Cross Epoch

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A cross over devised by One Piece author, Eiichiro Oda, and Dragon Ball Z author, Akira Toriyama.

The cross over is one chapter long and displays the characters living in a world together.
One character from each series is teamed up with their 'counterpart' from the other.

Luffy and Goku (the strongest/lead)
Zoro and Piccilo (the badasses)
Nami and Bulma (the 'babes')
Sanji and Roshi (the perverts)
then Vegeta is a lord with Robin, Usopp, and Trunks as his loyal crew
...
It's quite amusing and very fun

So I hunted this down after hearing it was a crossover between One Piece and Dragonball, because who wouldn't want to read something like that? You have two wonderful artists combining their already loved characters together in what should be an awesome story, right?

Wrong.

The story is completely and totally random, and had I not read One Piece or Dragonball I would have been at a total loss. It makes slight references to minor plot points of the other two stories, but it does not have the "pirates" or "z-fighters" themes at all. It's just these really random characters going around doing their (what we can ... assume) daily routines. It's totally plotless.

The art is wonderful. It's well drawn, the characters fit together seamlessly, and there's a lot of action in the background. Very common of the OP and DB series. In fact, the art is probably the best thing about this manga, because you can see (with official art!) what the characters look like together.

The characters, again, are wonderful. However, they are also using the same personalities from their mother series, so if you haven't read OP or DB before you would be at a total loss as to what is happening, or why they are doing certain things within the manga.

Enjoyment value was okay; again, it's OP and DB, and even if it is a totally crack story, it was amusing to see some characters together. Props out to Sanji and Roshi hanging out together. That was awesome.

Overall, if you have read Dragonball and One Piece, you should probably read Cross Epoch just to say you did. It's not a great story, but it's still fun to look at the art and see what characters Toriyama and Oda decided should work together, based on their personalities and/or gender. It's not any sort of monumental story that you'll dig out a great plot from, but I would say that it is worth reading.

So... Cross Epoch is a thing...

This might be one of the shortest manga review I may end up doing, since Cross Epoch is basically Dragon Ball Minus with One Piece characters... Or rather, a One Piece scenario with Dragon Ball characters shoehorned in it.

The most lackluster aspect of the One-Shot is the story (or for better terms, a lack of one). You see, nothing really happens in Cross Epoch, it´s just a compilation of scenarios of What-If´s that uses both Dragon Ball and One Piece characters (e.g: Vegeta is the lord of a pirate tripulation made up of Ussop, Trunks, etc. but we don´t know ... how or why this pirate tripulation was formed) and on top of all that, it´s really short! (While One-Shots usually strives for 55-60 pages length, Cross Epoch strives for... 19 pages).

The art is really good, combining both the artistic strengths of Toriyama and Oda. What I found surprising, and overall the best thing of this One-Shot, is that Toriyama draws the Dragon Ball characters, while Eiichiro Oda draws the One Piece characters, and it feels nice not having both blend into a single style.

Overall, if you have the curiosity of finding out what is Cross Epoch, go ahead, the One-Shot isn´t long and it has some good art. But if what you´re looking for is a compelling story that unites both Dragon Ball and One Piece... well this isn´t the way to go. At all.