Power level leagues you were unsatisfied with in Dragonball

Easily the Buu Saga.

Vegeta sets the entire tone for it with his famous "Bargain Sale" line. The legendary transformation (no, not the Broly one) of Super Saiyan, the lynchpin transformation that enabled Goku to defeat Frieza after so much sacrifice and hardship is now an effortless toy for children.

Also Gohan's completely slacked off his training, but I won't delve into that particular aspect of his character, that's more suited to an entire thread devoted to just Gohan.

Then Babadi and Supreme Kai show up, and the Saiyans proceed to make a mockery of "mighty" beings such as Pui Pui. Then Buu wakes up and of course he's leagues above everyone else. Then Goku reveals he can transform into Fabio and go even further BEYOND.

Goku has also revealed that he just happened to learn a magical fusion dance that will let Goten and Trunks fuse into a singular being to help fight Buu. Anyway, then Gotenks does in a couple of days what took Goku seven years to do, learn SS3. So not only has SS1 been rendered a child's toy, but now SS3, the most powerful Super Saiyan form seen to date at this point in time, is also a child's plaything. But on top of all that Goten and Trunks still can't even go SS2 when unfused.

But Buu's also transforming. First he splits himself in half between his good and evil selves. Then he eats his other half and becomes Super Buu, and spontaneously gains the ability to sense ki. Then he screams his way out of the HTC after Piccolo destroys the exit, something even he didn't realize he could do, and something Gotenks is able to duplicate after powering up sufficiently.

But that's not all. Gohan endures 25 hours of boredom and suddenly now HE's the top dog. Effortlessly defeating Super Buu while Goten/Trunks/Piccolo stand around slackjawed in awe.

Can you imagine how infuriated Vegeta would be if he was around to actually witness all these events? First two children fuse together to form an even more obnoxious child, and they unlock a higher form of Super Saiyan than he's able to achieve in his lifetime in only a few days. Then Gohan sits around on his ass for ONE day and becomes the strongest unfused character in the entire saga. The closest thing he had to compensate was making a deal with the devil for a small boost that in the end amounted to nothing.

But then Buu comes up with a novel idea...he just starts absorbing other people! So now he's like Cell, except instead of two specific individuals, he can absorb anyone and get stronger forms. Gotenks literally is a plot device to further prop up Buu's power, and Gohan soon follows after him. But that's okay...because it turns out that these little earrings here have a BETTER form of fusion than the dancing kind, and without a time limit to boot! Well, for now at any rate. So Goku wants to fuse with Gohan, but he gets eaten.

But then Other World decides the crisis is grave enough that they find the strongest warrior they can muster and drag him back to the land of the living to fight Buu...Vegeta. So Vegito happens, and then he effortlessly just thrashes Buuhan. In fact, it isn't even a fight. Buuhan's like a child compared to him.

But now there's a problem. Vegito's TOO powerful. How to solve this problem with a fusion with no time limit? Have him PLAN to get absorbed by Buu (since just killing him and bringing everyone back with Shenron or Porunga doesn't seem to be an alternative) and Buu's insides can defuse Vegito even though he tried his hardest with his outsides to kill the guy. So Goku and Vegeta run around pulling out all of Buu's recent absorbees and soon the final battle begins.

We have a Buu who's weaker than when he first started, albeit more dangerous with what power he does have due to his willingness to use it, against a Goku and Vegeta who for all intents and purposes are roughly right where they were the last time they fought Buu. Gohan is vastly more powerful and is standing around on the revived Earth doing nothing until he contributes to Goku's Spirit Bomb, and even the annoying Gotenks, who we spent so much time on, stands around as his defused selves doing the exact same thing as Gohan.

Buu is finally defeated by the Spirit Bomb, becoming the first villain in the franchise to actually get killed by the technique (though admittedly it was much, much more powerful than the ones Vegeta or Frieza were hit by).

Then we randomly skip ahead to the future to another tournament where Buu's been resurrected as Uub, and Goku flies off with Uub under his wing just so he can have an entertaining fight in the future one day.

Poor Vegeta.

Totally agree here. ...Technically Future Trunks doesn't seem to really work for it either in the manga, but this is where I believe Toei did a much better job with him in the anime when he got it when Future Gohan dies.



Definitely agree on character bloat. What confuses me is that Toriyama has clearly shown that he's fine with some characters moving on. Oh okay, maybe he forgot the occasional character, but others had their story arc, completed it, and moved on.

Gohan wants to take Guile's advice and go home and be a family man?



Let him. But don't keep teasing that maybe he's taken up training again. Gohan clearly prioritizes his family over training and tournaments. Let him go.

Similar situations can occur for other characters. Krillin for instance.

Son Pan

Totally agree.

I'll go out on a limb here and say they shouldn't have been destroying the moon as far back as DB. Now you have fighters hundreds of thousands times stronger than Roshi, so the power just starts getting ridiculous yet the collateral damage is bizarrely kept to a minimum. Destroying a planet is so low effort that power is best demonstrated as "Now this person punches a lot HARDER" or "Now he can take a punch much more easily from X person".

Removing destroying moons and planets while keeping the "Punch Harder, Punch Faster" powerup mentality I don't think changes all that much thematically, though it would require rewriting the actual nitty-gritty of the plot itself. Yu Yu Hakusho I think is a good example of a DBZ-esque mentality without destroying planets or universes.

Now granted, part of this is likely a writing style of flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, but still.

I think it's not so much how strong characters get that's ridiculous, because DBZ itself seems to have fairly consistent feats:
1. Frieza-level: can destroy the planet if they want to.
2. MSS-level: the "splash damage" of their attacks is strong enough to destroy a planet, meaning they have to be careful when they fight so as to not blow themselves up.
3. SS2-level: strong enough to destroy a "solar system," aura is strong enough to overpower Super-Saiyan level people (according to the anime)
4. SS3-level: aura alone puts the planet at risk
It seems like a gradual, natural progression all throughout DBZ, which is why GT and Super feel a lot weaker even though they're technically lightyears stronger. Like @skar said, it's the power level numbers that make things ridiculous.

In hindsight, much of what happens in Dragon Ball is irrelevant. If I were to rewrite the series from the ground up, as Azoth said, I'd remove a lot.

First: give Frieza only two forms.


Second: for Buu saga, eliminate SS3 and don't make Goten and Trunks have Super Saiyan.

There's also general Buu saga stuff that I'd change (like making sure Gohan isn't wasted) but that doesn't really have to do with power levels or transformations.

I also agree with Axalon that having Roshi destroy the moon in Dragon Ball was a bad idea. I think planetary destruction should be something only final-form Frieza (and people beyond that) can do.

Well actually Goku Fighting Raditz Goku is actually more a power level 900 as that is what his Kamehameha statted as.

But we don't have Power levels past 1 million so everything after that depends on peoples opinions and is no way a sure thing. As Multiverse views the Final Form Frieza's hundred percent power not literally 100 times stronger then when just transforms.

I really wish that 3rd Form Frieza had more screen time, it was lame that he was only on for a few minutes. He should have been allowed to show some cool tricks, and the form seems to be built for physical combat but we don't get to see that.

Son Pan that is a good idea, I wish they did have them separate from Frieza after hitting him with the Spirit bomb, so they could train and plan. It would have felt better to my sensibilities.

Well, I mean, that IS why he's Superman.

Interestingly enough, I dunno how many people have seen the old Justice League Unlimited cartoon, but he gives a famous speech describing exactly what you're talking about and how paranoid he is that he could accidentally just kill someone, as he constantly feels like the entire world is made of flimsy cardboard while everyone else has free reign to act how they see fit.

^But that would require getting more creative than someone who's just way stronger and can regenerate. Can't have that.

I was actually talking about something similar to this with my friends in the DBM Fan Chat room on Chatango (I wouldn't go there if you expect to talk about DBM by the way, and DBZ is barely discussed either for that matter. Honestly the name should probably be changed but that's how the chatroom started) and my biggest complaint is definitely Zenkais. They really cheapened Dragon Balls message of training and overcoming your limits and ultimately made things out to be that Goku just got stronger because he got beat up a lot, which wasn't even true anyway.

There are a lot of good things about the Frieza Saga, but the power disparity and needing multiple plot devices to catch up really dampen my opinion on it, and out of the four major sagas I only prefer it to Buu. The Cell Saga was highly reliant on them as well, but I feel like it did a better job at foreshadowing SSj2 (even better than SSj1 perhaps) and went about power-ups in more interesting ways. The Saiyan Saga is definitely my favorite of all of them, as it really doesn't have much in the way of cheesy plot device power-ups, with most of the cast just getting stronger off the back of training with beings that were their greaters. 

I feel like it isn't even an unpopular opinion to state that Power Levels blow anymore, as that's all I ever see being stated, and yet people still like to bring them up all the time. I'm honestly not sure if Toriyama intended them to be used as a way to ridicule the villians, who were constantly flabbergasted by the power levels being presented even if they were lower than their own (Vegeta for instance), but that's really how it comes off sometimes. The only thing that really nags at me in connection with Power Levels is how Frieza jumps from 530,000 from his first form to 120,000,000, while Goku goes from 90,000 to 3,000,000 in ONE Zenkai (which Vegeta had abused many, many times more and was nowhere near that strong). The thing is, they could have just slashed off a zero and it would have made so much more sense. Frieza going from 3 million in third form to 6 million at 50% power is still double his former strength, and Goku at 300,000 after his Zenkai boost would still allow him to be at 6 million with a 20x Kaio-Ken, and then later at 15 million with Super Saiyan (if you subscribe to the belief that Super Saiyan is a 50x multiplier that is, which I don't, but I'll use it here for the sake of arguement). There doesn't really seem to be any huge issue there, at 12 million, Frieza is still far and away the biggest powerhouse in the galaxy (as far as we were aware at that point) and allows for Goku to have a much more believable jump in power from his Zenkai. It's just such a simple little change that would make so much more sense in my opinion, and as far as I'm aware, the 120/150 million numbers were never a part of official canon anyway.

The only thing that really bothered me in the Cell Saga was when Cell returned from being destroyed and seemed either stronger than or equal to SSj2 Gohan. It honestly seemed kind of pointless to even give him the power-up to begin with, since Gohan kills him about 5 minutes later anyway. I would have just had it so that when Cell returned, he was able to get a sneak shot in on Gohan that crippled him (as with what happened when Gohan tried to block Cell's shot at Vegeta) that put Cell at a massive advantage during their famous beam struggle. It was explained away as a Zenkai, but they were always horse shit so I'd rather just try to do away with them whenever possible. 

Of course the Buu Saga is where everything went wacky, and I'm not even sure I'd be able to say anything original here that someone already hasn't brought up before. Goten and Trunks shouldn't have had SSj, SSj3 made Goku and Vegeta's fight basically tensionless, ect. I actually do like the idea of fusion, though, I just wish that it had been alluded to earlier and used more than to just bring Gotenks into existence. For instance, in order to show that it existed I would have had a character enter into the Otherworld Tournament (filler I know, but pretty good filler outside of a few small bits) using the fusion dance. That's when Goku takes note of it and decides that he should try to learn how that works sometime, and then he either beats the fusion dancer or the fusion dancer is beaten by Pikkon. It's just an offhand thing that would have given the audience a bit of foreshadowing. As for it being better used, I would have tried to have other characters learn the dance, like Tien/Yamcha/Krillin and have them attempt to do some fighting while fused. They probably wouldn't have been able to do much against Buu, but it would have been super interesting if Yamcha and Krillin had decided to try it out when Buu escaped from the ROSAT as a last ditch effort. 

Saucemonkey

I just read that part in the manga, and Goku says that the fusees have to be of similar power and physical size. /pedantics

Otherwise, it seems to me that when Buu Saga came around, Toriyama was running a bit dry on ideas or his editors weren't as good as the ones for Freeza/Saiyan Saga.

Axalon

Yup. I would have had Goku get knocked out by Black, Trunks use the mafuba to seal away Zamasu, and Vegeta kill Black. Vegeta gets his Goku kill/defeat (sorta), Trunks gets to be a Big Damn Hero, and nobody has to bug Zeno. Maybe Goku can bug the future namekians for their dragonballs to fix up the mess a bit. A much happier ending than the doppelganger horror we got.