Portgas D. Ace

Ace was a tall muscular young man with jaw-length curly black hair. Although they were not blood related, Ace looked remarkably like his foster brother, Luffy. However, Ace was more serious looking than Luffy's lighthearted design, and was also taller and more muscular. He also sported rather childish freckles (inherited from his mother) and tended to make a skeptical facial expression by raising his left eyebrow. Interestingly, his facial features were almost akin to his biological father Gol D. Roger in his youth without his mustache. Ace's tattoos were among his most remarkable, trademark features. He had a tattoo on his back of the Whitebeard symbol—purple bones formed in a cross behind a purple skull with a white mustache—that he described as his pride and joy.[17] Ace had another tattoo on his upper left bicep that spells "ASCE" vertically. The "S" crossed out is a tribute to Sabo as that's his jolly roger. afterwards, he stopped wearing anything over his upper body except when on winter or desert islands due to the weather requirements. He wore black boots, black knee-length shorts with an eyelet-studded orange belt, and a blue pouch belted around his left leg. He also wore a short second belt with a large red "A" on the silver buckle over his right hip, but left it unfastened and threaded the free end along the back of his shorts. A dagger in a green sheath hung at his left hip. On Ace's left arm, he wore a Log Pose and a red and white striped bracelet around his wrist, an orange elbow guard, and his "ASCE" tattoo. He wore a red beaded necklace and an orange hat with two blue smileys, one frowning and one smiling, and a string of red beads sitting above the rim. Two long orange side straps hung down sides of his hat and met at a large medallion of a bull's skull with orange tassels.

Ace was much more intelligent, polite, and generally, more bearable than Luffy, which prompted the Straw Hat Pirates to question whether he was truly related to their captain. While several people who knew Gol D. Roger noted Luffy is quite similar to the late Pirate King, Whitebeard himself claimed that Ace's personality was not at all like his father's. It seems that among the very few things the brothers shared was their recklessness as pirates (and their near-bottomless stomachs). In addition, Ace liked to party as much as his brother does. When he boarded Buggy's ship, he was drawn by the smell of food and decided to enjoy himself while he was there. Ace could be a bit inappropriate though as he once used a woman's skirt to wipe his face while he was dining at Spice Bean in Arabasta.

There were two running gags about Ace. The first was his rather extreme narcolepsy. He tended to randomly fall asleep while eating and conversing, leaving strangers around him wondering if he had died. This was first seen in Arabasta when they thought he died in the middle of eating. The second was that he did a "dine and dash" routine wherever he went. This went back to his younger days with Sabo and Luffy, when they would often dine and dash in the city of Goa, and carried over to adulthood, as shown on three occasions when he was on Drum Island, Arabasta, and Lulusia Kingdom.

Ace was also shown to be quite impulsive, much like his younger brother, as he too would make hasty decisions and, in some cases, neglect listening to reason. This was shown that shortly prior to setting out to hunt Blackbeard for killing Thatch. Whitebeard insisted that Ace should not go after him, yet Ace, despite his immense loyalty and respect for his captain, ignored his warnings and went off to find his former subordinate. Another, albeit more humorous example, was in his mini-story, where during his hunt for Blackbeard, he mistook a man named Dr. Blackbeard for his target, due to coincidentally having a similar name and appearance to Teach. Rather than check to see if he found the man he was looking for, Ace jumped to conclusions too soon and attacked the doctor on sight. It was by then Ace realized too late that he had the wrong man, which got him into a lot of trouble with the villagers.