After a chilled introduction in the figure market with the Half Age Girls series in mid-2009, Bandai shifted the focus from cute girls to popular shonen series with the remarketed Half Age Characters series in mid-2011, this time with a stronger impact. This figure series started with Gintama, Naruto Shippuden and Ao no Exorcist. The concept has then been applied to One Piece in late 2011 with the New World version of the Straw Hat pirate crew.
With the Half Age concept, Bandai introduced a new design style, the half deformation style. It can be understood as a middle ground between realistic and super deformed rendering, pushing half way towards the increased roundness of SD characters while keeping a realistic head-body proportion, resulting in a cute early teenage rendering.
Figures have an average size of 9 cm and come with a stand base. Each set contains 8 figures, 4 characters and their alternate versions sporting subtle pose changes.
This special set of 2 figures was pre-orderable at Premium Bandai shopping website starting December 26th 2011, by winning first a dedicated raffle. This set contains Luffy and Ace as modeled in volume 1 but this time holding their respective hats.