One Piece’s Romance Dawn Special Confirms Cast

With the Wano Country Arc moving hot and heavy in both the One Piece anime and manga, and the fourteenth film in the franchise about to release in North America with One Piece: Stampede, the popular pirate franchise doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. An all new television special will take us back to a time before Luffy became the leader of the Straw Hat Pirates, exploring a prequel special that was originally created as the preliminary chapter of One Piece. Now, the upcoming special has just confirmed its voice cast, with new and old characters alike.

Twitter User NewWorldArtur shared the voice cast, confirming that of course Monkey D. Luffy’s japanese voice actor would make a return for this special, and filled in just which actors would be supplying the voices for new characters Ann, Spiel, and Balloon:

As mentioned earlier, Romance Dawn was originally created by Eiichiro Oda as the main plotline that One Piece would follow, with Luffy still acting as the lead but this new cast of characters apparently making up the Straw Hat Pirates, or their equivalent gang. Premiering on October 20th, fans of One Piece won’t have to wait long to dive into this new interpretation of the franchise that follows Monkey D. Luffy earlier on in his life.

Romance Dawn will take fans to a time before Luffy got his patented facial scar beneath his eye, also exploring his first encounter with his Devil Fruit, as well as the first time he learned to use, and eventually master, his rubber abilities. It will definitely be interesting to watch this special and see what Oda originally had in store for the series overall.

Will you be catching One Piece: Romance Dawn? What’s been your favorite anime “prequel” within the medium to date? Feel free to let us know in the comments or hit me up directly on Twitter @EVComedy to talk all things comics, anime, and the Straw Hat Pirates!

Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece first began serialization in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. It has since been collected into over 80 volumes, and has been a critical and commercial success worldwide with many of the volumes breaking printing records in Japan. The manga has even set a Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book by a single author, and is the best-selling manga series worldwide with over 430 million copies sold. The series still ranked number one in manga sales in 2018, which surprised fans of major new entries.