DRAGON BALL’S POWER SCALE PROBLEM

You cannot consider yourself an otaku if you don’t know or never heard of Dragon Ball. You may never have watched it, but you at least know the anime or even the most basic thing about it. Some may even say that Goku is the face of anime, just as Spider-Man is the face of Marvel, Batman is the face of DC and Superman is the face of superheroes. However popular Dragon Ball is, it does present itself with a lot of problems when it comes to consistency regarding the power levels of the characters. This article will go into detail about this problem is.

The Scouters

Dragon Ball Z was the successor, the sequel series to the original Dragon Ball. It gave us the full origin of Goku and explained just why he was so different from everyone he had come to know. He was revealed to have been an alien who was sent to Earth to conquer it, and was among the weakest in his species. This power was determined by the scouters: devices that were used by the Frieza Force to identify the power level of every individual it scans. Goku’s power level in the beginning of the show was in the 200s, and increased as time went on. An average human being was revealed to have a power level of 5. That just goes to show how much stronger the average saiyan is, compared to the average human.

The Transformations

By the end of the Frieza saga, we learn that Frieza achieves a power level of 1 million, and the Super Saiyan is stronger than Frieza at maximum power. Frieza at maximum power had the power to destroy a planet with one small blast. Just imagine what a super saiyan would be able to do...with a huge blast, since that is what they usually use. The power of the Super Saiyan was revealed to not be enough to take out the next big threat in the form of Cell and the Androids. That resulted in the need for the transformation into Super Saiyan 2, which was achieved by Gohan, and he defeated Cell with that new power. Obviously, Super Saiyan 2 was vastly superior to Super Saiyan 1. Gohan demonstrated this. In one scene, he moved so quickly that it looked like an animation error. This was when he snatched the bag of senzu beans from Cell. We knew that this new transformation was nothing to play with. We then got a taste of Super Saiyan 3 in the Buu Saga, which needed the series’ coolest transformation scene, along with the best music to accompany it in some versions. Just transforming into Super Saiyan 3 could have destroyed the world, and it was such a huge power boost that it reduced the amount of time that Goku was allowed to stay alive. Just imagine the amount of inhumane training one has to go through in order to achieve this kind of power. Imagine what the power level reading would be on a scouter if even in the Frieza saga, the scouters exploded due to the high power levels. We first had Super Saiyan 4 but then that got retconned into non-canon status, and we got Super Saiyan God instead, which wasn’t a power level transformation per se, as it needed 5 Super Saiyans in order to give one the power needed to transform. This power was so great that when trading blows with someone of equal or greater power, each blow sent a shockwave across the universe. Then we have Super Saiyan Blue, which was above that, but we didn’t really get an example or anything to tell us how or why, other than it being a new transformation. Then, finally, we have Ultra Instinct…and that’s about it.

The Problem

Having to constantly upgrade the power levels of the characters isn’t a bad thing per se. In fact, it’s almost a necessity. There’s no point in telling the story of the characters if they’ll just remain the same throughout the story. They eventually have to get stronger or learn new techniques or new things on their journey, otherwise there’s no point in creating more content about them other than to just make money. However, constantly doing the same thing over and over again, like making them more powerful by changing their hair colour and making the new bad guy defeat the previous hair colour form easily is not the way to go. Unfortunately, that is what the show has come to. Super Saiyan 3 was helpless against Beerus, so Super Saiyan God was used. Then we had Super Saiyan Blue come up, and we saw that Super Saiyan Rose was above it, but we never see the good guys reach it. The highest we end up seeing is Ultra Instinct. All of these new transformations don’t have the same impact as the previous transformations shown in Z. We don’t feel the difference in power. We are only told. The closest we can get to feeling the difference in power is when we see characters who handled those forms easily, getting handled by the new hair colour, but it is all the same. Super Saiyan 3’s transformation shook an entire planet and is clearly faster than light, as Super Saiyan 2 was already faster than light. Something like Super Saiyan Blue should be able to do 3 months of fighting in just 2 seconds, but we don’t really see that in the show. The show shows us all these new forms and doesn’t really know how to illustrate just how powerful they are anymore.

We see the tournament of power, which is a competition to see which universe has the strongest fighters overall, with the losing universes getting erased from existence. The ones representing the universe we’ve been following are the Z Fighters, and they go up against the strongest warriors in all the other universes. One of the people recruited is Frieza, the one who destroyed planet Vegeta. He only went through less than a handful of months’ worth of training and was more powerful than every saiyan transformation we have seen so far. So, all he had to do was barely even train at all and he could have been far beyond what a normal Super Saiyan could ever hope to be. The power levels, reasonably speaking, have gone through such enormous upgrades that the show won’t make sense or be fun to watch if it portrays everything correctly. We also have Android 17, who hasn't been seen since Cell's defeat, and he has been on a distant island taking care of the wildlife there. He somehow was able to match Super Saiyan Blue even though he didn't have to fight any world ending threat or go through training that is rigorous enough to be compared to what it took for the Super Saiyan 3 transformation to be achieved. We have Krillin managing to clash beams with Super Saiyan Blue Goku. Shouldn't being in Goku's presence in that form alone be enough to incinerate him? We also have Gohan, and somehow he is able to match Super Saiyan Blue Goku, even though he has stayed away from fighting and training since Buu was defeated. We see characters like Jiren, and we are supposed to be amazed at how powerful he is, because he was able to defeat a god of destruction, yet we don’t see him trade blows with anyone to the point that it can destroy the universe during the tournament…not even when he fights against Goku in a form that is far more powerful than Super Saiyan God. So, what exactly is going on with the power scaling in the Dragon Ball universe? Have transformations really become stale and formulaic? Is that all there is to the IP now? Is there a way to change it?

The answer to the last question is: yes. Dragon Ball Super can revert back to the old ways of doing things. The power level thing has been used to the point where it’s a trope. What they could do now is make it about learning new techniques again, instead of simply achieving higher levels of power, as there is only so much one can do with that. They have already established a limit for the once-thought limitless potential of saiyans with the introduction of gods of destruction, whom no saiyan can ever match no matter how much or how long they train for. The best thing to do now is to have the saiyans learn new techniques in order to just make them a species that has mastered the most techniques, whose power will be about knowledge of said techniques, because the reputation they have as the most powerful beings has been permanently tarnished and cannot be repaired due to the existence of these gods.

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