Team battles just don't work with the massive gaps in power that these characters have.
The Ginyu Force was a last hurrah for the concept of team battling. Vegeta, Gohan, and Krillin gave Recoome everything they got and it amounted to nothing. On the villain side, Recoome, Jeice, and Burter gave Goku everything they got and it amounted to even less. It was Captain Ginyu that gave Krillin, Gohan, and Vegeta something to do and went down to a group effort.
And then Frieza arrived and teamwork was one of many things that shattered into a million pieces on the insurmountable brick wall that was his battle power. It never recovered.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.That's sort of an entirely different problem altogether, though.
Like, even at Piccolo Daimao, Tien was humiliated by Drum to make Goku's reappearance more impressive. Maybe Tien and Drum could have fought a more even-sided battle in the background while Goku and Piccolo went at it, but I'm not sure what that would have contributed to the plot.
edited 12th Dec '15 8:17:39 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Yeah, that was a total waste of potential, having a minion or pair of minions for every side character, and then having them win easily, only to get stomped by Goku.
Like, having a few of the side characters go at it while the main plot is happening wouldn't have made the plot go anywhere it shouldn't have.
what do you mean I didn't win, I ate more wet t-shirts than anyone elseOh, this one again. The solution there is to give them battles where the stronger fighters will not show up. Look, planets are gigantic, and there is still a whole lot about Dragon Ball Earth we don't know about. About what occupies certain spaces, about its past, potential developments of its future. Solar systems, star clusters, galaxies, those are even bigger and we know there are things living there too. Living...hey, did you know there is an actual after life in Dragon Ball? Actually two of them, there is a demon world with everything the Kai world has. Flesh em out a little, throw in a few fights while doing so. In fact, a side story where Krillen runs into a problem and handles it makes it more special when he really can't do anything and 18 has to step in, when she can't and Piccolo has to-Buu-Gotenks-Gohan-Vegeta-Goku,ect.
I mean, there is infinitely more potential there than "BOG with less Pilaf!", even if nothing new about the setting is revealed.
Buldogue's lawyerThe only problem with having weaker characters fight enemies at their level is that there'd be absolutely no tension. Death Is Cheap and the good guy losing just means that someone stronger steps in and one shots the villain. Even if they're on the opposite side of the planet, they can cross that distance in a small amount of time and Goku can just IT over there.
Let the joy of love give you an answer! Check out my book!Toriyama (and Toei, who are the ones who do the movies and decided to have the side characters get stomped there) aren't interested in that.
If they were, then we'd have seen Vegeta, Krillin and Gohan just barely defeat Recoome, only to get stomped by Jeice and Burter.
In the end, it's all about Goku coming in to save the day, because i get the feeling Goku is the one he enjoys writing about the most. He even admitted that the whole thing with Recoome was about getting Goku there to put the big dude's ass down didn't he?
One Strip! One Strip!And there is tension in retreading events that have already been covered?
Krillen is patrolling the city, stumbles across some super criminals, who give him a little trouble, but he beats them. He can then interrogate them to learn how they got such away , if they weren't built up before hand, leading to a grand scheme that he topples and becomes an honored hero on the force for. It wouldn't be that hard.
If you really needed tension(you don't), Goku's currently fighting something stronger and may not win. You'd don't even need "minions". Planets are gigantic, a small one like Earth can still house billions of people and trillions of other life forms. There are space travelers, time travelers, the planet itself orbits adjacent to a dimensional barrier to a strange limber where gravity and temperature are consistent, there are demons, the dead can be brought back to life even without the dragon balls and, oh yeah, there are a set of seven balls that can do piratically anything.
It makes more sense that all the degenerates aren't affiliated with each other and the protagonists don't always get together to fight them, or what each other when they have their own problems.
Buldogue's lawyerYeah, that's true. It'd also be more preferable to see one of my parents brutally murdered in front of me than both of them.
Either would be more preferable to dealing with more Gine.
Toei's Saiyans are basically Krogans, who have no interests beyond murdering everything all the time, but that's stupidly unsustainable. If the Saiyans were like that, the Tuffles wouldn't have needed to fight a war with them in the first place; they would have wiped themselves out a long time ago.
I get this but I feel this isn't enough to excuse Gine at all. Even if that kind of job makes sense, I feel pretty confident in saying that Gine wasn't given the job to show it exists - the job existed so Gine could be given a domestic role.
I'd go as far to say that the role not existing at all and Saiyan society running on logically unsustainable nonsense is still far better than putting Goku's mother in that role.
Tension / building up the characters who are more integral to the plot. Really, there's less point of introducing characters for the sole purpose of having the lowest characters on the totem pole defeat them.
That isn't really One Piece's approach. It always has someone miss out, and it always favours the "Monster Trio". Even the CP9 arc gave nothing to Robin, who the arc was mostly about, and had several characters get their ass kicked to make sure the villains still looked credible. If it had been primarily concerned with just pandering to each individual character, it probably would have fallen completely flat.
It also has a much smaller "crew" than Dragon Ball ended up having, and even then doesn't balance it very well.
There's a fantastic reason for it: tension and villain competence. It reflects better on even the main villain if he's allied with people who can defeat the Earthlings. If his companions can't even beat Chaozu, it doesn't look good for him at all.
And it just starts getting really repetitive and predictable if virtually everybody has their own designated opponent that they defeat each time.
There wouldn't be much harm in it, but there'd be no benefit in it either. The story should come before the individual side characters. There wasn't any good reason to make them win.
In the end, it's all about Goku coming in to save the day, because i get the feeling Goku is the one he enjoys writing about the most. He even admitted that the whole thing with Recoome was about getting Goku there to put the big dude's ass down didn't he?
They'd already defeated Gurd. Defeating Recoome wouldn't have made much of a difference, except that the Ginyus would be slightly less competent and the situation wouldn't have quite the same hopeless atmosphere Toriyama was going for. Gurd was like a wake up call, Recoome was the start of the real battle. Once that started, they shouldn't have continued winning.
I don't think that decision has anything to do with Toriyama only being interested in writing Goku, or he would have never written him out in the first place! He chose to put those three at the focus for a while, and from the sheer quality of this segment I have to assume he enjoyed it well enough.
Not being interested in having Vegeta, Gohan and Kuririn defeat Recoome doesn't mean he wasn't interested in them. He was clearly invested in writing them... but as underdogs. That's what made this part of the series really good, how unmatched they were.
edited 13th Dec '15 1:15:43 AM by Saiga
There was still team-battling in some form in the Buu Saga with kid Buu fighting Vegeta, Goku and Majin Buu.
I mean I suppose you could think of it as turns but Goku was gathering energy for a spirit bomb while Vegeta and then Buu and then Vegeta again distracted him.
Dragon Ball/Part 1 was the best because, even though it was still Goku's show, it had the World Martial Arts Tournaments that gave everyone a chance to show off. Krillin never stood a chance against Roshi or Goku or Piccolo but by god he was awesome in all those fights and never looked more impressive anywhere else.
One Piece is a bad example of the "throw the side characters a bone." I'd say something like Yu Yu Hakusho is a better example. Only Yusuke could beat the Big Bad Toguro or Suzaku but that still gave Hiei and Kuwabara and Kurama stuff to do by beating the ther Beasts or Team Toguro members.
edited 13th Dec '15 1:24:43 AM by Nikkolas
I don't think early Dragon Ball balanced it well at all. The tournaments came closest, but even those were only every second arc and they became less and less kind toward the humans.
Yamcha shows up to job on schedule, Kuririn's fights with Goku and Piccolo are undermined by the fact that everything he achieved was a result of those two lowering their power to the point where he could do those things (I Am Not Left-Handed has plenty of uses, but it should not be used to give the illusion side characters can do something while later revealing it was completely hollow) and once Ten resolves his character arc he is just plain humiliated by Goku without a good showing.
And then you've got shit like the Uranai Baba tournament where the Earthlings achieved little and mostly just got beaten up so Goku could show off even though it was long established he was way above them.
YYH benefits from having a tiny cast that is actually active.
One of the MAIN purposes I Am Not Left-Handed serves is allowing the weaker character to show off before being surpassed! By your logic, all the fights Freeza was in aside from 100% Freeza vs SS 1 Goku meant nothing!
That's not what I was saying at all.
And I haven't seen that be the main usage, the times I've seen it meaningfully used have more been about revealing a new power to raise the tension of a fight. And usually there is also an actual reason for someone to hold back.
I mean I did say that it had many uses so obviously I wasn't arguing anything less than 100% vs 100% is meaningless.
The problem is when it is used in a way when said character only achieved something because another character held back to just the right level for them to do that... and didn't have much of a reason to do so or cost them anything to stop holding back.
Another problem is that Kuririn vs Goku and Piccolo already showed that he was extremely outclassed, so they didn't need to be holding back in those fights to have credibility. The fact that they were just meant that anything Kuririn did was just a matter of how much they were holding back at any given time. It was just unnecessary, and reeks of Toriyama moving onto the main fights and suddenly feeling it won't mean as much unless the characters are portrayed as untouchable by anything before that point.
Also yeah the Freeza fight is a bad example because mechanically that fight sucked ass. But the earlier parts of Goku vs Freeza were still good when both were holding back.
The Freeza fights are the worst thing to ever come out of Z, in my opinion. The fact is, the fights were all pointless. Cut Freeza up, beat Freeza down, and he'd just whip out another transformation and now you just wasted a few episodes or chapters.
I don't mind a villain powering up or whatever when it serves a point. Saiga being here makes me think of Bleach where Ichigo at first never stood a chance against Base Ulquiorra but later on he was strong enough so now Ulquiorra had to unleash his Resurrection. But then Ulquiorra had a second Resurrection because...I dunno. His first one was more than enough to curbstomp Ichigo. And I love Ulquiorra. I just don't know why that existed.
Forcing Ulquiorra to power up the first time showcased the main character's growth and so it served a purpose.
edited 13th Dec '15 2:17:34 AM by Nikkolas
I liked Krillin/Piccolo. Mainly because Krillin manages to genuinely impress him a few times before losing. Piccolo then muses that impressive warriors like Krillin would pose a threat to his future reign. The Recoome fight was also an example of a hopeless battle done right.
If you ask me, the hopeless fight with Nappa was the one done badly (or rather, it felt like too much). If the only casualty of that fight had been Piccolo, it would achieve the same narrative result.

To establish how powerful the major characters are while simultaneously demonstrating the fundamental flaw of trying to create drama via minions in Dragon Ball.
The miniboss squad defeats the side characters to establish how powerful they are, which then demonstrates how powerful Goku is when he floors them all simultaneously.
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