Dragon Ball Z hews to a more traditional standard. It's a plot device, not the entire plot in and of itself. In both of those cases, though, the fighting tournament furthers the overarching story of the series, and there's even a little character development mixed in from time to time. For that matter, all the rescue-Sasuke arc is missing is a set of brackets and someone to handle the color commentary. The Chunin exams in Naruto, for instance, are a sort of fighting tournament in disguise – the first and third acts neatly bookend the tournament that makes up the middle of the story. Nowadays, a more creative generation of writers has learned from the lessons of the past, and they've come up with some subtler variations on the fighting tournament. Cue the great big fighting tournament, where Earth's mightiest warriors slug it out for Cell's amusement. The newly-Perfect Cell could destroy the planet Earth if he really wanted to (and Vegeta could have destroyed Cell at the end of the last box set if he weren't a total idiot), but instead, he's going to play with the world for a while before he kills it. This is basically what happens during the Cell Games saga in Dragon Ball Z, which takes up most of the new Season Six box set. You can tell when an author has run out of real ideas for what to do with his story and his characters, because he throws everyone in a great big fighting tournament while he waits for some kind of genuine inspiration to strike. It's only even remotely funny if you read a lot of shonen manga, or watch a lot of the cartoons that wind up being adapted from the same. Hey, nobody ever said it was going to be a funny joke. Question: When is a plot not a plot?Īnswer: When the plot is a fighting tournament.