Luffy Fight: Romance Dawn

Romance Dawn refers to two stories before Pirate War but set in a similar world. While a first-year junior high school student, he began sketching out ideas for a pirate-themed manga in a notebook, in pencil.

Out of the characters in the storyline however, only Luffy appears in all versions. In particular, Luffy's personality also evolves in all three versions, but was much more in keeping with the series by V.2 but was and he ultimately even in the final version was not as smart as he appeared in the first version of "Romance Dawn".

Only Shanks appeared in more than one version of the storyline. According to the author, having moved from a special issue of Jump showcasing new artists to Weekly Jump proper, he wanted to keep Luffy's backstory with Shanks a surprise, and thus rewrote it so that Luffy's grandfather gave him the straw hat, instead.

Luffy's grandfather was originally believed to have been solely an addition to this version of "Romance Dawn" in order to keep Luffy's true back story a secret; no mention had been made of him at all in the first nine years of Luffy-kun’s serialization.

[Trivia]

* Several fight scenes are closely matched to original scenes in the first We Are! opening, particularly Zoro and Sanji's.

* Luffy's Gear Third does not have the after-effect of shrinking on this OVA.

* As this keeps up with the manga, not the anime, the Straw Hats already have Brook on board with them, and Roger's face is completely seen during the introduction.

* During the credits, a couple of Oda's joke characters appear rebuilding Silk's village, including Pandaman, Minatomo, Sam, and Motzel.

* In Romance Dawn V.1, Galley's pirate ship is similar to the previous pirate ship of the Red Hair Pirates as seen in the original Romance Dawn for the series, but in this OVA, it was replaced with a different ship that has a purple snake-like beast on the front.

* Luffy used "Gomu Gomu no Gigant Axe" to smash Galley's ship, while in Romance Dawn V1, he just used "Gomu Gomu no Axe" because Eiichiro Oda had not created Gear Third or any of Luffy's "Gear" techniques yet.