Dragon Ball was written week by week, with no master plan and no notes, so it is no surprise that some things don't add up. A few inconsistencies come from the manga itself, others from the jump to anime, movies and sequels written decades apart. On this page we have gathered only documented cases, with Akira Toriyama's own explanations where they exist, and left out the legends that have been bouncing around forums for years.
A creator who forgot on purpose
Toriyama himself pointed to the root of many plot holes. In a 2013 V-Jump interview he explained that he never kept notes on his world and forgot things deliberately: if he didn't clear out the old stuff, he said, new ideas wouldn't come. It is the same interview in which he admitted mixing up Super Saiyan 2 and 3, a story you'll find in our Dragon Ball trivia.
There are plenty of other examples:
- Launch: answering reader questions for the US launch of Shonen Jump in 2003, Toriyama confessed he had completely forgotten about her after Raditz arrived, and later came up with an excuse for her disappearance: she had run off after Tien.
- Mercenary Tao: chatting with One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda, Toriyama couldn't place the Red Ribbon Army's hired killer until Oda described the assassin who throws a pillar and rides it through the air.
- Goten: Daiki Miki, character designer on Dragon Ball Online, recalled Toriyama asking him who Goten was. Told that he looked like Goku, the author offered to just draw kid Goku instead.
- Bulma: in 2013 Toriyama admitted he didn't know what Bulma's real hair color was, since it had changed several times over the years.
Ages that don't add up
The strangest case involves Vegeta. In a 1990 interview, only recently translated by fans and reported by CBR, Toriyama said he had always drawn the Saiyan prince imagining him much younger than Goku, around twenty during the Frieza saga. The Bardock TV special, however, showed Vegeta as a child when Goku was a newborn. Toriyama realized he had never told the anime staff and simply let it go. The official timeline in Daizenshuu 7 (1996) later set Vegeta's birth in Age 732 and Goku's in Age 737: five years apart, with the prince as the elder.
Goku's own math is unusual too, because he spends seven years in the afterlife while his body stops aging. Here are the ages based on the Daizenshuu dates:
| Moment | Year | Goku | Gohan | Vegeta |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Raditz arrives | 761 | 23-24 | 4 | 29 |
| Namek saga | 762 | 25 | 5 | 30 |
| Cell Games | 767 | 30 | 9-10 | 35 |
| Majin Buu saga | 774 | 37 (30 physically) | 16-17 | 42 |
Time spent in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber muddies things further: by the end of the Buu saga, Vegeta is physically a couple of years older than his actual age.
Did you know? Asked about the subject, Toriyama admitted he tried not to think too hard about his characters' ages, because if you look at them closely they get a little strange.
Power levels: numbers built to break
The scouters of the Saiyan and Frieza sagas gave readers an easy number to follow. In a 2014 Q&A for Saikyō Jump, Toriyama explained that he had seen the problem coming: if strength is a number, you already know who wins. So he decided Goku and friends could raise and lower their ki, making readings unreliable, and after the Frieza saga the numbers almost disappear. Figures published later in guides and magazines should be taken with a grain of salt, and sometimes contradict each other.
Lost in translation: "over 9000"
The most famous power level line is itself a translation error. When Goku returns from King Kai's training, Vegeta's scouter reads a power above 8,000, both in the Japanese anime and in Toriyama's manga. The Ocean dub, which aired the episode in the US in April 1997 with Brian Drummond as Vegeta, turned it into "over 9000". According to Daizenshuu 7, the dub team felt "nine thousand" better matched Vegeta's mouth flaps. The meme exploded online from October 2006.
The change also breaks the story's own logic. Official guides list Vegeta's base power at 18,000, and Goku needs a triple Kaio-ken to overpower him: with a base above 9,000, a double Kaio-ken would already have been enough. Funimation kept the line in its own redub, and Dragon Ball Z Kai used it in the Nicktoons broadcast version, while the Kai home video and Toonami versions went back to 8,000. Ocean's dub is remembered for other slips as well, such as having Goku believe that Vegeta killed Grandpa Gohan.
GT, Super and Daima: three sequels that won't fit
The manga ends with an epilogue set ten years after Majin Buu's defeat, at the 28th World Martial Arts Tournament (Age 784). Dragon Ball GT, written by Toei's staff rather than Toriyama, picks up five years later, in Age 789; Funimation's dub stretched that gap to ten years. Dragon Ball Super sits right inside the ten-year skip, with Pan's birth and the arrival of gods like Beerus and Whis. As a result GT, released twenty years earlier, knows nothing of Super's forms, villains or characters. Many fans consider the two incompatible, although an official timeline displayed in 2017 still placed GT on the chronology.
Then came Dragon Ball Daima, set one year after the Buu saga and therefore before Super. Here Vegeta uses Super Saiyan 3, which he jokingly rebrands "Ultra Vegeta 1", and Goku reaches Super Saiyan 4, GT's signature form. In the final episode Goku even says he had been training for it since the fight with Buu. Yet in Super, set years later, Goku tells Beerus that Super Saiyan 3 is his strongest form, and Vegeta fights the God of Destruction without ever using it. The series doesn't explain how the two fit together. To find your way through series and movies, our watch order guide follows the internal chronology.
Movies and filler out of place
The movies of the 1980s and 1990s are parallel stories, often impossible to place. Daizenshuu 7 itself puts only two of them on its timeline: Dead Zone and Cooler's Revenge. The anime then complicated matters: the Garlic Jr. saga, a TV filler arc aired after the Frieza saga, is a direct sequel to Dead Zone, pulling a movie into the TV continuity.
Animation errors
The anime staff gave fans more than one coloring slip, like blond or brightly colored Saiyans who contradict Vegeta's own words. The most famous modern case, though, is episode 5 of Dragon Ball Super, broadcast in summer 2015: the fight between Goku and Beerus on King Kai's planet drew heavy criticism for its off-model drawings, and similar problems returned from episode 24. Producer Norihiro Hayashida defended the show, blaming a few sequences handled by new animators and ever-tighter production schedules. Toei still fixed things: on the first Blu-ray and DVD box, released in Japan in late 2015, many shots of the episode were redrawn. Proof that Dragon Ball, more than a perfect machine, is a saga built one piece at a time.