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

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

Pojo's Unofficial Dragonball Z Cards Simplified

The Dragonball Z Collectible Card Game (CCG) premiered in 2000 with the Saiyan Saga starter decks and booster packs. There are now over eighteen expansions and several rare and promotional cards to play around with. The CCG’s purpose is to play mock battles in Dragonball with your favorite DBZ characters and abilities, mixing and matching fighting styles and combat techniques to come out the victor. Pojo’s Unofficial Dragonball Z Cards Simplified: A Player’s Guide details the origins of the game, the various cards, and strategies from winners of national tournaments.

The book starts off with a nice introduction to the Dragonball series and is a suitable primer for those unfamiliar with the topic. Of course there’s no substitute for watching the show or reading the comic book, but it sets you up for the rest of the contents. It follows with a description of the various card types, such as Physical Combat, Energy Combat, Non-Combat, Dragon Ball’s, Battle Grounds and Locations, and Mastery cards. It then breaks those down into different fighting styles, including Red, Blue, Black, Orange, Saiyan, and Namekian along with descriptions of what makes each one unique.

Overall it gives a pretty good idea of what the game contains, but it doesn’t actually include the rules, so you’re left trying to piece together how the game is played from the descriptions of cards and strategies therein. I suppose this is because the rules change frequently with each new release of cards, and it would have been difficult to summarize all of the rules into a few pages, but it would have made a lot more sense to me if they had tried.

Layout and graphic design of A Player’s Guide is excellent, with full color pictures of all the DBZ cast members, sections laid out in different colors, and an overall DBZ theme throughout. There are a few minor complaints, like the typesetting in certain places, but that doesn’t affect the content in any way. The large pages are pleasing to the eye and pull you in deeper.

Near the conclusion they list all of the cooler cards that were released over the three year period since the game started and the book’s release. It includes a top 10 list of each Saga (Box Set), and provides really great (and useful) information for any player of the game.

In the end I was really pleased with Pojo’s Unofficial Dragonball Z Cards Simplified: A Player’s Guide, and it actually got me thinking about starting to play the CCG myself. There are probably tournaments still going on in the neighborhood hobby shop, and it might be fun to drop by and throw down a few Kahemameha’s.

DBZ Book Information:

Editor in Chief – Bill Gill, AKA “Pojo”
Published by Triumph Books
Price: $9.95
Pages: 96
ISBN: 1-57243-600-X

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Dragonball Book Review – Pojo’s Unofficial Dragonball Z Cards Simplified: A Player’s Guide

… That’s all I got so far.

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