Dragon Ball is one of those series that feels like everyone under the sun has experienced or at least has heard of. Even my grandmother can at least recognize Goku as the guy in the orange karate gi with the spiky, golden hair. However, my experience with the series is a unique one as unlike seemingly every other person my age who enjoys anime, I didn’t grow up with Dragon Ball. I was the prime target audience for Dragon Ball as a child. Not only did I play video games and enjoy action-orientated shows like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Avatar: The Last Airbender but I also took mixed martial arts classes for a large portion of my life as well. However, for some reason, I never tried giving the show a shot. It may have been due to my parents thinking it was too violent for me at the time or a general lack of interest at the time but regardless of the reason, I never sat down and tried watching it. As I got older and became more into anime, I started to realize how much of an influence Dragon Ball had on the medium. I recognized the series’s importance but still didn’t have any motivation to start is largely due to the daunting size. My feelings towards the series would remain that way until I saw one piece of Dragon Ball media that would make me want to finally dive into the series.
I consider myself to be more into video games than I am other mediums and while there have been other Dragon Ball games in the past, none of them ever stood out to me as being something that I needed to play. That changed when, however, when I saw Dragon Ball Fighterz. I didn’t love any of the characters nor could I appreciate all of the small references within the animations but I loved the look of the game and as a fighting game fan, the fast-paced feel of it really grabbed my interest. After seeing people playing the game an adoring it, I really wanted to play it myself so I decided to give the series its long-overdue chance.
To preface, I decided to jump straight into Dragon Ball Z blind instead of starting with the original series. After listening in on some of my friend’s opinions who were better versed in Dragon Ball than I, I came to the conclusion that while it may be worth experiencing at some point, the original series just isn’t incredibly relevant anymore in the overall series. While this did lead towards me not knowing certain characters and their relationships with others, I was able to quickly catch onto the world of Dragon Ball. I also started by watching Kai due to the large size of the series being incredibly daunting.
Going into DBZ already being well versed in anime provided a much different experience than most other people had who grew up with the series. While I can appreciate Dragon Ball for being the pioneer of shonen, it’s creativity couldn’t blow me away because I had already become accustomed to works that had been inspired by it that came in the future. The idea of people fighting while flying in the air, throwing out energy blasts and moving faster than humanly possible wasn’t foreign to me. I absolutely love the intensity and absurdity of shonen fights but I had already become well accustomed to them through other shows such as Gurren Lagann, My Hero Academia and Kill La Kill. For so many other people, Dragon Ball was their first exposure to this but because it wasn’t for me, I couldn’t fall in love with it as much as others have but I was still able to enjoy it.
Dragon Ball at its core is about its characters and their growth as they become stronger both in body and spirit. I may not have been given a proper introduction and missed large amounts of backstory for characters but I was still able to greatly enjoy the cast. The three characters I feel embody this sense of growth the most, Gohan, Vegeta, and Trunks are the ones I became most attached to over the course of the story. It helps that these three characters are first introduced in DBZ meaning that I wouldn’t be missing out on backstory from original Dragon Ball. Gohan’s more timid nature mixed with his immense innate potential provided for a really interesting character that I in a way could relate to. He’s caught in the middle ground of having the power that could more than rival his father and everyone else he knows but at the same time wielding that power goes against his more pacifistic personality. Seeing how he learns to own that power when he and the people he cares about need it the most during the Cell saga was one of my personal favorite moments in the series.
Vegeta is another character that I grew to enjoy. He at first sees himself as a high and mighty prince but throughout the course of the series, he continuously has the pedestal he built himself to be crushed time and time again as others get stronger. This causes a conflict within himself where he feels as if he lost sight of who he was meant to be by having a family on Earth and not even being a proper father for his son. However, he learns to accept his place in the world and be comfortable with it while still owning who he is and I found this to be an extremely enjoyable character progression to see in the series. Seeing his interactions with Trunks as he slowly learned to be a better father made me enjoy the two characters.
Another large element of DBZ is the rivals and villains that these characters face. Each individual arc has its own predominant villain that has the spotlight for a long period of time. I found that most of the major villains weren’t entirely well developed as characters with a lot of them only feeling like obstacles for the protagonists to overcome. Because of this, it was hard to feel engaged with a lot of the conflicts.
I enjoyed the rest of the other cast but I wasn’t able to grow largely attached to them. This could be my own fault due to skipping the original series but I do feel like part of the reason was that there weren’t a lot of times where we were able to see the characters outside of combat. I know the action is the main focus of the series but I do wish there was more an of balance between it and the slower moments.
The beginning of the series with the Saiyan Arc was extremely enjoyable for me. The pacing felt fast but I think a large part of that was because of me skipping the original series. Through me doing so, I was constantly getting introduced to new characters and elements of the series that had already been established before. This on top of the new elements that Z introduced such as characters like Gohan and the existence of other Saiyans, meant that there was always something new being thrown at me. Despite the splurge of information thrown at me during the first few episodes, I was able to keep track of most characters and their relationships with others. There were some elements that I wasn’t able to fully understand until doing a small background check such as Kami and Piccolo’s relationship. However, these plot devices were minor for the most part and I was still able to enjoy the beginning of the show. The Saiyan arc helped with the fact that I skipped the original series due to it spending a lot of its time separating itself from aspects of it. This can be seen with how they not only introduced several new concepts that would take its place like the Saiyans but also getting rid of certain elements like the Great Ape transformation. Because of the series starting on somewhat of a clean slate, It helped me get more involved with it.
Where DBZ really took off for me was the Frieza arc but at the same time is where I ran into one major problem with the series at least when it comes to watching it. This is where I feel like both the action and story are at their height in the series. The beginning of the arc has a perfect balance of plot progression and fights. Each encounter, whether it be squaring off against members of the Ginyu Force or different members of the Z fighters going up against Frieza, helps progress the plot forward all while building up to Goku arriving at Planet Namek. With each encounter increasing in scale and tension, it feels like there’s almost never a dull or unimportant moment with it.
One thing that I believe is incredibly difficult to appreciate nowadays is the way the plot builds up to the existence of the Super Saiyan. During the time of the manga’s initial run and to an extent the original airing of the anime, nobody knew what a Super Saiyan actually was. The mystery of what a Super Saiyan was heightened through Frieza’s apparent fear of the concept. One moment that I feel really took advantage of it was Vegeta’s bluff of achieving it. Because of nobody knowing exactly what a Super Saiyan was, you couldn’t tell if Vegeta had truly done it or not. All of this helps build-up to the moment where Goku finally becomes the Super Saiyan but its at this moment where I ran into one of my biggest problems with watching DBZ.
Before this point, the Frieza arc does a fantastic job of pacing with each major encounter building up towards to the next. This comes to a screeching halt however when Goku begins to fight Frieza. The fight starts at episode 43 of Kai with Goku turning Super Saiyan in episode 47 and the fight concluding in episode 53. When you do the math, Goku and Frieza fight each other for a whole three and a half hours which is longer than the average movie. During this period of time, the entire saga comes to a complete stop as Goku and Frieza go at it for what feels like an eternity while not building up to anything. This is especially bad when Goku turns Super Saiyan as with Krillin being gone and Gohan returning Piccolo and Bulma to safety, there are almost no background elements to the fight for two hours. I love shonen fights but when fights get dragged out for this long, it’s so easy to forget why they are even happening in the first place and all emotional impact that the fight may have in the start becomes lost. By the end of the fight, it feels as if Vegeta’s and Krillin’s deaths were years ago and that the intensity of the emotional impact that those events feel like they disappeared around the same time. It took me a long time to finish the Frieza arc because of this and if I felt this way about 10 episodes, I can’t imagine me ever finishing the original DBZ with this being stretched across 24 episodes and being an additional 5 hours long.
When I finally finished watching the Frieza arc, I came to the conclusion that I would from then on read the manga for the rest of the series. Seeing as how the pacing suffered so much during this part of the show, I wanted to avoid that entirely by reading at my own pace. Getting through the series would also be much faster reading it than it would be me watching it.
While I enjoyed the Cell arc, a large portion of it felt confused as it’s constantly switching villains and their appearances. It starts with Frieza, who was presumed dead, and his father coming to Earth but immediately getting curb stomped by Trunks who appears out of nowhere. Then it introduces the concept of Androids with the introduction of #19 and #20 who were by far the least appealing villains in the series. While they weren’t around for long, going from Frieza to what was essentially a weird old guy and his fat clown, doll (?) friend who were both androids was really unexciting. Thankfully, they get replaced soon by a much more appealing group of androids with #16, #17, and #18. #16, #17, and #18 were really entertaining due to the mix of their laid back and care-free attitude with their extreme strength. But as with the other androids before, this trio gets shafted in favor of another villain.
Cell’s personality is entertaining with how he constantly taunts his opponents with his pure strength. However, he didn’t have as strong of a motivation as Frieza for wanting to fight so his reasoning for causing conflict simply being to grow stronger made him less appealing to me. While I wasn’t as attracted to Cell as a villain, his presence brought out one of my favorite moments in the series which was his fight with Gohan.
The Buu saga felt like a strange way to end the series but I still was able to enjoy it. The start of it with the Super Saiyaman was the most enjoyable part of the series for me as it did something that I wish there was a lot more of which was having the main cast live their normal lives and interact with regular society. It also helps that it focuses on Gohan in a light that we haven’t seen before. I wish we got to see more of his antics with Videl as the Super Saiyaman but it’s not long before the action of the Buu saga takes precedence over this.
Initially, Buu was starting to become one of my favorite villains due to how different he was to every prior antagonist. He’s easily the biggest threat of the series but he wasn’t a cold-hearted brute like the rest of villains before him. Having a more childish, almost animal-like force provided for a different dynamic between Buu and the other protagonists. However as the arc goes on, Buu gradually loses this personality and becomes more of just an existent force rather than an actual character which was much less appealing.
Within the Buu arc, there’s a constant sense as if there is too much happening at any given time. From constantly introducing new concepts like the Majins, the Kais, Super Saiyan 3, and Fusion alongside important events like Vegeta sacrificing himself and Buu killing all life on Earth, the arc as a whole feels like it doesn’t know what to do with itself and throws a large number of ideas at the wall to see what sticks before having to wrap up the series.
Dragon Ball Z for me was an enjoyable yet flawed experience. I can see and appreciate how important it was for Japanese pop culture and its spread in the West however it’s not without its fair share of problems. The action and combat paved the way for other shonen manga and anime but with character’s lives and motivations revolving solely around fighting, it makes it hard to connect to the characters fully. Watching other shonen anime that learned from Dragon Ball Z definitely affected my judgment of it but regardless, I still had an enjoyable time watching and reading the series.
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