The Dragon Ball Z Legend

The Dragon Ball Z Legend: The Quest Continues

The Dragonball Z Legend: The Quest Continues says right on the cover “An essential source for every anime fan”. To that, book cover, I say you are wrong. Entertaining perhaps, but certainly not essential, even for Dragonball nuts.

The books design is a series of Q & A. Fifty-Four (54) questions related to series’ trivia are posed and then answered in a couple of pages each. Unfortunately while the answers tend to be fairly on target, more hardcore fans will recognize numerous errors, and this gets frustrating after a while. Luckily the questions are varied and the answers are comical.

Every few pages there are advertisements for Dragonball paraphernalia, such as action figures, statues, and collectibles. They are kind of nice to see as they shine the spotlight on Dragonball’s incredible marketability and success, but it begins to feel more like a toy catalog than a book about Dragonball.

The books layout is quite nice. The arrangement of the pages, the silhouettes of the dbz characters and the page art combine to make it feel unique and easy to read. It should be noted here that aside from the action figures and toys there are no pictures from the series itself, only silhouettes of the characters. I presume this is for legal reasons, as the book is not authorized by the owners of the Dragonball license.

The Quest Continues is filled with trivia, but after completing the book it just doesn’t feel complete. It’s not an easy task to create something that contains the entirety of Dragonball Trivia (thousands upon thousands of facts), so it’s not as if I expected it to be a tome, but it kind of let me down. However if you go in knowing that the book is just the tip of the iceberg than I think you’ll be satisfied.

The Dragonball Z Legend is written for casual fans of the series. It is not an essential Dragonball guide, and it is written more for insiders who already know this stuff, so it’s somewhat fan service-esque. It’s got just enough to keep you interested and reading but is filled with inconsistencies and trivial errors that will annoy you as you do, creating a weird situation where I wonder just who this book was written for.

For the pickier types of fan I say stay away, and read about the trivia elsewhere, but for casual fans it will prove to be entertaining and thought provoking.

DBZ Book Information:

By Satoshi Ikeda & Martin Foster
Published by Cocoro Books and DH Publishing
Price: $11.95
Pages: 188
ISBN: 0-9723124-9-8

Post from: The Dao of Dragonball Blog

Dragonball Book Review – The Dragonball Z Legend: The Quest Continues

Dragonball Z An Unauthorized Guide

Fair warning… This review is scathing, and it makes me feel bad to have written it, but it’s also very true and needed to be said. With that mentioned…

To paraphrase a seminal comedy of our time, Billy Madison, “Nowhere in this book’s incessant rambling and incoherent nonsense does it even come close to forming an intelligent thought. I am now dummer for having read it.”

Truly, Dragonball Z:An Unauthorized Guide should never be read, by anybody, including DBZ fans. I don’t even know where to begin with this book other than to say that it consists of over 200 pages of random observations, incorrect assumptions, little to no facts… and insights from a 10 year old.

This book was written by a mother and son team. Unfortunately the 10 year old appears to be the more intelligent of the two, and his comments are few and far between. I would have preferred if the whole book were written by him. Seriously, I cannot believe that this book was ever published. It’s like a bad blog post gone wild with stream of consciousness and then multiplied exponentially.

At this point I should mention that I am a hardcore Dragonball fan. I’m writing my own book about DBZ, you know? So when I read a book like this it makes me want to cry, throw the book into the opposite corner of the room, and then cry some more. Yet fate of fates has assigned me with the task of reading the whole thing so I could write this review. Bear that perspective in mind.

What’s so bad about it? For starters, it’s completely random and chaotic. The so-called chapters diverge from their own subject material so many times that even the author questions why we should listen to her anymore?

“You can’t pay attention to me, by the way, when I’m sitting here, making fun of Yamcha’s fork cuts. After all, why listen to me? I’m a grown woman who eats pizza for dinner every night and who talks to stuffed pigs when I think nobody’s around.”

Indeed Lois, indeed. And nowhere in the rest of the book does she give us reason to think otherwise. Sadly, this isn’t coming from a comedically inclined prologue or introduction; this is in Chapter 4, the main focus of the book.

Sometimes when children say unintelligent things it comes off as ‘Honest’, and “Innocent’, and it makes you gaze inside at your adult perspective cruelly honed over years of real world life and cause you to shockingly look at things with fresh eyes, dropping your preconceived notions. Bill Cosby created an entire series of television shows built on this premise. Unfortunately this book does not fall into that category, because when Danny’s comments, such as “This may be better than Pokemon, there is more action.” are used it feels like they’re solely so that Lois can somehow apply it to a random aspect of her life, which is only tangentially related to Dragonball or the quote, if at all. And her musings, while definitely unintelligent, are bereft of the benefits of simplicity often applied to such a lacking.

What about the actual content of the book, is it DBZ related? Yes, sort of, I’ll give it that. It does discuss each of the main characters, the basic plots, and why the Dragon World is entertaining and captivating: All of these things are expressed. But if you’re not familiar with Dragonball on an ‘all too familiar basis’ to begin with, you’ll be completely lost by the end of the first chapter. The book doesn’t explain anything particularly well.

The character analyses are one dimensional, looking at them as either “Good Guys vs. Scum and Filth”, and the descriptions of each are shallow and not even worth the time it takes to read the words. You can type any DBZ characters name into a search engine, pick the first link, and find out more about the character in a few seconds then you’d find in this entire book. Honestly, I just did it, and it worked.

The one saving grace is that this book provides a unique perspective that you don’t find in most others. The ‘mother and son duo’ that are actively interested in Dragonball and were so enamored by it they took the time to write an entire book. That’s not something easy to do, and not something you hear about on a daily basis, for this subject or anime in general. On that particular front I give them my respect.

But if you can base your whole approval of a book on the fact that it was merely written, I’d say you either need to go a bit deeper or prepare yourself to read every book in existence, because that’s the only way I could ever recommend Dragonball Z: An Unauthorized Guide.

DBZ Book Information:

By Lois and Danny Gresh

Published by St. Martin’s Paperbacks

Price:$5.99

Pages:211

Post from: The Dao of Dragonball Blog

Dragonball Book Review – Dragonball Z: An Unauthorized Guide