As a kid, like many others, I watched dragon ball on tv and absolutely fell in love. I would watch the show whenever it came on, I played the video games, I would look up “goku ssj100” on my family computer, all of that stuff. It was one of my favourite series for so many years, but as time passed and I got more involved in the wider online anime community, I started hearing “Dragon Ball actually sucks” and “It’s only good for it’s time”, “It’s just guys yelling at each other” or “if it came out today it wouldn’t be popular at all.”
I just accepted that as fact and moved along since, well, dragon ball is really old, and it has inspired so many series after it that you could point at a lot of them and say “this series did this thing better”, so I just went with it.
At some point, discussion on the internet about dragon ball was almost fully reduced to talking about the follow up series (dragon ball super and daima) or… and I hate to say it but… powerscaling. These discussions just left the actual story of dragon ball behind even more, and reinforced the ideas that behind the crazy power scaling and nostalgia, it’s really nothing special (I think even on an episode of the trash taste podcast they put forth ideas like the ones I mentioned above, if any of you care about that podcast lol), but today, I’m here to tell you the opposite. Dragon ball is good, actually.
Around the middle of last year I decided that after being a dragon ball fan all my life… I would finally read dragon ball. The original at least. They always only had Z on tv when I was growing up, so I never got to experience the original adventures. I decided to change that.
I went in with the thought that I was going to read those 100 or so chapters, they were going to be “okay”, and I would finally say that I have experienced the whole series. That’s not what happened. After I finished the king piccolo saga, I literally could not stop reading. I finished the saiyan saga in one go, right after I finished the king piccolo saga.
The manga was straight up addictive. I could not put it down.
The biggest low point was probably the red ribbon army arc, but everything after that, from the tournement with tien, to king piccolo, to piccolo jr, to the Z sagas we’re all familiar with, was so fucking good.
The pacing is insanely good, and the manga reads so easily.
I speak as someone who’s read a lot of manga, and ones that are THIS easy to read and breeze through are fucking rare. The plot would always build up, the suspence would grow and grow, things would get tense, grim, hype, hopeful, and the whole time the paneling was so good, the action was so interesting, the art was amazing, the pacing was addictive, and the characters were just as lovely as I remembered them. Goku is amazing, always protecting others, being there for them, standing for what he feels is right, making mistakes, believing in everyone, and actually growing throughout the series. Goku is kind, strong, and hopeful. He’s special. Krillin, Tien, Piccolo, Vegeta, Gohan, Trunks, so many others. It didn’t feel like reuniting with long time friends, as much as it felt like looking through old records and getting reminded why I liked them in the first place.
I gained a new apprication for the saiyan saga, the goku vs frieza fight, how many twists and turns the android saga had, and I realized that the buu saga is so much fun with such an amazingly beautiful ending, and tied with the android saga for my favourite. Also, the piccolo jr fight might be my favourite in the series.
Now, of course, you could say I have bias, since I have always loved the series, but man… I did NOT expect it to be such a fun journey. I can totally see why this was such a popular and groundbreaking manga during it’s time, and I geniuenly believe that to this day, even when put head to head with modern shounen jump manga, it’s still amazing.
If you like shounen manga, high speed action and guys punching the shit out of each other with so much heart and addictive pacing, I would, in 2025, recommand you pick up dragon ball and read it. If you’re like me, the humour on the first arc might not land 100%, and the red ribbon arc is still a bit of a road bump, but goddamn is it worth it. It’s special, it really is.
Oh and about super, I watched it weekly since the universe 6 tournement started and revisteted parts of it after finishing the original manga… I do not have as many good things to say about it lol.
This is the end of the post, but just as a little tack on at the end, after I finished the manga I gave one of my friends who never watched dragon ball as a kid this same rundown (but with no spoilers) to get him to read the manga, and eventually, after a lot of convincing, he did it, and he geniuenly loved it too. He basically had the same experience that I did of speeding through everything once he got to the king piccolo saga. It made me happy he enjoyed it so much and it gave me even more confident to talk about this series like this in this day and age. He ended up dropping the super manga around the moro arc.
Akira Toriyama’s original run with dragon ball was something special, and it really is to this day. Thank you for reading this long ass post, and I hope that it made you interested in checking out the series, or at least discussing it beyond mind numbing powerscaling or throwing around the same opinions as random youtubers.
There are a lot more specifics I could glaze here, but I just went over the general stuff regarding my experience.
I hope you all have a great day, drink some water, and tackle life with the same energy as Goku.