Dragon Blog Daima #24: Panzy
Article By Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a. the Animeister
The gang's all here, Ticketholders!
Or rather, the main half of the gang is all here.
Which is also the case for my experience with the new Vampire Survivors DLC. I did not play Castlevania growing up, so the bulk of my knowledge of the franchise comes from watching lore and gameplay videos on YouTube. But the scope of this content and the heart and production value behind it (particularly the concept of the final? boss) is insane. Finding and unlocking everything so far has felt incredibly satisfying. But now I'm in the "the map has nothing left to reveal so let's make the player do things twice and figure out cryptic bullshit to unlock character skins and low-tier playable enemies" phase where the game (the mobile version, at least) is starting to show its seams. Powerful passive items are blocked off by erroneous invisible walls, unlock conditions sometimes fail to trigger, getting a build that fits conditions and ensures survival comes at a point that both breaks the game's established boundaries and makes them visually impossible to navigate.... I'll keep playing to see if this content has any other "everyone vs. Death for the fate of reality" moments, but video games were meant as fun pastimes for non-athletic children, not as replacements for life itself. They don't need to be sprawling quest factories to be good or "worth your time and money."
What is worth your time and money (because it's free and serves as a reminder of the informative joy of reading) is answering the call. So please give me your energy and grant my wish by clicking the Follow button to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, commenting at the bottom of this post, helping out my ad revenue as you read so I don't have to deal with Third Demon World problems, and following me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.
Dragon Ball DAIMA looks as good as ever. Never mind that I'm getting a bit weary of the yellow ground and pink sky everywhere after three and a half straight episodes in the Third Demon World. I'm not letting that ruin my experience with the story...yet.
The girl Goku rescued from the Gendarmerie in the previous episode, who did the "fake accusation for the sake of a suspenseful cliffhanger" thing at the end, but here plays the curious child role instead. This is Panzy, formerly referred to in promotional materials as The Masked Majin.
From a referential standpoint (the common YouTuber comparisons are Star Wars and JRPGs), she's Princess Leia crossed with that one time Princess Zelda pretended to be a male ninja. She even has a sassy attitude and symmetrical hairstyle like Leia (twin tails instead of cinnamon buns). From a 40th Anniversary of Dragon Ball standpoint, she's Bulma (likes tinkering with machines) crossed with Chi-Chi (daughter of an imposing but affable monarch who gets involved in a marriage proposal with Goku). Despite being 86 years old, she's a child in terms of the average demon/Majin lifespan of a thousand years. So divide by ten, and Panzy is the demon equivalent of an eight-year-old, going on nine. Which, looking back to the life drain concept from the previous episode, imagine if you couldn't pay your taxes and the government sucked a year off of your life expectancy, and that parallels pretty accurately.
As for new stuff, Panzy says that every Majin can do at least one spell, and demonstrates her ability (with difficulty because she'd rather tinker than train, I guess) to lift rocks with her mind by surrounding them in green magic. She also demonstrates further how disconnected the Demon Realm is from the "outside world" when asking Goku about himself. If she and Gomah are any indication, the Demon Realm does not know about Saiyans...except maybe Arinsu and Glorio, considering she beat Gomah and Degesu to Earth and Glorio asked for Goku by name.
Speaking of names, Panzy and Goku do the "your name is weird! No; your name is weird!" thing that always goes over my head when I'm watching anime because I know there's a language-specific joke built into Japanese character names that I can't grab with the language barrier in the way. In Dragon Ball it makes sense because Goku's a Japanese name and he's the only character with a surname to his family, plus Toriyama named his characters by race after various foods and objects, usually (but not always) based on syllabic rearrangements and Romanized approximations of English words (we even get a rare instance of Goku acknowledging his "other name" of Kakarot, which was interesting). But it still feels like a trope I don't understand and it makes me groan every time I hear it in something.
Panzy offers that she knows the way to the Third Demon World Castle (sorry, Son Goku; your Dende is in another castle...), where she is revealed to be the King's daughter. Glorio describes King Kadan as an "uncivilized mafia boss" (that, combined with his huge size and rotund physique, draw comparison to Jabba the Hut), but in person he's more like a Demon Realm version of Ox King, and his ruthlessness only extends to "criminals and bad people."
There's a cutaway to the First Demon World, where Gomah hilariously is trying to get on Mini Dende's good side by having a nanny theatrically read him bedtime stories so he will make them Dragon Balls. There has never been any suggestion that a Namekian can create multiple sets of Dragon Balls at once (GT doesn't count), so good luck with that, I guess.
Back in Kadan Castle, it becomes apparent that Glorio did not inform the king that Goku and his friends had been Miniaturized by a wish, leading Shin to suspect that Glorio was the one to approach King Kadan about "someone strong enough to defeat Majin Buu" who could displace Gomah for him, and not the other way around. Of course, this further illustrates how little the Demon Realm and the Otherworld hierarchy comprehend about ki and mortal power levels.
So it's time for the fight of the episode: Goku (without his Power Pole) sparring with Kadan's elite guard by himself. It's yet another beautifully choreographed, smoothly animated squash match, with the new added wrinkle that he goes Super-Saiyan for a few seconds to free himself and gain some distance, suggesting that these are stronger and more skilled than the Gendarmerie soldiers, but still well below Goku's league. Near the end of the fight, Goku goes back into base, but retains a thin yellow outline that some suspect is Full Power Saiyan, but could just be a visual indicator of Super-Saiyan's lingering energy.
We are also introduced to a lazy, Teletubby-looking demon named Hybis. 
He's into ballet, and is set up to be the second group's escort to the Demon Realm in future episodes, solving the PIN issue from the "Daima" episode. With the coordinates programmed into his Dragon Radar-looking device (making Hybis a plot device with a plot device), he heads off while the group of Glorio, Shin, Goku, and Panzy continue their journey in a cargo-sized plane they borrowed from the King. But because the Demon Realm doesn't have Capsule technology and the plane is a secondhand piece of junk, Panzy's luggage is too heavy and the plane crashes as the episode ends.
A formula has begun to show itself here, and it's high time we got away from "meet the character, go to the place, fight the goons, have sudden adversity," pink and gold edition. Maybe things will be due for a switch-up in "Lightning"?
Until next week, please give me your energy and grant my wish by clicking the Follow button to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, commenting at the bottom of this post, helping out my ad revenue as you read so I don't have to deal with Third Demon World problems, and following me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my magical content.
Animeister,
Out.
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