Dragon Ball Book Review – The Dragon Ball Z Legend: The Quest Continues

The Dragon Ball 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
Amazon Link: The Dragon Ball Z Legend: The Quest Continues

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