One Piece: Heart of Gold

I think Olga is an extremely appealing character. One Piece could use more lolibabas. Other than that, there's not much to be said about this special. It has a solid plotline, decent original characters, it's well animated, and the characterization is not terribly off. What else could you possibly want from a non canonical special episode?
It's also worth mentioning that it's a prequel to Film: GOLD, but it stands on its own, mostly just teasing some characters and events. I think I enjoyed it more than the film, even.
In conclusion, watch this for Olga, ok? She's very cute.

No spoilers

This is a very long teaser of One Piece: Gold. It kinda follows the silver mine arc.
Production quality is good, there's nothing to say about it.

The story itself however... It sucks so much for something labelled as One Piece.
The crew is behaving normally except for the fact that their interactions together are pretty bland.
It's like someone who's not familiar with the show watched a few episodes and decided to write the dialogues. Sure, it seems as usual but it has this quickly done and fake feeling.

A new character is introduced (a child) and is one of the most annoying characters I've seen in One ... Piece. I literally skipped some "sentimental" parts because I was too annoyed. And the whole story revolve around this unlikable character.

The bad guys seemed interesting at first because their goal wasn't money but rather excitement for adventures. Yet as the story progresses, they are being pictured as guys who don't care about their friends and would do everything for the money. I insist on this because the scenario insisted on this.

Then you have a long and poorly written dialogue about the values of friendship between luffy and them while they fight. My eyes were rolling the whole time.
Sure, in One Piece, you get those same dialogues about friendship but there is always a good reason for them to happen. Here, it's as if the authors thought: "oh yeah, we almost forgot, dialogue about friendship, where should we put that ? there ? yeah, whatever".

The only character that I liked (the dad), behaved like a normal One Piece character. Just the right screen time and a good balance between comic and dramatic actions.

One last thing, the fights were god awful. Luffy and his crew has been training for 2 years and they get that much difficulty to beat a bunch of low pirates ? The Zoro from baroque works could have beaten all of them alone.

In the end, if you're expecting One Piece quality in terms of story, just skip this one. If you haven't anything left to watch about One Piece then, you might enjoy it.

- Well this is meant to be a prequel to the new movie "One Piece Film: Gold" and to be honest i don't think that i need it.

Story:
-The Story is very simple. New girl appears and we are going into an adventure to find a piece of gold \o/
In the adventure, exists a villain called Mad Treasure (Horrible character btw) that will be trying to get to the gold before the StrawHats, while being in their way.

Art:
-I actually was pleasantly surprised with the art. Taking into account the anime series of One Piece that the art usually is really not that good :/ This special ... had some really beautiful art and fluid animation.

Sound:
-The sound was very average, dont recall having something special about it, just the usually One Piece Soundtracks.

Character:
- The characters was what it really failed for me. I think that the only characters that it needs to be mentioned are the villain called "Mad Treasure", Olga and her father... and i really didn't enjoy any of these characters.

- The Villain was really bad. In the beginning the episode i remember that he said that he likes treasure hunting because of the excitement... and ended up using the StrawHat crew to pass the traps. Why? Because he is a villan and needs to be a bad person -,-''
- Olga was that generic character that appear from time to time, that in the beginning of the episode don't trust people and in the end of the episodeend up being friends with the StrawHats.
- Olga's father was a simple character.. Just there so that in the beginning of the episode Olga started with hating him and liking him in the end. (Never saw something similiar.. really original...)