About what Toriyama meant with this enigmatic statement

[Mister Ape]

Toriyama once said something quite enigmatic about SSJ forms.

He said -"Super Saiyan 2 and 3 are nothing more than powered-up variations of Super Saiyan. After the fight with Beerus, Goku realized that mastering his normal state and Super Saiyan would raise his level more and sap less strength, so I think he probably won’t become Super Saiyan 2 or 3 any more"-.

But going SSJ2 and SSJ3 will always make you 2 and 8 times stronger than going SSJ, no matter how powerful you are and how you trained.

So what did he mean ? I think I found it out.

Let's say 2 Saiyans are equally powerful and both just mastered SSJ. If they were from U6 or they were hybrids they would not need much more than that to get SSJ2, but let's say they are just basic U7 Saiyans and they would rather need 3 years worth of specific training. One Saiyan is training for SSJ2, the other is just training to get stronger. After 3 years the first Saiyan gets SSJ2, but he is only slightly more powerful in Base form than 3 years earlier. The other got a lot stronger but did not get any new form. Was SSJ2 worth it ? Which Saiyan made the better choice ?

The answer is the one who did not train for SSJ2. By the time the first Saiyan has SSJ2, the second has improved in Base form, and thus as a SSJ, nearly 2 times more than the first, and his or her SSJ form is nearly as powerful and way more efficent than the SSJ2 form of the first one.

Indeed, when Goku got SSJG, he had to "relearn" to go SSJ as a SSJG, which made him get SSJB. This time after SSJB he never trained for SSJB2 and SSJB3.

When Goku trained for SSJ2 and SSJ3 in the afterlife, he did not have any stamina issue because of his already dead body, and he did not know he was going to be brought back to life. He may have chosen to train for SSJ2 and then SSJ3 only because he had no stamina issue by then. If he never died, he may have only trained to get stronger in Base and SSJ.

Gohan and Future Trunks got SSJ2 fast and Future Trunks even mastered it, but they are hybrids with huge potential. Yet I think training for SSJ3 is not the best way even for them. Caulifla was basically already SSJ2 by the time she was SSJ, but not only as a U6 Saiyan she has a lot more S Cells, she was already extremely powerful in her Base form.

So going back to the 2 average Saiyans of the example, for most Saiyans it is better to train for SSJ, master it and train to just get stronger, rather than training for SSJ2 and SSJ3.

In the ROSAT, Goku got 10× stronger but he did not get any new form. After training 7 long years in the Afterlife he only got 1,5× stronger in Base, even though he got actually 12× stronger than before due to SSJ3, yet had he in the Afterlife got 10× stronger in Base, and had he in the Buu saga been 6,667× stronger than he actually was, yet with only SSJ, he would have been way more effective. SSJ at 20 billions would have been better than SSJ3 at 24 billions.

[Hugo Boss]

I think the key takeaway is that forms like SS2 and SS3 offer brute power, but at a steep cost (stamina, stability, and efficiency). Goku realizing this after fighting Beerus makes perfect sense. The god forms demanded a different approach: control and balance between power and energy management, not raw escalation.

So it’s like Toriyama was saying: instead of pushing for new forms, it’s often better to refine the ones you have, and that seems to be where the narrative eventually tried to steer Goku and Vegeta before Champa arc.

[Slangh]

The quote implies that Super Saiyan 2 and 3 can be viewed as branches, like the Ascended forms.

"Ascended branch": power at the expense of speed
"Super Saiyan 2" branch: power at the expense of personality (aggression, sadism, arrogance). I view this branch as the most natural continuation of the regular form due to the core trigger being the same and personality alteration. The way Gohan achieved it was like a transformation stacked on a transformation, like a Super Saiyan Squared.
"Super Saiyan 3" branch: power at the expense of time (rapid ki drain). It doesn't alter personality, it's just a massive power boost.
@MasterApe I like that idea of Goku training for higher forms because he was dead. The privileges of Heaven blinded him. He only seems to become aware of SSJ3 draining ki during the Kid Buu fight. I think this is where he learned that the original Super Saiyan form (or base) just needs to be trained more.

All the branches are just hacks to gain power quickly.

[Mister Ape]

Thanks Slangh. Do you think for a basic, default kind of U7 Saiyan, who right now just mastered SSJ, is it better to train to get SSJ2 or to train to get more powerful in Base and SSJ ?

[Vegeta th3 4th]

Do you think for a basic, default kind of U7 Saiyan, who right now just mastered SSJ, is it better to train to get SSJ2 or to train to get more powerful in Base and SSJ ?

Ssj2 was never shown to negatively affect the user (loss of speed like the grade forms or loss of stamina like Ssj3), so although training one's base and Ssj1 to their full potential may be more ideal, having Ssj2 in their back pocket isn't a bad idea either. What we can agree on is that Ssj3 is just not designed for combat at all, so that's more suitable for a final attack.

[Mister Ape]

Toriyama stated both SSJ2 and SSJ3 drained stamina, even though SSJ2 did not do so much. However it may still be worth training for, but Goku and Vegeta did not train for SSJB2. On the other hand SSJ3 needs such a long specific training it definitely is sub optimal and not worth it. If Goku knew he was going to get back to life and only trained to get more powerful after SSJ2, he would have been at least ×3 stronger in Buu saga, and being ×3 stronger as a SSJ2 is better than being ×4 stronger as a SSJ3. A form for beam struggles only is not worth it if it is so hard to reach.

[Vegeta th3 4th]

A form for beam struggles only is not worth it if it is so hard to reach.

Vegeta reached it in less than a year following the defeat of Kid Buu, while Gotenks did so in a matter of weeks. It seems to me that discovering the form is what took Goku a long time, rather than actually being able to reach it.

[Koitsukai]

Slangh explained it perfectly, I think. It is like the Ascended forms, where you need to go back to square one to properly wield that vast pool of power.

Training the base power of SS provides a better access, I guess, to the source rather than hacking into it. More smoothly, in a sense. Similar to a car, I'd say, if you go from Gear 2 to G3, to G4, etc., the car and the engine will run better than if you skip gears and go G2 to G4. Or maybe, a better comparison would be changing gears at the correct time and not when one feels like it.

There is also some correlation between this and the enhanced SS2 form that rivals SS3 in power without its drawbacks. Vegeta and Trunks have improved their SS2 form to an incredible degree, which could be the result of having improved the regular SS form and then going for the higher stage, although Akira said this would be unnecessary, yet Vegeta is doing it and getting benefits out of it. Trunks probably reached it through a different way but that was never explained.