One Piece Novel A [Ace's Story] Review

One Piece: Ace's Story

I've honestly never had too much time to read light novels thanks to my workload -- that's the neat part about manga and comic books, really. They're so much easier to digest when you want to partially turn your brain off but still consume media. But I got these novels alongside the Bleach: Can't Fear Your World trilogy, and over the past week, I quickly got through the two parts of One Piece: Novel A. Or as it is localized into English, One Piece: Ace's Story. 

And... it's a well-written set of light novels, I suppose, for what they are. It's less of a "prequel" and more of a "let's fill in the blanks" from when Ace departed on his little dinghy and ended up working under Whitebeard. And there's always the sense that the author (who isn't Oda, but Oda supervised the novel) probably wanted to do more, but couldn't really do too much without contradicting the fact provided by the source material, the manga, that Ace didn't reveal or deal with any of his angst around his status as Gol D. Roger's son until much, much later. Again, the dialogue is snappy enough and we go through a lot of locations as Ace journeys through the New World that it never really gets too boring, but there's always the sense that the novels kind of ended in a rather strange place. 

Going through the novel's events quickly, the first novel is mainly told from the POV of Masked Deuce, Ace's eventual first mate and later on the ship's doctor. The Deuce POV did go on for a bit too long as he grouses about his own terrible dad before bonding over Ace as the two of them are stuck in a deserted island together. The two are antagonistic for a while, before they become friends. In this deserted island they find and eat the Mera Mera no Mi together, although Ace chomped down on the fruit first and ends up getting the flame-flame powers. 

The second half of the first novel basically goes through a lot of Ace's backstory (which all One Piece fans already know about) and Ace's 'rage against the world' mentality before stopping at the point that they leave Sabaody and enter the ocean to go down to Fishman Island. Throughout the first novel we also get a couple of secondary characters -- the rest of the Spade Pirates, of which the shut-in teacher Mihal; the pirate otaku Skull and the cute lynx Kotatsu get the most screentime. 

We also get a couple of confrontations with Marine Ensign Isuka, who... who is probably supposed to be the Smoker to Ace's Luffy, but I'm rather sorry to say that she just isn't all that interesting. She's shown constantly to be bumbling and one-note as the Marine pursuer who isn't actually evil, just believes in the 'good' justice. Later on in Sabaody things come to a head when Isuka hands Ace the Shichibukai recruitment letter... but Ace, of course, refuses to be yoked to the World Government. The final villain of the novel is Vice Admiral Dorrow (who hasn't had a presence until their final confrontation) who has Haki, a pair of flamethrowers, and the rather shoehorned in revelation that he was the one responsible for killing Isuka's parents as collateral damage in the name of capturing a group of pirates. 

And that's where the first novel ended. And... I really honestly do think that the novel would've been a bit more exciting and more substantial if Isuka has had a much more interesting or antagonistic relationship with Ace and Deuce, or if perhaps we get like a bit more with Ace recruiting other members of the Spade Pirates. 

The second novel is a bit more... inconsistent, I feel. It starts off with the Spade Pirates in Fish-Man Island, leading to Ace burning down the Whitebeard flag there after listening to all of the talks from the people there about pirates and whatnot, while Ace just wants to make a big name for himself to eclipse Gol D. Roger's legacy. There are a lot of interesting call-backs to the main world-building in One Piece, like references to the Yonko dynamic, the Luffy and Sabo backstory, a bunch of other characters including a cameo by Aladdin... but ultimately I do think that the story could've actually involved these side-characters a bit more. 

The second novel shines best when Ace actually interacts with other characters in the One Piece world. We get to see the fact that he actually walked up to Shanks' base, introduces himself in a rather dorky way as someone from the same village as Luffy and Makino. There's then a confrontation between Jinbei (who sees Ace as someone who disrespects Whitebeard and Fish-Man Island) that lasted five days. Very cool sequence, and it even fits in nicely to how Ace and Jinbei has had interactions in the manga as well. 

And then the rest of the novel has Whitebeard one-shot Ace, realize that he's a good man for trying to ensure his crew's escape, before Whitebeard basically kidnapping Ace and 'training' him to be a better man and captain that sees how the world functions, I guess? A lot of the novel at this point just delves into Ace realizing how badass and awesome the Whitebeard protection network is, and while Masked Deuce still does have a couple of scenes here and there, we primarily deal with Ace's dynamic with fourth division commander Thatch and the future Blackbeard, Marshall D. Teach. 

From all of these interactions Ace basically decides to respect Whitebeard's dynamic, culminating in him and Blackbeard shutting down a slave ring run by some gorilla-man called Oliva (which involves a sting operation that isn't as interesting as it sounds). I do really like that it does give Ace and Thatch's relationship a bit more of a context, and even this early on Teach is already pretty much a borderline psychopath who just knows when to control his temper while he bided his time. A lot of neat buildup and foreshadowing on Teach's true plans, about how he gets a bit more defensive when the other Whitebeard pirates joke about how Teach likes a certain Devil Fruit (the Clear-Clear Fruit is the Joke) and how he's ready to murder people that dare disrespect him or Whitebeard. 

The Ace/Whitebeard dynamic is... it's all right, I suppose. It's an extension of a series of scenes that we saw in the manga, and with us having a quasi-Whitebeard POV (there's a nice conversation between him and Deuce) the interaction feels less of a Stockholm Syndrome kidnapping and more of a way to get Ace to understand the code of the pirate and how to not be a selfish person, I guess? But I really do think that the novel probably could've ended better with a specific moment from the manga -- that moment years later when Ace finds that Blackbeard had killed Thatch, which is the very anathema of everything Ace learned from Blackbeard, and pays off Thatch's storyline in this manga too. 

That's a fair amount of nitpicking on my part, I recognize, but those are things that I thought about when I read through the manga. Regardless, it is a light novel that's pretty easy and, well, 'light' to read. Hardly essential, and it doesn't really give us too mcuh new information or characterization, but very nic to experience this story regardless!