One Piece: Episode of East Blue - Luffy and His Four Crewmates' Great Adventure

ワンピースエピソードオブ東の海[イーストブルー] ~ルフィと4人の仲間の大冒険~ (One Piece: Episode of East Blue - Luffy to 4-nin no Nakama no Daibouken)

7.8(25,080)

MAL Score

Ranked #1054

Popularity #3702

Action
Adventure
Fantasy

Episodes: 1
Duration: 1 hr 46 min
Aired: Aug 26, 2017
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

Gold Roger’s final words ignite a worldwide rush for treasure, ushering in the Great Pirate Era. With the Grand Line on the horizon, Monkey D. Luffy—now able to stretch like rubber after eating the Gum-Gum Fruit despite losing the ability to swim—sets his sights on becoming King of the Pirates. Along the way, he gathers the first members of the Straw Hat crew: the swordsman Roronoa Zoro, the sharpshooter Usopp, the cook Sanji, and the thief “Cat Burglar” Nami, as they prepare to brave the open sea together.

Years earlier in Windmill Village, Luffy’s dream is shaped by his admiration for the pirate Red-Haired Shanks. When mountain bandits threaten the peace, Shanks refuses to be provoked—until Luffy is put in danger, and Shanks steps in to protect him, even at great personal cost during a clash at sea. Before departing, Shanks entrusts Luffy with his straw hat and a promise to return it once he’s become a great pirate. A decade later, Luffy finally leaves home in a small boat, ready to begin the journey he’s imagined since childhood.

Otaku Consensus

Episode of East Blue is best read as a 2017 Toei anniversary compression of One Piece’s foundational crew material: Takashi Ootsuka’s direction and Tomohiro Nakayama’s script keep the special moving with unusual speed for the franchise, while the Nami and Sanji sections benefit from dedicated animation-direction oversight. Its 7.84 MAL score and 76 AniList score reflect a broadly warm but not ecstatic response: fans value the polished adaptation and nostalgia hit, but the common complaint is that the one-episode format necessarily sacrifices the gradual emotional buildup that made the original East Blue saga land.

Why You Should Watch

Watch this if you want the early One Piece emotional toolkit in a concentrated, modernized Toei package without committing to dozens of TV episodes first. It works especially well for returning fans who want to revisit the first Straw Hat bonds with cleaner 2017 production values, or for curious viewers who want a low-friction sample of why One Piece’s ensemble chemistry became so durable. Think of it less as a replacement for the series and more as a shounen refresher in the spirit of Dragon Ball Z Kai’s “get to the point” appeal, but with the adventurous, found-family energy that defines One Piece. The special is also useful as a tonal bridge: it highlights the franchise’s mix of absurd powers, swordplay, pirate iconography, and sincere character vows in one sitting.

Key Characters

M
Monkey D. Luffy
Luffy is compelling here because the special foregrounds him as a shounen lead whose optimism is not naivety but a recruiting force that changes the emotional temperature of every crew member’s story.
R
Roronoa Zoro
Zoro gives the East Blue crew its hard-edged discipline, and fans often treat his early material as the point where One Piece proves its comedy can coexist with severe personal resolve.
N
Nami
Nami’s section stands out because the production assigns it its own animation director, matching her role as the early crew member whose guarded pragmatism most strongly tests Luffy’s trust-first worldview.
S
Sanji
Sanji brings a different kind of loyalty to the crew dynamic, and his part receives separate animation-direction credit, underlining how the special treats each recruitment story as its own emotional set piece.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
Toei Animation produced this as a single finished special airing on August 26, 2017, giving early One Piece material a compact presentation rather than a standard weekly-episode rhythm.
2
The special’s structure is not a simple episode-by-episode remake; AniList’s Achronological Order tag reflects how it organizes early crew material around memory, recruitment, and character-defining flashpoints.
3
Midori Matsuda served as Chief Animation Director and also handled the Nami Part as Animation Director, giving that section an explicitly credited visual supervisor beyond the overall production pipeline.
4
Akihiro Oota is credited as Animation Director for the Sanji Part, a notable production choice that separates the special into character-focused units instead of treating the East Blue recap as one uniform block.
5
Its database reception sits in a strong-but-not-canonical-masterpiece zone: MAL records a 7.84 from more than 25,000 votes, while AniList lists a 76/100 score and 140 favourites, suggesting appreciation tempered by recap-format limitations.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: The full Japanese title, One Piece: Episode of East Blue - Luffy to 4-nin no Nakama no Daibouken, literally frames the special around Luffy and four crewmates, making its subject the pre-Grand Line core of the Straw Hats.
Fun fact 2: Eiichirou Oda is credited as Original Creator, while the special itself was produced by Toei Animation, the same studio responsible for the long-running One Piece television anime.
Fun fact 3: The special arrived in 2017, the 20th anniversary year of the One Piece manga’s 1997 debut, which helps explain why it revisits the franchise’s starting point rather than advancing the current TV storyline.
Fun fact 4: Masayuki Satou is credited as Character Designer, while Midori Matsuda’s dual credit as Chief Animation Director and Nami Part Animation Director points to a production with both overall correction work and character-specific supervision.
Fun fact 5: The staff data includes Glauco Marques as Brazilian Portuguese ADR Director, a reminder that One Piece specials often have an international afterlife beyond their original Japanese broadcast.