MC1980 said:
Man, I sure shat out a bunch of words in response to a throwaway sentence.
Actually, it wasn't throwaway. I'm always hoping someone takes me up on a Dragon Ball discussion.
MC1980 said:
Kai did skip DB, hell, it skipped the Buu saga too at first. Kai was kinda made on a budget.
The whole "Z ruining Dragon Ball" is fanboy revisionist garbage based solely on the arbitrary split in naming Toei did for the show post Piccolo. DB was well into being 'DBZ' as early as the fight between Goku and Roshi in the first tournament. Tenshinhan, King Piccolo, Piccolo, these are what most people call the best parts of DB, and they're DBZ as fuck.
Hell, taking a closer look, DB and DBZ are way more similar than they are different, and a lot of the differences themselves are superficial that people are incredibly hung up on.
It's true that the name split was fairly arbitrary, but it still did represent a fairly big shift in the story. Most of the remaining Journey to the West flavour was abandoned for sci-fi, Goku and Piccolo's backstories were retconned, and the trends toward darker and more serious continued. Yes most of what people attribute to Z can be traced back to trends starting in Dragon Ball, but if you want a time to point to and say that the show isn't the same as what it started as DBZ is a pretty good split to point to.
MC1980 said:
- Characters that are useless in Z were also useless in DB once their arcs finished, and only got a token role to get over the new hotness in the new arc. Yamcha was always a jobber, Tenshinhan was immediately useless after his fight with Goku, Roshi didn't really do much of anything after his fight with Goku, had a gag fight, half a fight with Tenshinhan and died in 3 seconds agaisnt King Piccolo, Lunch never did anything to begin with, Oolong/Puar are afterthoughts the moment they appear, only getting 1 or 2 moments of note each. Bulma literally does the same exact thing in DB as she does in DBZ.
This is true to an extent, but the introduction of power levels are what really cemented the inferiority of the rest of the cast. In Dragon Ball you could at least imagine that Tenshinhan and Kuririn were at least in the same ballpark as Goku, but come Namek Goku's breaking a million and it's clear the rest of the non-saiyans are truly out of the game. In Dragon Ball they felt like participants, even Yamcha, post Saiyan arc they're nothing but spectators.
Roshi was also handled a lot more gracefully than the other's were in Z though. He had his time, and stepped down to make way for the newer generation, then he gave his life in an attempt to stop the big bad. It failed, but it still made for an effective swan song for the character. He wasn't just relegated to perpetually standing on the sideline's saying "That punch was so fast I couldn't even see it!"
MC1980 said:
- The fights are still structured the same way, punch/kick leads into named move that is either a stupid punch/combo or a ranged (beam) move, then pause for effect. Rince repeat until finishing sequence. Only differences there are that DB's punch-kicks are vaguely kung fu looking generic punch kicks. There is a linear improvement in overall pacing as the manga goes on, but that's about it.
The fights are just so much longer though, and take up so much more of the focus. In DB there wasn't a fight that took up more than 3 episodes, which was a tolerable lenght for a major battle. Freiza fight was 30 episodes! Thirty!
Beyond that the show used to have much more to it than the battles. There was adventure to be had travelling from place to place looking for dragon balls. Lots of unique sights to see, no everywhere-on-this-planet-looks-the-same-Namek. But once you can circumnavigate the globe in under a minute there is no way to have an adventure. You don't have to stop anywhere on the way to your goal because you're there as soon as you begin. They literally have a dragon ball collecting montage at the start of Z, it's a minor chore by this point and nothing more.
I think Toriyama was running out of creativity by the time Z was rolling around. No more varied scenery and locations, the hot new hangouts are wastelands, wastelands, and wastelands. Heck, the filler's Fake Namek was leagues more interesting to explore than the real Namek was!
In DB the choreography felt more important, and I thought, was just better in general. In the fight between Jackie Chun and Goku, Jackie factors in that his legs are longer so his kick will have more impact and this strategy wins him the match. In Z it mostly comes down to having the bigger number and figuring out how to make your number bigger.
It also doesn't help that they'd all expanded their movesets to the point that all the characters feel the same. They all fly, they all shoot beams out of their hands in various fashions, they are all telepathic for some reason, they all could level a city with the flick of their wrist. Once you are at that point there isn't any way to show that the characters are getting stronger without someone coming out to wipe the floor with Goku without even trying, until he powers up enough to turn the tables and finish the fight without breaking a sweat. He was already so good there isn't any tangible evidence of his improvement, he's just stronger now because his number's higher.
MC1980 said:
- DB was about martial arts in the same way DBZ was about sci-fi. Funny clothes and scenery, maybe some terminology in the mix, nothing more. Hell, DB was a parody of martial arts to a degree, Yamcha is a legitimate martial artist guy with a cool sounding martial arts move, that is about a 1/10th as effective as Goku's stupid paper-scissor-rock punch joke move. Roshi's a con man who instead of teaching the kids(Goku&Krillin) martial arts, trains their cardio and teaches them math, with the goal of completing an impossible task(move a gigantic boulder). Only reason he gets found out is because they actually manage to do it, baffling Roshi completely. It also glosses over training for the most part. An actual martial arts focused thing would have spent a lot of time on monotonous training montages, learning forms and techniques, how to punch properly, kick properly, styles, hardship. None of that in DB. Most of the named techniques that aren't beams are joke moves, like volleyball attack.
FFs, the trademark move of the show, kamehameha, is learned in like 1 second by atleast 3 characters onscreen(Goku, Tenshinhan, Buu), while the rest of the cast get the thing off screen. In a proper martial arts anything, unlocking the big technique would be a focal point of the story and incredibly difficult to do.
Yeah that sort of thing was always a bit of a problem in Dragon Ball. I sort of forgive the Kamehameha because it was just a little one and not very powerful, but I was always annoyed how quickly Goku closed the gap between himself and Tao Pai Pai. 3 days is just far too short a time to make that much progress and breaks my suspension of disbelief. But then Z went and made the problem 10x worse with Zenkais and his ridiculous power jump after a couple days training in a ship.
MC1980 said:
- The writing, both story and character, is almost exactly the same across the entirety of Dragonball. Be that structure, style or storytelling. Toriyama is pretty consistent in being woeful at it, but he also doesn't indulge in it too much, so he doesn't get bogged down in meandering shallow gunk. This is true for the entire run of the manga.
Now there are a couple of differences that people notice, but can't really quantify or specify, so they just say DB and Z are different.- Dragonball was always Dragonball, be it Z or not. But, early Dragon Ball was also something else. That being a vehicle for Toriyama to rip off/come up with Tex Avery/Looney Tunes/Tom&Jerry skits to entertain himself. There's a very hard distinction in the earlier parts of DB when it's being 'Dragon Ball' and when it's being 'Looney Tunes'. As the series went on the Looney Tunes component subsided, and making a slight resurgence during Buu. Now, by itself this wouldn't confuse people, since there is a harsher line between gag scenes and normal scenes, but combined with the second point it makes for a confusing double whammy.
Personally, I really enjoyed the comedy in the show, it was part of what hooked me to begin with. I went in expecting a show about people screaming at eachother until they start glowing and got a charming, goofy show that also had exciting battles.
MC1980 said:
- Dragonball was a 12 year journey of an artist discovering how to do a basic story arc with an effective villain. Toriyama was so horrible at writing, that at the start of Dragon Ball, he didn't know how to do a standard story correctly. Every arc devolves into him doing the same thing over and over, slowly realising the obvious on how to improve it each time. It takes him until King Piccolo to make a villain that is evil, is powerful, does evil things, escalates the plot, and is prominent across an entire story arc. He had to go through Yamcha, Roshi, Taopaipai and Tenshinhan to get to this point.
After him the next 2 villains/arcs are improved rehashes of King Piccolo. That being Vegeta and Frieza. The reason why people say Z is so different isn't because it is, but because the Saiyan saga just happens to be the time when Toriyama has finally realised how to do the story structure he's been refining correctly, which is in stark contrast to the early parts of DB, where he hadn't a fucking clue. And Saiyan saga itself was the peak of pacing and structure for him, so people started on the most competently made part, versus the early parts of DB. Combine the incompetence with the prominent Looney Tunes component early on, and you have something that under a marginal lense is very different, but under a deeper lense is very much the same.
I think what you are calling refining, I would call stagnating. He always relied on Goku saving the day, but in Z he really starting leaning hard on Goku being out of commission until finally showing up at the last second to finish off the big bad. Saiyan Arc did it, then Namek did it
twice with the spaceship and then the healing tank. There was a lot more variety in the narrative structure in DB than just giving us a big bad to fight, because we didn't always need that. Just focusing on winning a tournament was interesting in it's own right, or taking down a sprawling organization like the RR Army. I whole heartedly disagree that the Namek arc is a refinement on the RR Army arc.
The Saian Arc was pretty good, though, and was the last time I really enjoyed Dragon Ball. The way that the afterlife was presented was full of the wacky creativity that made earlier Dragon Ball so enjoyable to me, and there was a lot more going on in the fight against the Saiyans than the one vs Freiza.
One last thing, I really can't forgive Vegeta's heel/face turn. He was a genocidal sociopath. He killed without remorse and destroyed entire planets. He killed his ally and one of last of his species in existence because he was "too weak", and he's a good guy now? Just like that? No. No he's not! I know Yamcha, Tenshinhan, and Piccolo Jr were all villains to start but none of them could compare to Vegeta. Vegeta was so far beyond the moral event horizon and yet they welcome him back without so much as an apology. Bulma has a kid with him and he killed her last boyfriend! Unbelievable!
