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While Dragon Ball Z’s Great Saiyaman Saga is the franchise’s most divisive storyline, here are the biggest, most important plot twists from it.
With Dragon Ball Z mostly focusing on planet-shattering stakes that pit the Z Fighters against overwhelming threats looking to subjugate the entire universe, the Great Saiyaman Saga saw the Dragon Ball franchise briefly shift to smaller scale, slice-of-life storytelling. Picking up seven years after the cataclysmic Cell Games Saga — which saw Goku killed and Gohan stepping up as Earth’s strongest warrior in his father’s footsteps — the Great Saiyaman Saga had Gohan balance his life as a high school student with a makeshift superhero identity. The resulting storyline proved divisive among DBZ fans for its odd place and tone in the overarching franchise.
Here are all the biggest plot twists from the Great Saiyaman Saga and its preceding Other World Martial Arts Tournament, each of which proves why the storyline deserves its place in the DBZ canon and set up the rest of the story beyond Gohan’s superhero daydream.
DBZ’s Introduction and Importance of Pikkon
Goku arrived in the afterlife for a second time following his death during the Cell Games, wasting no time leaping into action once again. After arriving in Hell, Cell quickly teamed up with Frieza, King Cold and the Ginyu Force to stir up trouble, with Goku and the West Kai’s champion Pikkon dispatched to stop them. While Goku faced off against the Ginyu Force singlehandedly, Pikkon turned his attention to the more powerful enemies.
In a stunning turn of events, Pikkon was able to lay out King Cold, Frieza and Cell each with a single blow, stunning Goku with an awesome display of strength and speed as the stoic warrior hinted at being one of the mightiest seen in the Dragon Ball franchise to date. And with fresh memories of just how deadly Cell was, this underscored that Goku was encountering a whole new league of fighters in the afterlife.
Goku Gets Disqualified in the Other World Tournament Final
The four King Kais decided to pit their strongest warriors against each other in an epic martial arts tournament across Other World, with the winner getting a private training lesson under the mysterious Grand Kai. With Goku standing as North Kai’s champion, Pikkon represented the West Kai’s mightiest, with the tournament eventually narrowing down to both warriors as the last two standing.
As Goku and Pikkon unveiled their full potential, all of Other World marveled at the show-stopping brawl — though Goku emerged as the apparent winner by knocking Pikkon out of the ring with a Warp Kamehameha Wave. However, in a twist, Grand Kai revealed that both fighters were technically disqualified before this, as they each touched moons hovering above the arena simultaneously. The action ultimately counted as a ring-out.
Videl Learns Gohan’s Saiyaman Secret
While Hercule had capitalized on Gohan saving the world by publicly taking credit for Cell’s destruction seven years prior, his teenage daughter Videl was a much more genuine hero, becoming an impressive crimefighter in her own right. So when Gohan arrived on the scene right around the same time as the superheroes known as the Golden Fighter and the Great Saiyaman, Videl naturally suspected her classmate of being both.
While Gohan attempted to maintain his superhero secret identity by using a costume designed and constructed by Bulma, Videl’s suspicions about her new classmate steadily grew. This would result in Videl tricking Gohan into revealing his identity, privately to her, as Saiyaman while Videl quickly deduced that Gohan was also the Golden Fighter — as well as the actual fighter who took down Cell seven years ago.
Goku Returns to Life For the World Martial Arts Tournament
Videl agreed to keep Gohan’s superhero secret if he would train her how to fly in time for the upcoming World Martial Arts Tournament, to which Gohan agreed. When Vegeta overheard that Gohan was entering the tournament, he decided to do the same to prove he’d grown stronger than Gohan since the Cell Games. Surprising everyone, Goku announced telepathically from King Kai that he would enter the tournament too.
Goku was permitted to return to Earth for a single day to participate in the tournament, echoing Grandpa Gohan receiving a similar disbursement in the original Dragon Ball to reunite with his adoptive grandson. And with Goku’s surprise return incoming, the stakes of the tournament grew considerably from the friendly competition it had begun as.
Goten and Trunks: Child Super Saiyans
As the Z Fighters’ training intensified ahead of the Martial Arts Tournament, Gohan was shocked to discover his younger brother Goten had quietly achieved the Super Saiyan transformation after being trained in secret by Chi Chi for some time. Meanwhile, Vegeta’s training of Trunks resulted in the latter unveiling his own Super Saiyan transformation, to his father’s visible shock.
Earlier in Dragon Ball Z, Vegeta and Gohan had gone through arduous training that pushed them to their limits in order to achieve the Super Saiyan transformation for the first time. For Goten and Trunks to comparatively reach it at a significantly younger age — and with more relative ease — set them up as more prominent figures in DBZ as the threat of Majin Buu surfaced shortly thereafter.
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