Dragon Ball's spiritual successor

[Soppa Saia People]

Still don't think I will ever understand the YYH and DB comparisons, though if you want a show that borders on just being YYH, Flame of Recca is 80 percent the same show as Dark Tournament arc YYH.

Honestly of the action shounen I've seen, I really don't think any of them feel the same as DB, outside of general broadstrokes. I've never seen Naruto, but given that most people seem to say their alike cus both Goku and Naruto wear Orange and like food, kinda makes me believe it isn't that alike lol.

[Vijay]

So I noticed that a lot of people in the anime community consider One Piece "Dragon Ball's spiritual successor".

What do you guys think about this? I get where people are coming from cuz One Piece really does feel like Dragon Ball.

Excpt its not. DB is unique

Its got likable characters, relatable characterizations, funny humor, neat plot & powerful fights/transformations/villains of epic scale

Above all, Goku is one if a kinda protagonist. There's none like him, & there'll never be one like him

Closest was aot eren who almost became monumental face of anime, but even he in finale couldnt match up to Goku's iconic status

[MasenkoHA]

Still don't think I will ever understand the YYH and DB comparisons, though if you want a show that borders on just being YYH, Flame of Recca is 80 percent the same show as Dark Tournament arc YYH.

I think it has more to do with Yu Yu Hakusho being Funimation's first non-Dragon Ball anime and most of the voice actors being recycled for YYH so that plus Yuyu Hakusho having tournaments and ki attacks has drilled into people's heads that it was DBZ 2.0

[ClutchBangstrip]

This is gonna sound crazy, but I think Dragon Ball's spiritual successor is...

One Punch Man.

Goku and Saitama's paths are TOO similar. It just seems like OPM removes the insane amount of elements that mask what Goku has become/is. But they're both doing/becoming the same thing.

It also seems like both series are subversive in that they don't take themselves as serious as the genres they're associated with. Dragon Ball goes out of its way to do what is more obvious to Dragon Ball, rather than what is obvious to a Shonen. OPM seems like it almost acknowledges this, specificly and illustrates how crazy it is. Like Goku is probably 1 million times stronger than he was when he was at the heights of the ToP. That's crazy and OPM would not gloss over how wild that is, while Dragon itself does.

[Desassina]

This is gonna sound crazy, but I think Dragon Ball's spiritual successor is...

One Punch Man.

Goku and Saitama's paths are TOO similar. It just seems like OPM removes the insane amount of elements that mask what Goku has become/is. But they're both doing/becoming the same thing.

It also seems like both series are subversive in that they don't take themselves as serious as the genres they're associated with. Dragon Ball goes out of its way to do what is more obvious to Dragon Ball, rather than what is obvious to a Shonen. OPM seems like it almost acknowledges this, specificly and illustrates how crazy it is. Like Goku is probably 1 million times stronger than he was when he was at the heights of the ToP. That's crazy and OPM would not gloss over how wild that is, while Dragon itself does.

I agree with you and have chosen the same series in my last post although I did not express myself as clearly as you have. I guess that it's why OPM had to start independently instead of being bounded by market demands for shonen.

[DragonBallFoodie]

There isn't one single successor IMO. The impact of DB is too strong and wide to really have just one strongly influenced work.

[ClutchBangstrip]

This is gonna sound crazy, but I think Dragon Ball's spiritual successor is...

One Punch Man.

Goku and Saitama's paths are TOO similar. It just seems like OPM removes the insane amount of elements that mask what Goku has become/is. But they're both doing/becoming the same thing.

It also seems like both series are subversive in that they don't take themselves as serious as the genres they're associated with. Dragon Ball goes out of its way to do what is more obvious to Dragon Ball, rather than what is obvious to a Shonen. OPM seems like it almost acknowledges this, specificly and illustrates how crazy it is. Like Goku is probably 1 million times stronger than he was when he was at the heights of the ToP. That's crazy and OPM would not gloss over how wild that is, while Dragon itself does.

I agree with you and have chosen the same series in my last post although I did not express myself as clearly as you have. I guess that it's why OPM had to start independently instead of being bounded by market demands for shonen.

Yup. I see that now.

Someone also posted this, too.

It could just be a coincidence...

[BWri]

Still don't think I will ever understand the YYH and DB comparisons, though if you want a show that borders on just being YYH, Flame of Recca is 80 percent the same show as Dark Tournament arc YYH.

I think it has more to do with Yu Yu Hakusho being Funimation's first non-Dragon Ball anime and most of the voice actors being recycled for YYH so that plus Yuyu Hakusho having tournaments and ki attacks has drilled into people's heads that it was DBZ 2.0

Additionally, they both have blue haired girls who shepherd the heroes into their new roles, King Enma as a minor character who serves as a judge to the afterlife, an imposing and overpowered guy with green ki who can't control his power and is voiced by Vic Mignogna, Hiei clearly being inspired by Vegeta and possibly Tien, Toguro using the same percentage of his power trope as Frieza, and I'm sure lots more stuff I can't currently conjure in my memory.

[Soppa Saia People]

Hiei isn't inspired by Vegeta, design wise he was based off of a BL character, and role wise, in additions to rivals just being a common trope in every form of media, Hiei spends like one chapter being a villain before becoming an ally, whereas Vegeta spent nearly two arcs being a villain (and basically 1989-1991). And I mean...characters with 3rd eyes predate Tenshinhan.

The after-life stuff, I don't know, I've heard stuff from other people who say that like, the afterlife has been portrayed like that before Dragon Ball, whereas some people say it's a DB original. Regardless, Enma's role in both predate both, and I would agree that Enma in the manga of YYH is much more important character then DB's version of him ever was, at least in the final arc.

[BWri]

Hiei isn't inspired by Vegeta, design wise he was based off of a BL character, and role wise, in additions to rivals just being a common trope in every form of media, Hiei spends like one chapter being a villain before becoming an ally, whereas Vegeta spent nearly two arcs being a villain (and basically 1989-1991). And I mean...characters with 3rd eyes predate Tenshinhan.

The after-life stuff, I don't know, I've heard stuff from other people who say that like, the afterlife has been portrayed like that before Dragon Ball, whereas some people say it's a DB original. Regardless, Enma's role in both predate both, and I would agree that Enma in the manga of YYH is much more important character then DB's version of him ever was, at least in the final arc.

I mean, that could all be true, or you can take the simple explanation which is more likely ... Togashi was a reader of Dragon Ball and took some ideas and designs and put his own spin on it. What's BL by the way?

[Soppa Saia People]

I mean, that could all be true, or you can take the simple explanation which is more likely ... Togashi was a reader of Dragon Ball and took some ideas and designs and put his own spin on it. What's BL by the way?

I was slightly off, it was just a shoujo series that had a lot of BL(Boy's Love) elements but still


And sure, there are similarities, but a lot of those are very broad, or just superficial. Dragon Ball didn't invent or popularize most of those ideas, and if you look at what makes Yu Yu Hakusho what it is, a focus on delinquents in (at the time) contemporary Japan, a large focus on the after-life, student life, stuff like that, they don't really overlap at all. Same with how characters are used, how the fights tend to play out, just the general story layout, their very different. If something was to be a spiritual successor to Dragon Ball, I imagine it would share things in common with Dragon Ball, such as it's type Different World, the occasional sci-fi elements, the ancient Chinese lore...not just the fact two characters have blue hair.

[JulieYBM]

I recently begun reading the BORUTO: ~NARUTO Next Generations~ comic series and while reading Chapters #26-27 (the latter half of Volume #7) it struck me how these chapters really illustrated just how little the series is like Dragon Ball. In fact, it more often than not feels like an anti-Dragon Ball series. Dragon Ball wishes to remain forever a child, NARUTO welcomes becoming the parent with open arms.

NARUTO has this strange reputation for being a generic shounen but I think both within the second half of the original series and now in BORUTO where Naruto his an adult and the Hokage it's very fascinating to see scenes framed like this were Uzumaki Naruto is very much an adult.

Spoiler:

There's a tendency to place Uzumaki Naruto within the same ranks as a character among Monkey D. Luffy (One Piece) or Son Gokuu (Dragon Ball) but the character just doesn't share any major traits with those characters in his development as a character. There are no scenes like this in One Piece or Dragon Ball and in fact the tone of the dialogue and paneling feels much more close to an episode of Star Trek where the captain of the ship must make a moral argument to prevent the abandonment of a child simply because he is wanted by a private organization wishing to reclaim him for their evil deeds.

Spoiler:

I suppose if any scene from Dragon Ball beckons back to this sort of moral quandry it is in Blooma wanting to use the Dragon Balls to find Doctor Gero and stop him now instead of waiting three years for him to create the Artificial Humans that will supposedly kill them all. A key difference, however, is that Dragon Ball doesn't play such a quandry seriously, it acts with irreverance for the sake of a gag. Such is generally the flow and vibe of Dragon Ball as a whole that has spanded 39 years now and one that its supposed supposed successors do not seek to continue.

The character dynamics in the below panels really fascinate me. This isn't the sort of scene you would get from Naruto in early Part I (let alone the Son Gokuu of Dragon Ball), which so many people seem to think of when they think of Naruto as a leading character (or your generic post-Dragon Ball battle shounen protagonist). It is in this that Uzumaki Naruto breaks free of the structure of the battle shounen.

Spoiler:

If anything, I feel like in what—in the grand scheme of things—few 'battle shounen' series I have read or watched Dragon Ball has served as a core, spiritual inspiration or successor very, very little. I would even propose that the idea that modern Dragon Ball has supposedly taken so much inspiration from the works that it inspired is false. Dragon Ball remains at its core unchanged and any Easter egg winks at the franchise's younger contemporaries are purely surface layer.

Earlier in this slap-dash essay I proposed that in contrast to Dragon Ball and Gokuu the character of Naruto had steadily grown out of the mold of your generic 'battle shounen' boy to become 'the parent'. I mean this both in-universe in that Naruto wanted a family but also within the out-of-universe context of Uzumaki Naruto now fulfilling the role of parent to both reader and the character archetype. Gokuu has mostly refrained from ever assuming that sort of dual-role, save for brief moments during the battle with Raditz. Once Gokuu's love of battle is justified in-universe as being a result of his Saiyan heritage and that Saiyans aren't very family-focused I find that the character began to lose a lot of nuiance, perhaps as Toriyama brought the character closer to himself.

We know from interviews with NARUTO writer and illustrator Kishimoto Masashi that when he made Naruto a parent he did so with the intention of imbuing him with flaws and a character arc based on his own regrets about allowing his mangaka career to keep him away from his family. This is readily apparent in BORUTO: NARUTO The Movie (2015), story by Kishimoto himself. It's the sort of self-autobiographical storytelling that the Dragon Ball franchise has always vehemetly kept away from.

Similarly, the Son Gokuu character from Dragon Ball is often away from his family but we have little insight into Toriyama's own decision to write Gokuu as such beyond simply not wanting Gokuu or the Dragon Ball series itself to carry any sort of thematic resonance. It's a boring role to cast Gokuu in so often and so thoroughly and one that grows less charming with age. In contrast to Dragon Ball, NARUTO is very intrigued by the subject of parenthood, exploring it both through Naruto's relationships with Iruka, Jiraiya, his own father Minato and then most recently exploring the subject through Naruto's relationships with his own sons, Boruto and adopted son Kawaki. It's a recipe for scenes and character building that definitely would not have been heavily inspired by anything Dragon Ball did:

Spoiler:

The longer that Dragon Ball has gone on the more I feel like Gokuu has become removed from any degree of relatability or 'realness' in terms of adding variety to his character and his everyday life. I can certainly see, say, Monkey D. Luffy having a similar approach but with a character like Naruto—the NARUTO franchise being arguably right behind One Piece as a supposed 'Dragon Ball successor'—the character remains fallibillty both in-and-out-of-universe. In what way, you ask? A mix of getting annoyed at things and a mix of actually using his life experience to nurture the next generation.

Spoiler:

[imghttps://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fq9LSZsaEAEc6l2.png][/img]

A big weakness that has bothered me about Dragon Ball the older I've gotten is how often it runs from assuming responsibility for what it puts out into the world (the treatment of its female and queer characters). NARUTO absolutely has the same issues but one clear difference between it and Dragon Ball and one that I think absolutely disqualifies it from being a 'successor' to Dragon Ball is how it is at its core a series first-and-foremost about characters and growing up. Dragon Ball—despite marrying Gokuu off and giving him two children—has very much never really openly tackled the relationship between its lead character and their sons. Naruto—especially in most recent storylines—very much is about tackling the idea that its lead character changed and became a parent. As Dragon Ball is now I don't think anyone could imagine a dialogue like the one Naruto has with Kawaki or Boruto like the ones in BORUTO: ~NARUTO Next Generations~ Chapters #26-27.

I'll end this post here, since I have other things to do right now. I hope my position came through clearly, I'm quite tired right now lulz

[BWri]

I mean, that could all be true, or you can take the simple explanation which is more likely ... Togashi was a reader of Dragon Ball and took some ideas and designs and put his own spin on it. What's BL by the way?

I was slightly off, it was just a shoujo series that had a lot of BL(Boy's Love) elements but still

I looked up Hiei's wiki after your post to find it there and found the quote about Scunky. I couldn't see much of a resemblance at first but if you flip Scunky's hair upside down then you get something resembling Hiei's hair. I don't buy that Vegeta wasn't at all in Togashi's subconscious when he made Hiei. And that's being generous because I think he straight up used Veggie as a reference but I can see the Scunky too.

And sure, there are similarities, but a lot of those are very broad, or just superficial. Dragon Ball didn't invent or popularize most of those ideas, and if you look at what makes Yu Yu Hakusho what it is, a focus on delinquents in (at the time) contemporary Japan, a large focus on the after-life, student life, stuff like that, they don't really overlap at all. Same with how characters are used, how the fights tend to play out, just the general story layout, their very different. If something was to be a spiritual successor to Dragon Ball, I imagine it would share things in common with Dragon Ball, such as it's type Different World, the occasional sci-fi elements, the ancient Chinese lore...not just the fact two characters have blue hair.

That's a fair assessment. IDK, to me Yu Yu Hakusho and Hunter x Hunter both feel vaguely Dragon Ball enough for me to consider them branches of the same tree. Hunter x Hunter does feel more similar to something like JoJo's but there's a fair bit of DB in its DNA as well. But when I think of the other battle manga or Shounen Jump series, even One Piece, it doesn't feel as close to DB to me as Togashi's work. I believe I could plop the characters from YYH into Dragon Ball and vice versa and it works but I don't feel that from the other manga that Dragon Ball inspired ... except maybe OPM ... maybe.

YYH has all those elements you listed: ancient Chinese lore/mythology ... I mean come on the main villains of the third arc are the Sì Xiàng, it has sci-fi elements such as body modification and even a Dr. Gero analogue who coerces teens into becoming his experiments before modifying them with demonic tech and even created a full-on cyborg demon. And while the human world of YYH is mostly mundane, it still possesses a fair degree of mysticism in its remote areas like Genkai's private estate and Torukane's compound along with the Demon World, Spirit World and places like Maze Castle. There's a small cadre of spiritually powerful human martial artists just like DB and some demons have managed to crossover into the human world.

Another favorite of mine, Law of Ueki, has a lot of Dragon Ball-esque slapstick in its fights, but Ueki is often too preachy to be compared to DB since the theme of the show is RIGHTEOUSNESS!

[FoolsGil]

I don't consider One Piece, any of the big 3, or any anime from the last 30 years that takes inspiration from Dragonball, to be a spiritual successor. To me, a spiritual successor is the literal property but for many reasons including legal, changes have to have been made, but if you squint your eyes hard enough, you see the original property.

If anything, if you were to take Super and GT, take out the stuff that is completely 100% lawyer C&D Dragonball, replace it with original parts, and keep the parts brought in for those stories alone, they would be Spiritual Successors to the original 42 volumes and 444 episodes of Dragonball and DBZ.

[Shaddy]

Dragon Ball only is the big weird thing that it is because its fundamentally based in being a comedy series that featured martial arts, which transitioned into more action fare as a matter of course. I don't think most of the suggested manga and anime quite fit as spiritual successors because they're all shooting for something approximating what Dragon Ball eventually became, not the process it took to getting there. And fair enough, they're almost always way more polished from a writing standpoint, but they're never gonna be the same because Dragon Ball's weird turns in production made it what it is.

There may exist a writer who can go off the rails in terms of genre and structure the way Toriyama did. But they sure as hell aren't gonna come from the publishing giant shonen jump, and if Dragon Ball is any evidence, they're going to start as part of a different genre entirely than anything you look for in the field of modern shonen. It'll be something taking influence from spheres outside of popular trends or even standard manga/anime fare as a whole. Popular media will be able to define and refine the formula they personally took from Dragon Ball into some good shit, but they will never recreate the conditions that struck that lightning. Someone will, but nobody will be able to predict who that is, including the author themselves.

[Kappa]

I recently begun reading the BORUTO: ~NARUTO Next Generations~ comic series and while reading Chapters #26-27 (the latter half of Volume #7) it struck me how these chapters really illustrated just how little the series is like Dragon Ball. In fact, it more often than not feels like an anti-Dragon Ball series. Dragon Ball wishes to remain forever a child, NARUTO welcomes becoming the parent with open arms.

NARUTO has this strange reputation for being a generic shounen but I think both within the second half of the original series and now in BORUTO where Naruto his an adult and the Hokage it's very fascinating to see scenes framed like this were Uzumaki Naruto is very much an adult.

Spoiler:

There's a tendency to place Uzumaki Naruto within the same ranks as a character among Monkey D. Luffy (One Piece) or Son Gokuu (Dragon Ball) but the character just doesn't share any major traits with those characters in his development as a character. There are no scenes like this in One Piece or Dragon Ball and in fact the tone of the dialogue and paneling feels much more close to an episode of Star Trek where the captain of the ship must make a moral argument to prevent the abandonment of a child simply because he is wanted by a private organization wishing to reclaim him for their evil deeds.

Spoiler:

I suppose if any scene from Dragon Ball beckons back to this sort of moral quandry it is in Blooma wanting to use the Dragon Balls to find Doctor Gero and stop him now instead of waiting three years for him to create the Artificial Humans that will supposedly kill them all. A key difference, however, is that Dragon Ball doesn't play such a quandry seriously, it acts with irreverance for the sake of a gag. Such is generally the flow and vibe of Dragon Ball as a whole that has spanded 39 years now and one that its supposed supposed successors do not seek to continue.

The character dynamics in the below panels really fascinate me. This isn't the sort of scene you would get from Naruto in early Part I (let alone the Son Gokuu of Dragon Ball), which so many people seem to think of when they think of Naruto as a leading character (or your generic post-Dragon Ball battle shounen protagonist). It is in this that Uzumaki Naruto breaks free of the structure of the battle shounen.

Spoiler:

If anything, I feel like in what—in the grand scheme of things—few 'battle shounen' series I have read or watched Dragon Ball has served as a core, spiritual inspiration or successor very, very little. I would even propose that the idea that modern Dragon Ball has supposedly taken so much inspiration from the works that it inspired is false. Dragon Ball remains at its core unchanged and any Easter egg winks at the franchise's younger contemporaries are purely surface layer.

Earlier in this slap-dash essay I proposed that in contrast to Dragon Ball and Gokuu the character of Naruto had steadily grown out of the mold of your generic 'battle shounen' boy to become 'the parent'. I mean this both in-universe in that Naruto wanted a family but also within the out-of-universe context of Uzumaki Naruto now fulfilling the role of parent to both reader and the character archetype. Gokuu has mostly refrained from ever assuming that sort of dual-role, save for brief moments during the battle with Raditz. Once Gokuu's love of battle is justified in-universe as being a result of his Saiyan heritage and that Saiyans aren't very family-focused I find that the character began to lose a lot of nuiance, perhaps as Toriyama brought the character closer to himself.

We know from interviews with NARUTO writer and illustrator Kishimoto Masashi that when he made Naruto a parent he did so with the intention of imbuing him with flaws and a character arc based on his own regrets about allowing his mangaka career to keep him away from his family. This is readily apparent in BORUTO: NARUTO The Movie (2015), story by Kishimoto himself. It's the sort of self-autobiographical storytelling that the Dragon Ball franchise has always vehemetly kept away from.

Similarly, the Son Gokuu character from Dragon Ball is often away from his family but we have little insight into Toriyama's own decision to write Gokuu as such beyond simply not wanting Gokuu or the Dragon Ball series itself to carry any sort of thematic resonance. It's a boring role to cast Gokuu in so often and so thoroughly and one that grows less charming with age. In contrast to Dragon Ball, NARUTO is very intrigued by the subject of parenthood, exploring it both through Naruto's relationships with Iruka, Jiraiya, his own father Minato and then most recently exploring the subject through Naruto's relationships with his own sons, Boruto and adopted son Kawaki. It's a recipe for scenes and character building that definitely would not have been heavily inspired by anything Dragon Ball did:

Spoiler:

The longer that Dragon Ball has gone on the more I feel like Gokuu has become removed from any degree of relatability or 'realness' in terms of adding variety to his character and his everyday life. I can certainly see, say, Monkey D. Luffy having a similar approach but with a character like Naruto—the NARUTO franchise being arguably right behind One Piece as a supposed 'Dragon Ball successor'—the character remains fallibillty both in-and-out-of-universe. In what way, you ask? A mix of getting annoyed at things and a mix of actually using his life experience to nurture the next generation.

Spoiler:

[imghttps://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fq9LSZsaEAEc6l2.png][/img]

A big weakness that has bothered me about Dragon Ball the older I've gotten is how often it runs from assuming responsibility for what it puts out into the world (the treatment of its female and queer characters). NARUTO absolutely has the same issues but one clear difference between it and Dragon Ball and one that I think absolutely disqualifies it from being a 'successor' to Dragon Ball is how it is at its core a series first-and-foremost about characters and growing up. Dragon Ball—despite marrying Gokuu off and giving him two children—has very much never really openly tackled the relationship between its lead character and their sons. Naruto—especially in most recent storylines—very much is about tackling the idea that its lead character changed and became a parent. As Dragon Ball is now I don't think anyone could imagine a dialogue like the one Naruto has with Kawaki or Boruto like the ones in BORUTO: ~NARUTO Next Generations~ Chapters #26-27.

I'll end this post here, since I have other things to do right now. I hope my position came through clearly, I'm quite tired right now lulz

I'm not really familiar with Boruto(I've only seen the original Naruto) but it sounds interesting to me. And I agree that it can't be a "spiritual successor" for the reasons you mentioned.

[CashmanX]

Closest I can think of is One Punch Man, where instead of Wuxia it's taking the piss out of Superheros/Sentai tropes.