People tend to look back at the reveal of Super Saiyan 3 in the Buu Saga of Dragon Ball Z as a marker of Dragon Ball’s downturn in its final big-villain saga, that it’s nothing more than cranking the volume of the same old tune. I think the opposite is true — Super Saiyan 3 is quickly proven unviable in defeating Buu, and that’s because the Buu Saga explores a drawn-out scenario where power isn’t enough, reintegrating innovative battles and tactics that had been fading since the early Dragon Ball days. The Buu Saga, with all its ups and downs, is the perfect end cap for the series, leaning into escalation, desperate stakes and creative fighting, all while giving Goku’s character a satisfying bookend.
Escalation
Dragon Ball has always escalated the stakes from one arc to the next — what started as a fun goofy journey to collect the Dragon Balls became a fight to stop evildoers from collecting them, which later became a martial arts action series with a central focus on big villains. Battles with villains became battles with aliens and androids, escalating things further. The Buu Saga does the same thing, but with a few unique differences.
Goku and allies face Majin Buu, an ancient force of evil, one so great even the gods fear its reawakening. A unique part to the escalation is that Buu is more of a force, he wants to destroy as Majin Buu, as Super Buu and definitely as his purest form, Kid Buu. The other key part is that Buu is an unconventional opponent — on top of having both a super high power level and just as powerful magical abilities, his body also has rather strange powers like absorption, healing, shapeshifting and more.
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Rather than the final villain of the original run of Dragon Ball just having more power — a level for Goku and friends to reach and surpass in order to defeat — he has more power and a different power. This is where the Buu Saga’s escalation is unique and where desperation and creativity come in.
Desperation
Goku and his allies are stronger now, stronger than they were in the Cell Saga but that power increase is only used to show how much stronger and harder it is to beat Buu. He’s still leagues ahead of them, both with his power and his unique abilities. A new transformation or power up won’t cut it.
Let’s take another look at Super Saiyan 3 — it’s introduction almost feels like a declaration that this saga isn’t going to be like the others. The Super Saiyan 3 design sort of looks like a parody of the idea of pushing Super Saiyan farther: Goku’s hair grows even longer and spikier, his eyebrows disappear and he’s surrounded by electricity, his expression looking super-duper-serious. While this form is powerful, it is quickly shown to be unviable as a method of defeating Buu. Goku is able to stall Buu, but we learn later that this form is incredibly difficult to hold with a living body, and with a dead one, it reduces his time on Earth. Super Saiyan 3 is an energy-draining form that wouldn’t last long enough to actually defeat Buu, and in this, the series displays that just power won’t be enough, because we see it first hand — it appears to be the series rejecting the power scaling that it had become familiar with over time.
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With just powering through a threat proven ineffective and out of the question, things now look desperate. This desperation creates familiar Dragon Ball stakes, Goku and his friends are overpowered by Buu — but it's different this time, because they can’t just out-power the overpowering. It feels different, Buu is not an enemy that can be defeated normally, so the protectors of Earth have to get creative…
Creativity
In the early days of Dragon Ball, the comedy and wackiness was blended with the battles. The battle between Goku and Jackie Chun was fast-paced and exciting and had stakes for the characters involved, but it was still silly as heck, full of delightfully wacky fighting techniques and creative battle tactics, something that can be said of the entire World Martial Arts Tournament Saga. These kinds of creative, fun and interesting techniques would see less and less action as the series progressed but the creativity that made them found a new spark in the Buu Saga.
The Buu Saga doesn’t get a lot of credit for bringing back a lot of early Dragon Ball energy and blending it with the high stakes, action-packed escalated scenarios of DBZ. In limiting the fight against Buu to avoid just being “and then Goku got strong enough to beat him,” both the characters in-story and Toriyama himself get creative. It feels almost like the story is throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, tossing up wacky ideas like Fusion, Gotenks’ wild attacks, Gohan’s potential unlock and Ultimate form, Potara Fusion, Vegito going inside Buu to de-power him and, of course the thing that ended up defeating Buu, wishing Earth and its inhabitants back to life so a massive planet-wide spirit bomb could be created.
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It’s wild and all over the place and sometimes it falters, but it’s so cool to see so many weird and different ideas thrown out by Toriyama and I much prefer this to Buu just being “Cell but stronger.” This only emphasizes the stakes and desperation of the fight against Buu. Each technique feels like a new hail-mary the warriors are throwing at Buu, hoping it will be enough, and he just keeps brushing them off, adapting, transforming or stealing the power for himself. It’s frantic and it makes the fight against Buu seem bigger and more tense than anything that came before it. Pure power doesn’t defeat him. Hail-marys don’t defeat him. What will?
The Perfect Conclusion
Goku eventually manages to defeat Buu with a spirit bomb combining the power of everyone on Earth, a feat no single warrior could do on their own — there’s that “power isn’t enough thing” again! — and with this final attack, the Buu Saga comes to a close, bringing with it a rather fitting conclusion to Goku’s character.
See, Goku’s whole deal is that he knows he can be stronger and better today than he was yesterday, and that tomorrow he can be better than he is today, and so on and so forth. Additionally, the challenge of fighting strong opponents and learning how much he can improve excites him. The Buu Saga emphasizes the importance of training ones’ skills, widening one’s set of techniques and overall understanding that there is more than one type of power. In this, Goku keeps on his path of always trying to be better, but he has a new perspective: that he should train more than his power level and that there is no one way to win a fight.
It’s even a great end cap for Vegeta, not only because of his “you’re the best, Kakarot” internal monologue, but also because he too learned to swallow his pride and accept techniques that win a fight with more than the power he gained himself, especially when lives are at stake (a marker of his full tilt shift into one of the good guys). Both him and Goku come away with this notion, which strengthens their endings in the series. Heck, even Goku wanting to take Uub under his wing so he can fight him some day serves this ending — Buu was the enemy he couldn’t defeat under his own power, so of course he would jump at the opportunity to teach and learn from his reincarnation, to be better tomorrow using what he learned yesterday.
Simply put, the Buu Saga is underrated and misunderstood. It’s chock full of Toriyama innovating and experimenting and throwing wild ideas at the wall like the old days of Dragon Ball. It’s brimming with creativity and approaches that could have very well been another notch in the power scaling of the series and makes a weird and wacky villain saga that has increasingly desperate and exciting stakes, managing to give Goku a proper sendoff.
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Sean Aitchison is a writer and researcher from LA who watches too much anime and knows too much about Sonic the Hedgehog. Follow him on twitter @Sean8UrSon for his work and listen to his podcast, Sonic Podcast Adventure (@SonicPod)
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