One Piece: Romance Dawn Story

The animation revisits the very first Romance Dawn prototype, the short that came before the serialized manga. Whereas the original featured Luffy almost alone, this version is set between the Thriller Bark and Sabaody chapters, meaning the entire assembled Straw Hat crew is on hand. It was made for the fortieth Jump Super Anime Tour, screening at eleven venues across Japan in late 2008 before later free online distribution and a limited DVD offering.

With the crew out of provisions, Luffy takes the Mini-Merry to restock and drifts off course, washing up on an island. There he meets a girl named Silk, who mistakes him for one of Crescent-Moon Gally's pirates. Luffy had earlier tied Gally up aboard his ship, and he promises Silk he will help her drive the marauder off, swiftly besting Gally in a brief scuffle while explaining his rubber abilities.

Returning to town, Luffy is himself mistaken for Gally and tied up by the mayor and villagers. The real Gally then attacks Silk and flings Luffy's hat into the sea before ordering his crew to bombard the island. Luffy launches himself at the ship but is knocked into the water by a cannon blast, only to be rescued by the arriving Thousand Sunny and his crewmates. He wrecks Gally's vessel with a Gear 3rd strike, sends the pirate flying, and the Straw Hats give the looted treasure to the townsfolk to rebuild, with Silk painting a straw hat on her restored diner in tribute.

Because the OVA tracks the manga rather than the anime, Brook is already aboard and Roger's face is shown plainly in the opening. Several fight scenes deliberately echo the original We Are! opening, and Oda's joke characters such as Pandaman appear among the villagers rebuilding the town. Luffy's Gear 3 oddly skips its usual shrinking aftereffect, and his finishing move is upgraded from the one-shot's simpler attack since the Gear techniques had not yet existed when the original was drawn.