A review by mehsi
One Piece, Vol. 1: Romance Dawn by Eiichiro Oda

5.0

It is time to get started! Luffy journey starts now!


Everyone knows the story of One Piece, overly happy and confident boy eats a forbidden fruit and becomes all stretchy/elastic and decides to become the King of Pirates and finding treasure. Along the way many adventures and pirates are passing by. I had seen the anime for a few episodes, but I just was so daunted by the whole prospect of 100s of episodes that I decided to say HECK no. Reading a hundred of books is more up my speed, though I wonder if the library will ever get more than one. Haha, I am sure that they didn’t realise that there were so many volumes. With their budget it will take a while or never. But I am still happy I got to read the first volume! And I had a blast!

We first meet Luffy as a kid. Excited. Eager. Overzealous. Trying to be the best. But he is still a kid so you can imagine that the peeps around him treat him as such. XD But he is dedicated and I loved that. I loved his sense of justice and the sense of acting when something isn’t right. Like we see when the pirates that visit his town (SHANKS!!!) get belittled by some bandits. Luffy is not amused. I have to say I love little Luffy, but I had a big laugh when he ate that fruit and I knew that would be the start of everything. Even though it also meant that he would never be able to swim (though I guess given all that he goes through in this volume he doesn’t need to be able to swim, he has some great luck). I loved following Luffy when he went on his adventure. When he started out with a small rowboat searching for treasure and a crew. And oh yes, a bigger ship as well.

I loved meeting up with new people, new villains, see battles, see friendship develop, and more! We get to meet two of Luffy’s crew, though one of them isn’t part of the crew yet as we only get to see her and her kick-ass talents in the last part. Say hi to Nami and Zoro! Zoro we get to meet much closer as a lot of the volume is about Luffy trying to help/save him after things happened with the Marine (who btw are a couple of dicks, well especially the leader). There is a lot chaos, lots of exciting moments, but also tons of moments that had me in stitches.

The art was pretty nice but I had a bit of a laugh how Luffy went from looking pretty grown-up to being much younger looking again. Make up your mind! But other than that, I did love the details, teh fights, and the rest!

All in all, I hope that my library will add more of this series because I definitely want to read more! This is much more doable than 1049 eps x 20 min. XD

Review first posted at https://twirlingbookprincess.com/