Everything I Know about Dragon Ball Comes from Videogames

I don’t know shit about Dragon Ball. It’s an age thing: none of the comics or cartoons were popular in America until I was well out of childhood, and although college was a time of great personal discovery for me none of it involved cartoons or games or anything like that. Manga wasn’t even a thing yet in the States when I was at peak Dragon Ball age, and anime was a weird, illicit hobby for strange older men who bought overpriced VHS tapes at comic conventions or Suncoast. I knew one guy who was super into anime in middle school and for entirely unrelated reasons our friendship didn’t last past the 7th grade. (He tried to show me one of those mythical anime porns that you only heard vague whispers of at Dragon Con and I shut that shit down immediately, and even that wasn’t why we stopped hanging out. Dude was weird in a myriad of ways. Like, a bad weird.) If you weren’t around in the ‘80s or early ‘90s it’s probably impossible to realize the absolute lack of any impact anime and manga had on mainstream American pop culture; the closest we got were those chopped up Robotech seasons that were kind of a fringe thing in the mid ‘80s, and the mecha aesthetic of The Transformers—which, of course, was localized to feel like one of the most American damn things ever. So yes: I did not know shit about Dragon Ball, and still know very little today, outside of what videogames have taught me.

What I have learned from games has helped me understand why Dragon Ball has resonated with so many kids around the world, while also making me realize that it relies on a lot of the same nonsense as American superhero comics—and is maybe even more guilty of some of its worst excesses. I’m honestly surprised at how similar Dragon Ball and superhero comics can be, but I guess it makes sense, given that Dragon Ball seems to be the juvenile entry point into both anime and manga for most American kids. Or at least was, back whenever it first aired or got published over here.

Like Superhero Comics, Everybody Dies, and Then Comes Back

I had no idea how often Dragon Ball kills off major characters, only to bring them back very quickly. It must’ve been surprising at first to see characters killed off, especially to American kids not used to cartoon death once the show became popular over here, but based on my experience with superhero comics I’m sure that surprise wore off very quickly. You can only get audiences to really care about a shocking death too many times even without resurrection as a constant possibility, but once life and death becomes an endless carousel the goose is truly cooked.

This doesn’t come through in FighterZ, but playing through the episode battles in Sparking! ZERO hammers home how often the anime kills off its major characters. Vegeta, Piccolo, Krillin, even Goku all die at one point or another, with all inevitably returning in due time. There’s even a stretch in Vegeta’s storyline where he’s actively dead despite fighting alongside Goku back on our plane of existence, cute little halo over his head and everything.

Ultimately all these deaths are undone using the same plot point. The good guys collect all seven Dragon Balls, and then make a wish to undo all the death and destruction wrought by the bad guys. So the deus ex machina is baked into the series; it’s right there in the name. One thing that’s hurt superhero comics in America is that this constant cycle of death and resurrection has removed what should be the highest stakes from their storytelling; if anybody can die and everybody who dies inevitably returns, nothing means anything anymore. I didn’t expect Dragon Ball to not only have that same issue but for it to be a fundamental, central part of the series.

Characters Are Allowed to Age and Have Kids

Aging is considered a huge problem for American comics. If you ever wondered why Peter Parker has only aged maybe 10 years in 62 years of publication, well, it’s because Marvel doesn’t want Spider-Man to get too old. Marvel operates on a sliding 10-year timeline; basically the earliest Marvel superhero comics from the ‘60s always happened about 10 years earlier than the current comics, which is why its major characters have been locked into the same general ages since the early ‘80s. Even when a character like Parker does stuff entirely in line with a person of his age—like, say, his heavily hyped wedding with Mary Jane Watson in 1987, which was perfectly normal for characters who were roughly 25 or so at the time—Marvel might later decide it ages him too much to be married and go to extreme lengths to ret-con it. (Shockingly, the two have now been de-married almost as long as they were ever officially married.) Marvel and DC characters will almost always return to their most popular form, no matter how they might grow or change over the years; inevitably a new writer or editor will want to reset them back to whatever is considered “normal” for that character, so in the long run they rarely ever change all that much.

Dragon Ball doesn’t worry about any of this bullshit at all. These characters grow up, get married, have kids, watch them grow up (and then die, and get reborn, and die again, etc., ad infinitum) and all the while they’re out here busting up the bad guys’ heads and fighting hard to be the best and all of that. The adults don’t visibly age that much after a certain point, but Goku’s eldest boy Gohan goes from a toddler to a teenager during Goku’s episode battles in Sparking! ZERO, and based on FighterZ Goku and Chi-Chi eventually have a second son. Vegeta and Krillin get their own moppets, with Vegeta’s son Trunks (every Dragon Ball family has a weird naming convention, and for some reason with Vegeta and his wife Bulma it’s underwear) having a future version that pops up in Sparking! ZERO before he’s even born. Dragon Ball embraces its characters growing, starting families, and developing in the way real people in the real world do, which in this one very specific way somehow makes a series about constant space alien invasions and revolving door deaths feel more grounded and realistic than superhero comics set in recognizable American cities.

I won’t say that Goku and Vegeta becoming dads changes how they’re presented as people or fighters. Based on Sparking! ZERO’s episode battles, it’s not like either of them (or their other friends / frenemies) become any less strong or obsessed with fighting over time. If anything, they just keep getting stronger; even with two kids who would exhaust most mortal men, older Goku could probably wipe the floor with his younger self, given how the game portrays his constant dedication to training and growing stronger. Having children does raise what stakes remain after eliminating death as a practical concern, though, and gives Goku and Vegeta something to care about beyond their own strength and the pride earned from winning a fight. It deepens and humanizes them, at least a little bit, and that’s something American superhero comics struggle with.

Uh, The Women Don’t Really Seem to Get to Fight All That Much

Off the top of my head, I can think of two women who actually fight in FighterZ: Android 18—who is, shockingly, an android—and an original villain created specifically for FighterZ, Android 21 (yep, you guessed it: an android). Meanwhile we’ve got like a dozen different versions of Goku and Vegeta alone, along with what I can only assume is their whole crew of dudes. There seems to be a few more women in Sparking! ZERO, although I haven’t encountered any of them yet in the episode battles.

It’s not unusual for cartoons or toys made for boys in the ‘80s and ‘90s to have few women in them, but that is one thing superhero comics have over them and something like Dragon Ball. Despite the He-Man Woman-Hater Club of loser YouTubers and Twitter dorks review bombing any Marvel movie or show with a female hero in it, women have been a notable part of superhero comics for decades. They weren’t always treated very well, of course, and were usually depicted as being distinctly less important or capable than their male counterparts into the ‘70s, but by the end of that decade team hero books in both Marvel and DC usually featured several strong female characters, and both companies regularly launched ongoing monthly solo titles starring woman heroes starting in the ‘80s. Very few of those have lasted all that long, unfortunately, with only Wonder Woman having a regular, steady comic devoted to her, but Marvel especially has done a good job of elevating some of its women heroes over the last 40 to 50 years and making them vital, central parts of their fictional universes who are just as capable as the men. Uh, Dragon Ball doesn’t seem to do that, although points for having Bulma be so smart that every single man she’s ever met is just too dumb to hang with her. (At least that’s what I got from a few cutscenes in FighterZ.)

I’m as Convinced as Ever that You Have to Be Young to Really Get Into This Stuff

Dragon Ball FighterZ is a great fighting game, and while I’m still coming to grips with the deeper, more complicated Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO, I’m generally enjoying its frenetic, free-range approach to 3D brawling. And although I appreciate how the episode battles in Sparking! ZERO are finally given me more context for these characters I’ve come to know exclusively through videogames, I can say without the slightest pause that I am not cottoning to Dragon Ball’s story or style whatsoever.

This doesn’t have much at all to do with the fact that the anime aesthetic is so unlike the animation I grew up with. I’m seen like a dozen Studio Ghibli movies at this point, and between videogames, Matthew Sweet and Daft Punk videos, and a few stray passes by Adult Swim’s Toonami block, I can definitely appreciate the animation style. It’s so sleek and stylish and full of action and motion that it’s easy to understand why it’s so popular.

No, it’s not the animation that makes anime a hard pass for me still. It’s how everything sounds, from the overwrought rock music, to the deafening battle sounds, to the overly patterned, rushed, and generic voice acting, complete with all the shocked ughs and dramatic sighs that you only ever hear in anime. It’s also the stories, at least the ones condensed in the episode battles; they seem repetitive, limited in scope, and in a constant crunch to outdo the size and scale of the last arc—even though it’s well-established that no death is ever permanent.

I readily admit I shouldn’t judge a massive, episodes-long anime or manga story based on how it’s shortened into a half-hour chunk of a videogame. No doubt the full seasons are much richer and detailed than the summaries in Sparking! ZERO. The original story of FighterZ isn’t just the Cliffs Notes of a Dragon Ball season, though, and I didn’t connect to that tale at all, either. There are some problems that can’t be solved with fighting, and although superhero comics have grasped that fact over the decades, my limited exposure to Dragon Ball makes it seem like that’s generally where things are headed with its stories. Of course that might be because that limited exposure is confined entirely to two different fighting games, which, uh, sort of depend on fighting a lot, so maybe I’m just being a little too judgmental here. With countless movies, TV shows, books, and games out there for me to explore, though—many of which actually target people of my current age and mindset more than a 40-year-old Japanese kids property—I need to pick and choose my spots. I haven’t seen enough here to warrant the time commitment required by long-running anime or manga series, and I don’t have the familiarity or nostalgia that makes me willing to sit through another middling Marvel movie. I dig the games reasonably enough, but they just remind me once again that I’m not really built for Dragon Ball, and vice versa.

That’s cool, though. Nobody can like everything, and trying to make yourself like something just because others do is a fool’s game. I was already in middle school by the end of the 1980s, and I wasn’t one of those guys buying dubbed videotapes of Vampire Hunter D when I was 12; clearly anime isn’t for me. At least that doesn’t stop me from enjoying a well-made fighting game or two based on the ultimate king shit of anime, despite knowing almost nothing about the subject matter whatsoever.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, music, theme parks, wrestling, and more. He’s also on Twitter @grmartin.