Dragon Ball stuff found from the least expected places

[Tian]

Around 17 years ago, when we were kids, my brother and I found a disc of Dragon Ball Final Bout lying on our former neighborhood's dirt ground. We had no idea who may have tossed it but we would find out why later.

Once we took it home, we started to think about where it could be played since it was a PSOne game and we didn't have a PSOne at the time, but then my brother remembered we had a PSOne emulator on our computer (Emuraiden) and played the disc on it.

I still remember how shocked I was when I watched the intro's sequence because it was my first exposure to Dragon Ball GT (Cartoon Network LatAm wouldn't premiere Dragon Ball GT until some months later) and therefore, I didn't have much idea about it, aside from some vague spoilers (one of them was the SSJ4 transformation) that my brother told me (He watched GT on Magic Kids)

The copy was in Japanese, so it was also the first exposure for my brother and me to the Japanese cast and yeah, it was a pretty weird experience because we were pretty used to our Latin American Spanish dub.

While we can say we enjoyed the game, we couldn't complete it back then for a reason and it was probably why the former owner tossed it:

The disc was apparently a badly burned pirate copy (we should've noticed it because the disc's official design is silver and not orange like our copy) and whenever you fought against Pikkoro, Freeza or SSJ GT Adult Goku on Arcade or 2P modes (strangely enough, you could fight them in the Tournament), the game froze.

Of course, we found out shortly after about these button combinations that unlocked the rest of the characters (except for Baby though because we had no idea how to use the Gameshark.)

Did you guys have any similar experiences or stories?

[Dragon Ball Ireland]

I wish I had a story like that, I hope I'm wrong but I still get the impression the vast majority of Irish people have no clue what Dragon Ball is, and if they do they just vaguely know the brand name. Outside major urban areas like Dublin, Galway and Cork I would be pleasantly shocked if I ever saw any Dragon Ball DVD in a charity shop (and Manga UK have released plenty of them).

I still think the budget clothing and other accessories store chain Penneys (known as Primark in the UK but not as cheap) stocking Dragon Ball items just a few years ago was a miracle in of itself.

That's not to say Dragon Ball isn't popular, I'm sure the fanbase we do have is dedicated. All the recent movies have came here (except Battle of Gods although Chris Sabat screened that at Nom Con 2014 if you count that), but in my experience its hard to find anyone familiar with it unless they are already into geek culture of some kind. I was the only person at my Super Hero screening, although I don't live near Dublin anymore, there was likely a good few there.

Don't mean to be a downer, your threads are awesome Tian, it just gets me sometimes because I love Dragon Ball so much, and while I can understand its not for everyone I wish more people could be aware of how much of a pop culture phenomenon it is at least.

[Tian]

Don't mean to be a downer, your threads are awesome Tian, it just gets me sometimes because I love Dragon Ball so much, and while I can understand its not for everyone I wish more people could be aware of how much of a pop culture phenomenon it is at least.

Don't worry. As a fellow fan, I understand what you mean. I would also like the franchise to be as widespread around the world as other franchises like Pokémon.

Of course, it doesn't mean I'm not happy with all the localizations we've got so far.

The recently finished Polish dub of Kai/TFC and the recent announcements of a Castillian Spanish dub for Kai and a Danish dub for Super gives me hope that the series prior to Daima will still be getting more localizations, which I also hope they get the interest from both old and new fans.