Final Bout and the U.S Broadcast

[Tian]

Since the game was released in the U.S between episodes 41 and 42 of Z...
How much did these spoilers from later sagas of Z and GT affect you guys? Just wanna know how you reacted when you realized Gohan would grow up, Goku and Vegeta would fuse, Goku would have a granddaughter and stuff like that.

I also wanna know how you reacted when Goku and friends didn't sound like the Ocean gang. You know, the game had a different cast since it was recorded in LA rather than Vancouver.

[Brodes]

It didn't bother me personally, since Funimation tripped over themselves to spoil what was happening in Dragon Ball Z (various Super Saiyan forms, Vegeta and Piccolo joining the good guys permanently, Trunks, mecha Freeza, the Android saga costumes) from the very beginning with Rock the Dragon.

[linkdude20002001]

I didn’t play it at the time, but had I, Itwouldn’t’ve spoild anything. The show was had finisht in Japan already, do the internet had lots to spoil. Plus we had the Japanese imported toys by Bandai (their Super Battle Collection), cards, posters, and I had a Super Saiyan 2 Gohan (with a broken arm, I think) watch that had teen Gohan (as in from the Boo arc), Goten and Truncks, Boo and Satan. I think I thot Gohan and Goten were both Gokuh. ...The info on the internet wasn’t very complete. Super Saiyan Gogeta that I saw on a poster was just some awesome, mysterious, Japan-only Super Saiyan that I knew we were years away from seeing on Cartoon Network.

[Kokonoe]

I was watching Buu saga in Cell saga via international channel and a bit of GT later on. Also thanks to kids also into DB at the time I knew about GT stuff as well.

[TheBigBoy]

I knew about the existence of these characters from fan art in video game magazines plus the import companies selling wall scrolls and action figures in stuff in the back of the same magazines. A friend of mine had gotten the internet around that time and we spent a ton of time devouring every bit of Dragon Ball info we could, including falling for a lot of fake stuff. I remember one guy telling me about a series called Dragon Ball YX where Goku died of old age and old man Vegeta led Gohan, Goten and Trunks in the war against Freeza's extended family.

A local Blockbuster video DID have Dragon Ball GT and my PS1 owning friend rented it in early 1998. I knew GT took place after Z so while I wasn't surprised by the characters, However I WAS surprised by:

-The voices. It was really unsettling at first though the voices might have been more accurate to the original version than what we were getting on TV. Freeza sounded like a guy, for starters. During the fights, the characters used their Japanese voices. I remember trying to rationalize why Super Saiyan 4 Goku sounded so high pitched ("they probably just re-used the Kid Goku voice" I thought).

-The number of unlockable Goku's. There was like 6 or 7 I think. Kid Goku, SSJ, Kid Goku, Adult Goku, SSJ Adult Goku. Z era SSJ Goku, SSJ4 Goku and probably a few I'm forgetting. It was a harbinger for the Sparking games.

-How BAD the game was. It was slow and played like shit. By that point, we had been denied a long and rich legacy of Dragon Ball games playing like shit so this was my first experience with that. The opening animation was pretty rad though. Too bad we didn't get the awesome Japanese song.

[TheGreatness25]

By the time I discovered Final Bout (1998), I had already read summaries online. I also saw various pictures of the series. My friend also had a manga of the Cell arc (Trunks fighting Cell). So, I knew a lot of those things, but I didn't know that Freeza would end up looking like that and I didn't know what kid Boo looked like. That's really, the biggest thing that interested me -- especially Freeza. I couldn't imagine how Freeza went from what I knew him as, to what was in Final Bout.

[ShadowBardock89]

I did not know the game existed, let alone had the system to play it (had a Nintendo 64 as a kid).
My friend who had a Playstation did not have the game, either.
The first Dragon Ball game I encountered was Budokai on the PS2 as that same friend upgraded systems.

[TheGreatness25]

I think more shocking than anything was hearing the English voices for the game. Man, talk about weird. Always felt so disconnected from the series.

[Sin]

Playing Final Bout was the first time I had seen a lot of characters, as I think we were airing the Namek arc over here in the UK at the time. I don't think it spoiled anything that figures/fansites hadn't spoiled already, but it was a time when the internet was rife with fan art and gullible kids soaked it all up as being official (myself anyway) - It just made the series feel so much bigger than the show so far, like I knew we still had a long way to go to get to some of these characters.

[TheBlackPaladin]

Honestly, I'd say it was more so weird and confusing than anything else. That game was literally my first exposure to Dragon Ball (my friend brought it over to my house and I hadn't heard of it before), so I didn't really know what was going on. This resulted in a few misconceptions.

-I didn't realize that DBZ was originally a Japanese show until I was in high school. I was in 4th grade at the time of this game's release, and was under the impression that it was an American property. So after I got into the actual show and remembered the game, I was like, "Wait, so how is the game predicting what the characters are going to look like?" Nevertheless, I continued to believe it was an American cartoon.

-When that game came out in the US, the pre and post-fight dialogue was dubbed, but not the in-fight dialogue or attack efforts. So you can imagine the confused look on my face when Goku was introduced to me with Seve Blum's voice...only to have significantly higher-pitched voice when he launched a kamehameha. Now you must be thinking, "Oh, well that's when you figured out it was originally Japanese, right?" To my embarrassment...nope. I thought it was weird, but simply thought, "Oh, he must be doing that thing that Bruce Lee does where he has a super high-pitched voice whenever he attacks."

-The high point of both my confusion and my excitement was regarding the Super Saiyans. The game presented them as having blonde hair, whereas in the show, the first talk of a Super Saiyan came many episodes before Goku's actual (and iconic) first transformation in the battle against Freeza. So when the show started talking about Super Saiyans, I remember thinking that maybe the game was "wrong" since I didn't see any blonde hair. However, when the blonde hair finally came, I got chills. To me it was like, "The game's prophecy came true..."

So, yeah. The game didn't "spoil" anything for me, but it did confuse the hell out of me.

[UpFromTheSkies]

Since the game was released in the U.S between episodes 41 and 42 of Z...
How much did these spoilers from later sagas of Z and GT affect you guys? Just wanna know how you reacted when you realized Gohan would grow up, Goku and Vegeta would fuse, Goku would have a granddaughter and stuff like that.

Most people already knew what was going to happen from the interent and VHS fansubs.

I also wanna know how you reacted when Goku and friends didn't sound like the Ocean gang. You know, the game had a different cast since it was recorded in LA rather than Vancouver.

I don't remember anyone caring that the voice actors were different, we were just happy to be getting a Dragon Ball game released in the US. If we wanted to play the previous games we had to import them and pay almost twice the retail cost and then get our Playstations modded.

[DBZAOTA482]

Most people already knew what was going to happen from the interent and VHS fansubs.

Importers and pirates aren't "most" people...

Anyways, I doubt Final Bout spoiled things for that many people in the states. Dragon Ball in general was still fairly obscure at the time and very few copies of the game even existed.

[Hellspawn28]

I remember the game had a small run and the game was mostly aim to people who have already seen the series. I still remember when the game became hard to find after 1997 and before 2004.

[UpFromTheSkies]

Most people already knew what was going to happen from the interent and VHS fansubs.

Importers and pirates aren't "most" people...

Fansubs and import games were no big secret at the time, they were sold at every anime convention I went to, many locally owned video game and comic shops had them, and every other Dragon Ball fansite in the 90's had a list of VHS fansubs for sale or trade.

[linkdude20002001]

Plus, the internet was full of information on Dragon Ball. You wouldn't believe how many fansites there were at the time.
And even if you didn't have interenet in your house-hold, you'd hear all the jumbel of facts, rumors, and lies on the playground.

[DBZAOTA482]

Fansubs and import games were no big secret at the time, they were sold at every anime convention I went to, many locally owned video game and comic shops had them, and every other Dragon Ball fansite in the 90's had a list of VHS fansubs for sale or trade.

Still not most people... you can't just go up to a random person off the streets and start babbling about the fansub/importing scene even today. They won't have the slightest clue of what you're talking about.

It's best you get out of your limited anime circle.

[VegettoEX]

Still not most people... you can't just go up to a random person off the streets and start babbling about the fansub/importing scene even today. They won't have the slightest clue of what you're talking about.

It's best you get out of your limited anime circle.

Not today, no, because it's not relevant today. Then again, most people don't realize they're reading bootleg manga scans, so the modern equivalent is technically just as alive and well and as mainstream as possible.

We've had countless conversations about how prevalent bootleg video shops were in every mall across America, how fansubs were prevalent in every local flea market, and how those near major cities had an endless supply of any video they could ever want. Right here on this very website I've documented an enormous amount of material from video game magazines of the early and mid-1990s showing just how mainstream this stuff already was.

Just because you missed it back then (or were too young?) doesn't mean everyone else did; it's quite the opposite.

[DBZAOTA482]

Still not most people... you can't just go up to a random person off the streets and start babbling about the fansub/importing scene even today. They won't have the slightest clue of what you're talking about.

It's best you get out of your limited anime circle.

Not today, no, because it's not relevant today. Then again, most people don't realize they're reading bootleg manga scans, so the modern equivalent is technically just as alive and well and as mainstream as possible.

We've had countless conversations about how prevalent bootleg video shops were in every mall across America, how fansubs were prevalent in every local flea market, and how those near major cities had an endless supply of any video they could ever want. Right here on this very website I've documented an enormous amount of material from video game magazines of the early and mid-1990s showing just how mainstream this stuff already was.

Just because you missed it back then (or were too young?) doesn't mean everyone else did; it's quite the opposite.

Thinking on it, the scene was actually pretty big though I was indeed too young to know about it.

I'm just disagreeing on the notion that the Dragon Ball was widely known to people considering it's pretty much common knowledge that it's popularity in the states didn't really take off till it aired on Toonami.

[Kamiccolo9]

I was never into the bootleg scene, but I still knew what was gonna happen due to Beckett and Pojo magazines, friends at school, and just random stuff like movie posters at Blockbuster or something. IIRC, I knew the whole general plot for GT long before I ever actually saw anything past the Freeza Arc.

[Vorige Waffe]

Yeah, like some mentioned, even as someone who was introduced to Dragon Ball via the heavily edited Ocean Group dub on Toonami, once I started using the internet in 1998 as a wee lad I quickly indulged myself in any and all supplemental Dragon Ball information (as well as a few gaming mags that had some tangentially related Dragon Ball content). As a result, even prior to the "season 3" premiere of DBZ on Toonami in September 1999, me and various elementary school kids knew about future characters and events like Trunks, Cell, Vegeta and Bulma getting married, Goku having a second son, Majin Buu, and so on.

I specifically learned about GT from reading various synopses of the show on fansites, and in turn had a vague understanding of the plot (Goku turning back into a kid, a Tsufuru-jin named Baby being the first real villain of the show, Super Saiyan 4, Super 17, and finally the Evil Dragons), so in turn much of the content in Final Bout wasn't all that revelatory or surprising. This would have been either late 1998 at the earliest or perhaps the middle of 1999 when I basically spoiled most of the franchise to myself. Funnily enough I didn't spoil that much of original Dragon Ball to myself at all, besides maybe knowing ahead of time that the last real, climatic fight of the show being Goku vs. Piccolo/Ma Junior, and even then that was an event that was referenced occasionally in flashbacks in DBZ.

Really, by the late 90s so much of Dragon Ball had already fan subbed and discussed in various pockets of anime fandom that it's no wonder much of it was already heavily synopsized by then (barring the occasional mistranslation or fan interpretation that could lead to incorrect statements that colored events of the series wrong).

Addendum: There were also toys that basically spoiled the rest of the franchise. That said, much of those re-packaged Japanese figures that were released in that initial wave during Irwin and Funimation's partnership were typically DBZ related; any GT related toys I saw were usually Super Battle collection figures that I'm pretty sure were imported straight from Japan. I'll never forget seeing them in a local shop that specialized in selling games, anime tapes (including fansubs which, yeah, probably wasn't entirely legal), DVDs, and Japanese figurines or model kits. They had a lot of Super Battle figures from Z and GT for a good few years, and long before Funi announced their release of GT in 2003.