Special tie-in OVA for One Piece: Powerful World the film is free to watch on the franchise’s official YouTube channel for a limited time. Volume 0 is lost to media, with physical copies of both the OVA and manga volumes existing in very small numbers. Uploading to YouTube is a rare opportunity to watch short animations from an official source.
The tie-in was written by One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda, much like the Strong World movie itself, making it canon for the story’s larger timeline. Even so, trying to see it is a futile exercise as very few copies exist. Uploading to YouTube, while welcome, is not particularly accessible to English fans due to the lack of subtitles. Compounding the problem is that the lost episode will only be available for three months.
Strong World Episode 0 is free to watch – for three months, without subtitles
Volume 0 serves as a prequel chronicling the rise, fall, and escape of the film’s villain, Shiki the Golden Lion, who is also Gol D. Roger’s rival. Of course, watching or reading it was a challenge: the actual manga was only given to the first 1.5 million people to see Strong World in theaters. The OVA itself is even more obscure, existing only as 3,000 DVDs donated by House Foods in 2009, who collaborated on the adaptation. The upload of the OVA was made to celebrate the return of the movie One Piece: Red to theaters.
Unfortunately, the video is clearly catered to Japanese fans: it has no English subtitles, although the video’s description is written alongside it. For international fans, this means the value of the upload is more historical as it will be the best opportunity to watch the OVA in the highest quality, with Toei’s visuals and animation not affected by any transfers to disk. Owners of the DVDs will still have the last laugh, however, as the video will disappear at the end of the year, sending Volume 0 back into the void of long-lost media and collectibles extremely rare.
Thankfully, Episode 0 is mostly a novelty, consisting of 18 minutes of plot running at the speed of light, but its rarity only shows how important it was to preserve all and any animation , if only for posterity’s sake. The YouTube upload at least confirms that Toei is in possession of the master copy. Perhaps in the future, they will see fit to upload the OVA again when it’s time to celebrate another One Piece milestone. Until then, fans will have to wait a few more months to see this secret part of One Piece: Powerful World.
Source: One Piece YouTube Channel, Anime News Network