The pace has been frantic and the artwork of a consistently high standard, especially when you consider how detailed each cell of the One Piece manga has been as each cell seems crammed full of, not new weird and wonderful characters but also, some of the most important characters in the whole of the One Piece universe! If you’ve been following the manga, you’ll know what I mean.  

Cross Epoch (Fan Art)

In honour/respect of Oda taking a break, I thought I would do a quick review of one of his collaborative efforts with Akira Toriyama, on a one-shot/one-off manga called ‘Cross Epoch’.

Now who is Akira Toriyama? You may not recognise his name, but if I were to mention ‘Dragon Ball’, I would guess you would know exactly what I was talking about and Toriyama is the brain behind it all. Taking a look at his bibliography on Wikipedia, it’s clear that aside from Dragon Ball, there is very little else that he has done aside from a number of one-shot manga pieces.

Cross Epoch, is a fusion of both Oda and Toriyama best known works, namely, One Piece and Dragon Ball, respectively. It’s sees a cross over escapade involving all the main characters of each manga, teaming up to defeat a common foe, which happens to be none other than the complete nuisance, Buggy the Clown and Emperor Pilaf, who together form a gang called the “Pilappaggy Villains Union”.

The Whole Gang! (Fan Art)

You’ll find all the characters involved and in true anime/manga fashion they all have their perfect counterparts that would be their equivalent character in the other manga, as  each  One Piece character teams  up with a character from Dragon Ball.

As it is a one-shot manga there is not much that can be accomplished  in 20 pages, so the storyline in weak and a bit on the wacky side as so made little sense to me, but then again it could be said it’s not really about the storyline as it is more about having a bit of fun and seeing the characters in completely different context. Something particularly for the fans that would get a kick out of seeing these two very successful manga in their own right join together.

The drawing and artwork is very similar to One Piece in style and layout and the characters are all that you would expect from an Oda piece. I’m not exactly clear on how or what Toriyama contributed in terms of style aside from maybe assisting in the storyline.

Overall, if your a One Piece fan or a Dragon Ball fan (if they still exist), it’s worth a look but not much more. Enjoy it for what it is, a bit of light hearted fun by some seriously talented mangaka.

Have you read Cross Epoch? What were your thoughts? Tell us in the comments below.

A DrangonBall Z fan? Read our review of the anime TV series.