the turmoil the barrel rolls into the kitchen.

Alvida's crew climbs aboard to strip the liner of its cargo, hauling along Koby, the chore boy they bully, while a quick-fingered young woman creeps onto the pirates' own ship to lift their treasure. Down in the kitchen, Koby and a handful of raiders crack the barrel open to find Luffy fast asleep within.

Luffy makes short work of the pirates who attack him and slips off to the pantry with Koby to dig into the stored provisions. Between bites they exchange backgrounds. Luffy recounts setting out to begin a pirate's life only to be marooned by a whirlpool, and Koby confesses he was abducted by Alvida's crew and pressed into labor, dreaming of escaping one day to join the Marines.

News of the intruder travels to Alvida, who pegs Luffy as a possible bounty hunter and bursts into the pantry to face the two. A brawl spills onto the deck. Her spiked club accomplishes nothing against Luffy, whose body bends and snaps back like rubber thanks to a Devil Fruit he ate, and a single Gomu Gomu no Pistol sends her sailing off the deck to splash down in the water.

Their fight finished, Luffy and Koby push off together in a small boat and catch a passing look at the lone thief leaving on a dinghy of her own. Luffy fixes his ambition on the Grand Line and the One Piece, deciding his first move is to bring the dreaded swordsman Roronoa Zoro into his crew.

The episode kicks off the franchise's opening storyline. It marks where the Romance Dawn storyline first begins, and within the broader timeline it also opens the East Blue Saga. Rather than adapting the manga's first chapter, it pulls from the second, with Chapter 1's material held back until Episode 4. Several touches exist only in the anime, among them Nami's far earlier appearance, an inserted cellar scene of Luffy eating apples, and a setting shifted from an island to the cruise ship Lady Mary. A one-of-a-kind Japanese Continued end card closes it, used only here and in the second episode.