The official Dragon Ball website’s twenty-fifth entry in “The Nearly Complete Works of Akira Toriyama” — an on-going series highlighting rare and important pieces of the author’s work over the years — is a page from V-Jump‘s Tobal No.1 Part 1 Playing Manual, which went on sale the same day as the game (02 August 1996).

The specific page cited comes from the book’s “Super Fighter List”, detailing the origins and motives of the characters Chuji Wu and Oliems from the 1996 fighting game as they prepare to compete in the planet Tobal’s 98th tournament.

As with games such as Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger, Toriyama contributed character designs for Tobal No.1, a fighting game developed by DreamFactory for Square.

Toriyama’s robo-persona — used both as a self-insert character in various series as well as in otherwise “real-life” depictions — makes an appearance as a hidden playable character in Tobal No. 1, requiring the player to complete Udan’s Dungeon in the game’s quest mode.

Tobal No.1 received heavy promotion from V-Jump in 1996, coming at an advantageous timeframe between the end of Dragon Ball‘s manga serialization, the on-going Dragon Ball GT television series, and other Toriyama-related ventures.

Tobal No.1 received an American release that September, and was perhaps most notable to an outside audience for its inclusion of a Final Fantasy VII demo. Tobal 2 would see a release on the PlayStation in Japan 25 April 1997; the sequel unfortunately never received an international release.