Was adding Power Levels a mistake?

[Shaddy]

Damn, and I was gearing up to draw my epic Zarbon/Yakon fusion OC.

[JulieYBM]

The fact that Toriyama has brought back Freeza but not mentioned any particularly concrete battle powers should go to show that he simply isn't interested in doing that anymore, too.

Still, battle powers for post-Namek would be pretty interesting to see in some sort of official capacity. Maybe give Zen-Ou a new scale to work from?

[MyVisionity]

For what it's worth, Vegeta continues using sentouryoku/"Battle Power" post-Freeza from time to time when describing a character's strength. Naturally.

[Cursed Lemon]

Power levels are often stated to be bullshit - which they are. But discarding them doesn't do away with the fact that there are many irreconcilable discrepancies that occur in the franchise without any mention of power levels at all, e.g. Vegeta taking it to Beerus, the stupidest thing that's ever happened in all of Dragon Ball. All the silliness of power levels via scouter could've been replaced with characters sensing more nebulous strength.

[ABED]

Power levels are often stated to be bullshit - which they are. But discarding them doesn't do away with the fact that there are many irreconcilable discrepancies that occur in the franchise without any mention of power levels at all, e.g. Vegeta taking it to Beerus, the stupidest thing that's ever happened in all of Dragon Ball. All the silliness of power levels via scouter could've been replaced with characters sensing more nebulous strength.

Vegeta getting a few good shots int is hardly stupid, much less the dumbest thing in all of DB.

And I'm not sure what you mean by sensing more nebulous strength.

[Cursed Lemon]

Vegeta getting a few good shots int is hardly stupid, much less the dumbest thing in all of DB.

A 1000x-ish rage boost without a transformation when Goku literally got flicked away as a SSJ3 is, I maintain and emphatically assert, the stupidest thing DB has ever pulled out of its hat.

And I'm not sure what you mean by sensing more nebulous strength.

When characters sense energy, they're not sensing an exact numerical value.

[ABED]

Vegeta getting a few good shots int is hardly stupid, much less the dumbest thing in all of DB.

A 1000x-ish rage boost without a transformation when Goku literally got flicked away as a SSJ3 is, I maintain and emphatically assert, the stupidest thing DB has ever pulled out of its hat.

And I'm not sure what you mean by sensing more nebulous strength.

When characters sense energy, they're not sensing an exact numerical value.

That spurt was the equivalent of a grandmother lifting a car to save her grandchild. It was transient and didn't lead to anything. Even if I agreed that it was dumb, it's hardly the dumbest thing DB has ever done.

The point of making it numerical and technological was that it emphasized the Saiyans/Freeza and his army don't understand the mystical aspects of ki.

[RandomGuy96]

Good point. I think my annoyance with them is how the American Ball Z fandom has taken the whole concept way out of proportion because in 100 percent fairness to Mr. Toriyama he did seem to be making a statement that trying to attach numbers to a battle power is ridiculous when characters can manipulate their chi.

He said the exact opposite. He almost certainly added battle powers because he knew they'd be popular, and he specified that he wrote them out because they were too accurate (in other words, you could tell who would win). Kanzenshuu notes this.

http://www.kanzenshuu.com/battle-power/story/

However, in the second Shenlong Times issue, Toriyama and his three different editors from over the course of the series discuss how Toriyama began trying to improve Dragon Ball‘s popularity around the time of the Saiyan arc. The Saiyan arc of course corresponds with the beginning of Dragon Ball Z in the anime, and it was at this time that Yū Kondō took over as Toriyama’s editor, replacing Kazuhiko Torishima, the man who had been Toriyama’s editor during all of Dr. Slump and the beginning of Dragon Ball up to the 23rd Tenka’ichi Budōkai storyline. Kondō thought that in a fighting manga, the battles needed to always escalate, and so he tried to guide Toriyama in this direction. As you therefore might expect, the Saiyan storyline saw the introduction of many new things in Dragon Ball, including Goku’s son Gohan, and the revelation that Goku was actually an alien. Was the concept of battle powers one of the ideas Toriyama introduced to try and make Dragon Ball more popular, or was it Kondō’s idea, designed to help drive the escalation of the series’ fights?

Either way, battle powers proved very popular, both among the original Japanese audience and those in the countless countries Dragon Ball has reached. What’s the secret of their appeal? For one thing, having numbers to indicate how strong characters are simplifies the story, allowing readers to easily grasp who’s supposed to be strong and who isn’t. What’s more, the concept of battle powers is similar to the idea of player stats in sports, and numerous sports fans have memorized the stats of their favorite player over the years. Battle powers are also similar to a few earlier concepts in Japanese kids’ entertainment. For instance, in Osamu Tezuka’s famous Astro Boy manga, a robot’s strength is often measured in horse power, while numerous movies and TV shows featuring giant monsters gave measurements for how fast the monsters could fly, and how hot a flame they could shoot from their mouths.
[...]
Most prominently, the popular Weekly Shōnen Jump manga, KinnikuMan, featured a system called chō-jin kyōdo (“superhuman strength degrees”), which measured the power of the various chō-jin (“superhumans”) who appeared throughout the series. This system was extremely similar to battle powers as they appeared in Dragon Ball (and both terms are often dubbed “power levels” in English translations of the two series), with the major difference that superhuman strength degrees were always static, with a few exceptions. That is, for each superhuman, they had a single number that represented their power, and this number never changed throughout the entire story. KinnikuMan was a very popular Jump series long before Dragon Ball began, so maybe Toriyama and Kondō borrowed a page from its playbook as they tried to increase Dragon Ball‘s popularity?

Toriyama also noted that a big reason he put them in was for easy escalation: if he could have a character say "his power is 1,000, but mine is 4,000", then he could easily convey that one character was supposed to be way stronger than another (they would not be able to serve this simple purpose if they were intentionally inaccurate- which is why they weren't). It's probably no coincidence that battle power numbers showed up around the same time that visual escalation ceased to be relevant (i.e. when the characters could casually destroy celestial bodies).
http://www.kanzenshuu.com/translations/ ... sensei-qa/

My number-one goal in coming up with it was because, if an opponent's strength could be seen as a number, it would be very easy for the readers to understand when I put it in the comic. However, I could foresee that it'd be an inconvenience for me down the line, because if you knew a concrete number, then you could tell who would win or lose, so with regards to Goku & co., I decided that [their power] would change due to "Ki" and couldn't be adequately measured.

While he never used this exact system past the Namek arc, Toriyama kept having his characters make reference to the term "battle power number" (usually Vegeta) and periodically threw out numerical comparisons, presumably for the same purpose. The Buu arc, for example, tells us that Yakon is 800 units, Super Saiyan Goku is 3,000 units, and Dabra is over 4,000 units; later, (base) Goku is 1,000 units, and a hypothetical Goku-Satan fusion is 1,001 units. Around the time of BOG, Goku was 6 units, Beerus was 10 units, and Whis was 15 units.

[Cursed Lemon]

That spurt was the equivalent of a grandmother lifting a car to save her grandchild. It was transient and didn't lead to anything.

Well, honestly that's probably a perfect analogy, because that would literally never happen.

The point of making it numerical and technological was that it emphasized the Saiyans/Freeza and his army don't understand the mystical aspects of ki.

Right, but the point is that even if scouters were done away with and characters relied on sensing energy, most of the nonsensical BS involving strength discrepancies could and would still exist in DB.

[ABED]

That spurt was the equivalent of a grandmother lifting a car to save her grandchild. It was transient and didn't lead to anything.

Well, honestly that's probably a perfect analogy, because that would literally never happen.

The point of making it numerical and technological was that it emphasized the Saiyans/Freeza and his army don't understand the mystical aspects of ki.

Right, but the point is that even if scouters were done away with and characters relied on sensing energy, most of the nonsensical BS involving strength discrepancies could and would still exist in DB.

Grandmothers HAVE lifted cars to save people.

[KBABZ]

I forgive Vegeta getting a good hit on Beerus because on a story level it shows how much he cares for Bulma's well-being.

[Gligarman]

The idea of Power Levels wasn't the issue. If I recall correctly Toriyama said something along the lines of introducing Power Levels to demonstrate how pointless they are because strength isn't based on numbers. The problem is the fact that so many people cling to the idea of Power Levels even after they were disregarded in the series. That's why so many "fans" can't accept Kuririrn going toe to toe with Goku or Muten Roshi dodging Jiren's attacks.