A tribute to Toriyama's writting: How to re-define fights!

[ScouterSSJ]

Hi, fellow Dragon Ball fans!

I’ve been a huge fan of this website for a long time, but I’ve only just decided to start posting here now. ^_^

To kick off my contributions to this excellent forum, I’d like to pay tribute to Toriyama’s writing. I’ll be doing this through several posts, each focusing on some of his most underrated skills—especially his ability to craft some of the best stories in the medium.

I’ve seen a lot of people claim that Dragon Ball’s success came in spite of Toriyama’s “sloppy” writing. While it’s true he made mistakes—since he improvised the story week by week and often changed things on a whim—I believe that anime filler and some poorly researched official guides have made his work seem worse than it really is.

I want to start this series by exploring one of the most fundamental aspects of Toriyama’s writing in the latter half of Dragon Ball. Understanding this also helps explain why Toei’s writers (and even Toyotaro) struggle to make Dragon Ball stories that feel right, and why series like Daima, Dragon Ball GT, or even the anime adaptation of DB Super, don’t truly feel like continuations of the original.

With the arrival of the Saiyans, Toriyama redefined everything about Dragon Ball. Goku stopped being the main character in favor of his son (who inherited the traits that once defined Goku, while Goku himself evolved into a very different character), the narrative tone shifted to be more serious (continuing the trend started in the King Piccolo arc) and most importantly, the fights became more dramatic and complex than ever before.

To achieve this, Toriyama established a set of narrative rules that would become central to all future fights. Some of these ideas existed earlier, but from this point forward, he made them a key part of his storytelling, even adding new rules that helped him both in fights and in other scenes.

Thanks to the introduction of scouters (which, aside from being a clever plot device, also massively boosted the series’ popularity), Toriyama showed us the following rules:

1. A 10–15% power difference is decisive in a fight. We first see this when a 1307 Gohan almost knocks out a 1200 Raditz. It’s reinforced later: an 18K Vegeta easily dominates a 16K+ Goku but is beaten by a 21K Goku (Kaioken x3); Vegeta with 24K obliterates Kiwi (18K), defeats Dodoria (about 20K), and base Zarbon (about 21K). This is respected in every fight from Raditz onward.

2. Injuries directly reduce a fighter’s power. This is established in the Raditz fight: after Gohan’s attack, Raditz is so weakened that Goku, who’s nearly spent himself, can hold him. This rule becomes central in later fights—especially against Vegeta and Frieza—but it’s completely ignored by Toei’s writers, which is why fights in GT, Daima, or Super don’t “feel” like Dragon Ball, regardless of animation quality.

These two rules alone made the fights better, but Toriyama went even further to make the series more dramatic and nuanced. Through Goku, we learn that a fighter’s power is measured by four stats: physical strength, speed, attack ki, and defense.
Toriyama quickly demonstrates the importance of these in battle: in Goku vs. Nappa, we see a very balanced fighter versus one with extreme defense (Nappa’s defense was second only to Frieza’s—and probably King Cold’s, though we never saw him fight seriously). We also see how a fighter’s state of mind matters: Nappa can’t fight at full strength until he calms down, a theme that becomes more important later.

But it’s in the fight against Vegeta—arguably the best-written fight in the whole series (or in any series, in my humble opinion)—where Toriyama fully establishes the rules that define Dragon Ball from then on.
But before going into the new rules, I want to point out how he uses this fight to show off the earlier ones in an even matchup.
The 1st rule is clearly shown when KKx2 Goku is surpassed by Vegeta, but he then surpasses him with the KKx3 and a power of 21K+.

The impact of the injuries is more apparent than ever, allowing for one of the most complex fight developments in the series:
First, Vegeta is much stronger than Goku but holds back, not inflicting major damage.
Then Goku retaliates with the Kaioken x3, injuring Vegeta but hurting himself even more (shown when the KKx3 is no longer enough in the beam clash, and he needs the KKx4 just to barely surpass Vegeta).
After that, Vegeta’s gradual exhaustion lets Krillin, Gohan, and Yajirobe end the fight in one of the most dramatic shounen climaxes ever.

And as I've said before. two more rules are introduced here:
3. Surprise attacks deal far more damage than they would normally do. Yajirobe catches Vegeta off-guard twice, doing much more damage than his strength alone would suggest.

4. After a sudden change in power, a fighter doesn’t know their true strength until they test themselves again. This is seen when Vegeta tries to kill everyone after surviving the Genkidama but fails because he’s more weakened than he realizes. This rule also shows up in important non-fight scenes, like Trunks’s introduction, and adds depth beyond just battle logic.

Thanks to these four rules, Toriyama created some of the best fights in the genre—fights that, even with their massive powers and attacks, still feel more grounded and logical than most shounen manga battles.

People often criticize power levels, saying Toriyama was “a slave to the numbers,” but I disagree. It’s precisely his discipline in sticking to these four rules until the very end that made Dragon Ball as great and popular as it is.

Hope you enjoyed this, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on Toriyama’s writing! ^_^

[ScouterSSJ]

I'll expand on the topic with some examples of excellent fights that wouldn't have been possible if it weren't for those rules.

Goku vs Nappa: A very short fight, but a very interesting one. It was the introductory fight of Goku after his training with Kaito, so obviously it was designed to hype Goku before the final fight with Vegeta...
But unlike most other fights of this style, this one achieves its objectives in a very different way.
Maybe due to Vegeta having been too passive until that point, maybe because he wanted to show how flexible his new fights could be, or maybe because of both, the thing is that Toriyama didn't simply make Goku stronger.
At first, he wins because Nappa isn't fighting with a correct mental state, making him much weaker in the process (a topic that would become central in the development of the SSJ form).
Once Nappa calms down, we see how he still managed to match Goku offensively despite having lost some of his strength fighting the other Z warriors and enduring Goku's initial beating, which indirectly tells us that Nappa isn't just your usual sparring before the final fight, but someone that was already above Goku in normal conditions...
The action is still designed to make Goku look good (Nappa never manages to damage him at any point in the fight), but the story that Toriyama tells to us is that he will have a very hard time against Vegeta...

This fight already proves that Dragon Ball isn't as "simple" as some official products made it look to be... like the Daizenshuu guides for example.
They give Nappa a power of 4000 because they didn't pay much attention to what was being said during the fight and only remembered that Goku clearly won it without taking damage.
But nope, Nappa had to be at least above 9000 (I have him estimated at 11.000 due to his extraordinary defense).

vs Vegeta: The best fight of the whole series. It has the best development in terms of how the action evolves, with Vegeta getting more and more injured as the fight goes and how everyone plays his role in his defeat.
Those rules Toriyama introduced allowed the secondary characters like Krillin or Yajirobee to have a prominent role in saving the Earth.
Unlike the previous fights of the series, where they were completely sidelined (only Ten Shin Han was able to make a noticeable contribution in the fight of Goku vs King Piccolo), thanks to the new rules Toriyama introduced in the saiyan arc they would have some opportunities to shine.
In fact, Goku is left unable to continue to fight in the very middle of the fight, and are Gohan and Krilin the ones that do most of the job in the end.

Vegeta vs Dodoria & Zarbon: 3 very short fights that not only are a perfect display of the 4 narrative rules (the 2 fights vs Zarbon, at least), but also show us very well how different can be 2 fighters with very similar power-levels.
Dodoria being your typical brute force fighter with slow speed and Zarbon being the opposite, we see how both are trashed in different ways by Vegeta (Zarbon manages to react to Vegeta's movements, but is easily overpowered and soon starts to lose strength as Vegeta injuries him until he can't follow his movements anymore, while Dodoria is completely taken by surprise by Vegeta's speed and can't react to his movements, even if Vegeta has to put some serious effort in order to overpower him).

Goku vs Frieza: Not very complex in development until the 2nd act of the fight, where Frieza's low stamina but huge defense make for a very dynamic scenario.
On a deep narrative level is one of the best, but that's not related to the 4 narrative rules we're speaking about in this topic so I will let this for other topics I'll make in the future.

Vegeta vs A18 & Piccolo vs A17: Two almost identical fights presented in an almost opposite way thanks to how Toriyama plays with the context of each fight.
Vegeta vs A18 was designed to present and hype the new androids to the audiences, but like with Goku vs Nappa, it wasn't about just making them stronger.
Vegeta, in fact, could be argued to be a bit stronger than A18, but him being overconfident and the android having infinite stamina resulted in one of the worst one-sided beatings of the whole series.
On the other hand, Piccolo vs A17 was the last chance our heroes had to stop Cell from absorbing the androids, so despite his development being essentially the same as the Vegeta vs A18 fight (both start more or less equal, until Vegeta/Piccolo's lack of infinite stamina makes them lose the fight), the focus of the action is put in the part where they were even instead of when the android was superior (thanks to Cell appearing just when Piccolo was starting to lose ground to the android).

All of those fights are a very good example of all (or at least some) of these narrative rules being used to increase the quality of the fights, with some of them even telling different stories (one through how the action is presented, and the other through the actual plot) which allowed Toriyama to go one step further than most of his competition when it came to combat focused shounens.

[Yasai9001]

I've always looked at it like this, personally:

0% - 4%


Fighters are on absolute equal terms in battle.


Goku (334) vs. Piccolo (322): 3.59%


5%-8.3333333%
Stronger fighter has a slight advantage; competitive fight, outcome depends on effort/skill.


(Hypothetical) Person A (20,000) vs. Person B (19,000): 5.26%


11.111111%
Stronger fighter can dominate and win unless careless; fatal blows possible.


Vegeta (18,000) vs. Goku (16,000)


12.5% or higher
Stronger fighter cannot lose; outright outclasses opponent.


Vegeta (24,000) vs. Dodoria (21,000)