One Piece: Episode of Merry – The Tale of One More Friend

This 2013 feature-length special returns to one of the series' most emotionally charged stretches. Rather than retelling the whole saga, it focuses on the Straw Hats' bond with their first ship, presenting key moments with refreshed animation and a tighter runtime.

Its value lies in how it treats the ship as a true companion rather than a backdrop. For viewers already invested in the crew, the special offers a concentrated dose of adventure, comedy, and grief, building toward a farewell that lands harder because the connections are already established.

This makes it most approachable for existing fans who want an emotional revisit or a polished recap of a pivotal chapter. Newcomers may struggle without prior context, since the special assumes familiarity with the crew's history and the events it compresses.

This 2013 anime special revisits the Straw Hat Pirates' earliest voyages aboard their first ship, the Going Merry, retelling some of the crew's most memorable arcs from the Grand Line with newly produced animation. Monkey D. Luffy and his companions continue their search for the legendary treasure known as the One Piece, but the retelling keeps its attention on the vessel that carried them through those early adventures.

Within that retelling, the Going Merry is treated less like equipment and more like a companion, a presence woven into the daily life of the crew. That bond becomes the emotional center of the story, especially for the crew's sharpshooter, Usopp, whose attachment to the ship runs deepest. As the Merry's condition worsens and the pressures of the sea mount, disagreements arise among the Straw Hats about what the ship can still bear and what loyalty to it demands.

Around that central tension, the special also revisits the crew's clashes with dangerous enemies and the disappearance of their archaeologist, Nico Robin, drawing Luffy and his friends into conflicts that test their trust in one another. The result is a focused look at a single chapter in the Straw Hats' long journey, framed around the question of what a ship means to the people who sail on it.

One Piece: Episode of Merry - The Tale of One More Friend is a single-installment anime special released in 2013 with a runtime of 106 minutes. It is an adaptation drawn from the One Piece manga by Eiichiro Oda, the same source that has supplied the long-running television anime produced by Toei Animation, which began airing in Japan in October 1999. Rather than launching a new serialized run, the special stands as a self-contained production within that broader adaptation line.

The special takes a retrospective approach: it revisits a stretch of the story centered on the Straw Hat crew's first ship, the Going Merry, and rebuilds that material with newly made animation. Its coverage moves through key turning points such as the clash between Luffy and Usopp and the crew's parting from the ship, presenting these events again at feature-scale length instead of in the episodic format of the ongoing series. The framing treats the ship as a full member of the crew, which is reflected in the subtitle's emphasis on one more friend.

Because it condenses and reanimates previously told material rather than advancing the timeline, the special functions as a focused companion piece to the main adaptation and to Oda's original manga, offered as a single roughly feature-length viewing experience rather than as part of a continuing episode count.