It wasn’t in Skypiea: the first reference to Luffy’s Nika form dates back 26 years ago
A master of foresight who never ceases to make manga history.
‘One Piece’, years go by and Eiichiro Oda’s work never ceases to surprise us, reaching limits that are hard to believe. Master of improvisation or an absolute genius who measures the times of his own story almost three decades in advance? The Japanese mangaka continues to offer us a story that is in its own right one of the greatest odysseys ever told, and details such as the one that connects a chapter published in 1998 with another of this 2025 is a sample of the greatness of ‘One Piece’.
We are talking about chapter 58, published in September 1998, and the detail in question appears in the first mini-story that appeared in the work: ‘Adventure of Buggy’s crew’. This was from chapter 35 to 75, and the detail that connects it with Nika was in chapters 58 and 59, showing the dream of Richie, the lion of Buggie’s crew, while Mohji and Cabaji are fighting.
A mind that is decades ahead
In episode 58 of ‘One Piece’ we see Richie dreaming of leading his own pirate crew, while in episode 59 we see him face a dragon-like monster while carrying a sword, shield and clad in a cape, all while fire seems to surround them.
A foreshadowing at its finest? Everything seems to point to the fact that Oda used Richie, a character who is a lion, an animal that is a symbol of justice and power, and in some countries represents the sun, to give a hint of the message we would receive almost three decades later.
“The crescent moon saw a dream”, a text that we met in chapter 1138, and that revisiting the work of Eiichiro Oda makes us smile at something that had been planned for a long time.
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