I thought I needed to make at least one post about the death of Akira Toriyama. But I’d like to tie it into something, so I thought I would talk about Dragon Ball GT also, which I finally started watching in honor of his memory. (I know he didn’t personally work on GT, but I’d never seen it before.)

But first, a word about the man himself.

Akira Toriyama, as far as I’m concerned, was the biggest creative of my lifetime. Bigger than J.K. Rowling. Bigger that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Bigger than Stan Lee. Bigger than Shigeru Miyamoto. Bigger than Michael Crichton.

I understand that Dragon Ball is not the bestselling manga of all time, but I think it has to have had the biggest impact on the industry. And I understand that Final Fantasy is more famous than Dragon Quest, at least outside of Japan.

But those two combined are unsurpassed. That would be like if George Lucas had created both Star Wars and Harry Potter. Or J.K. Rowling had.

What is even more impressive is that both Dragon Ball and Dragon Quest (which Toriyama did the character design for), are actually both extremely good. A lot of things that are popular aren’t actually that good. They’re just popular. These two IPs are both great.

What do I mean by that?

Take, as an example, the slime from Dragon Quest. Here is a screenshot of one:

This little pixelated beast is probably my favorite video game villain of all time. Because it’s perfectly proportional to the tale as soon as it begins. Part of any story is having your protagonist scale with the escalating stakes. So the Jack Ryan we meet at the beginning of The Hunt for Red October would never be able to do the things that the Jack Ryan at the climax could do.

In an RPG, so much of the satisfaction of the game is progressing to fight more powerful monsters and adversaries. But this is tough to get right and make satisfying because the game play remains exactly the same. It’s just a turn-based RPG. So one of the ways to make this psychologically believable, that you are actually progressing and getting better even though you are hitting the exact same buttons in basically the same order, is simply through clever character design. And this is what made Dragon Quest so brilliant, because the beasts scale so well with your character.

The slime is the first adversary you meet, and even though it’s just a slime, it’s actually kind of intimidating coming out of that valley with a smile on its face. And all you have at this point is a club to defend yourself.

I mean, who comes up with a slime, anyway? It’s both odd and proper. It sounds like the right sort of beast for you to meet as you’re just setting out on your quest. Although you’d never think of it.

Here’s a screenshot of a monster later on:

So we’ve long ago left the gentle grasslands of home and have wandered into more rugged terrain and now we’re fighting revenant knights.

That character design is pretty good if you ask me. One of the undead is what you would expect to encounter in the mountainous regions of any self-respecting fantasy world. I think even Tolkien had his Ring Wraiths imprisoned somewhere in the High Fells. And it does a convincing job of showing that we’ve come a long way from beating slimes away with a stick.

Akira Toriyama is mostly responsible for all that. Later Dragon Quest games (the first three were known as Dragon Warrior here in that States) would feature much improved graphics and even more character design work from Toriyama, but I still think these early efforts are the most impressive. In Japan, a national law was passed that prohibited Enix, the company behind Dragon Quest, to release an installment in the series on anything other than a national holiday, because so many people would stay home from work when it came out.

That’s when you know you’re big time, when the legislature has to pass a law controlling when you can release one of your products.

Maybe my earliest exposure to anime came in the form of a Dragon Quest cartoon that used to come on at 5:30 in the morning on Saturdays and I kid you not both me and my brother would wake up that early to watch it.

Which leads me to Dragon Ball GT.

I’ve been a huge fan of the original Dragon Ball Z anime since I first started watching it my freshman year of college. I lost my insurance after getting in a car accident during finals week (right after a test when my brain was fried, just a fender bender, had too many speeding tickets), and so there wasn’t much to do in the winter in a small midwestern town except stay in the dorm and watch TV. I started watching Toonami on Cartoon Network and got hooked on Dragon Ball Z. Everyone got hooked in my quad and none of us had ever watched much anime before. (I’d seen some shows and some movies like Akira and Ghost in the Shell.)

But everyone had always said that Dragon Ball GT wasn’t as good, and to my regret, I listened to everybody.

Because when Akira Toriyama died, I bought the Dragon Ball GT boxed set just for curiosity and have watched about half the episodes and it is actually fine. It’s not the best Dragon Ball series, but it’s worth watching.

I think the reason maybe people didn’t like it is because it’s obviously designed to attract a more female audience. And a younger one at that. So it’s more like the original Dragon Ball than Dragon Ball Z, but this is one that maybe a young girl would be interested in. That’s why they have Goku’s granddaughter Pan front and center the whole time. There’s no fan service like the original Dragon Ball. Or if there is, it’s something that maybe a girl might find interesting or funny. It’s stuff that comes from their world. And I don’t even know if this stuff is actually hitting with girls because I’m not one. I’m just guessing that’s the reason for boy Goku appearing in the buff at times and why Trunks is written more dreamy than as a warrior prince of the Sayans.

Where’s his sword?

And Pan is definitely a girl boss. She even says so. I think she tells Trunks at one point that she is literally his boss (and Trunks is the CEO of Capsule Corp and at least ten years older than Pan. He’s a boy genius himself.). So, I could see why that might have been a turn off for some people.

But for me, it’s just Dragon Ball that’s girl friendly. That doesn’t make it bad. It might mean, if you’re a guy, that you don’t like it as much as the other series, but that doesn’t mean it should be forgotten. And Pan girl-bossing is before it got annoying. This came out almost thirty years ago and the way they did it wasn’t political or something like that, it was just to try and make Pan have more agency considering she is a young girl literally fighting on the same team with two of the mightiest warriors in the history of the universe. At no point does she diminish the other two characters. It’s just kind of her personality and it makes sense considering she is a Sayan and Chi Chi is her grandmother.

And curiously, when Akira Toriyama died, I noticed that a lot of people on YouTube paid tribute to him in some way, and a lot of the YouTube singers or musicians covered one of the theme songs from the Dragon Ball series. Dan Dan, which is the name of the theme song from the GT series, was covered a lot by the female artists. I’d never heard it before and didn’t recognize it until I started watching GT. Could just be a coincidence but I think there might be more to it.

Anyway, I still have to finish the series, but I think it’s been unjustly maligned. It’s succeeded in getting me back into Dragon Ball at least. I haven’t watched Dragon Ball Super yet either (I’ve just always been about the original series). I’m actually looking forward to starting that after this and will probably have something to say about it.

Take care!