Dragon Ball Editor Reveals the Secret Behind Its Success: Toriyama’s Simple, Direct Storytelling Set It Apart from Shonen Rivals

Here is a little inside baseball from the Dragon Ball trenches: the guy who helped shape it from the editor's chair says the series works because Akira Toriyama kept it simple and fast on his feet. And yes, that is why it can still hang with One Piece, Demon Slayer, Naruto, and the rest decades later.

Torishima's take: keep it clean, keep it clear

Former Dragon Ball editor Kazuhiko Torishima popped up on the KosoKoso Podcast and basically laid out Toriyama's playbook: clean hero-vs-villain lines, straightforward plotting, and a total lack of obsession with long-game twists.

'The good guys are good, the bad guys are bad.'

Torishima says Toriyama aimed the storytelling at younger readers, so he avoided the maze: not a lot of flashbacks, no sprawling conspiracy webs, no big mystery box to decode for 500 chapters. When the story needed a turn, Toriyama would just introduce a new idea and keep moving. Villains did not require endless chapters of backstory to click. The whole thing stayed direct, digestible, and very Dragon Ball.

The week-to-week magic trick

This is the surprising part if you are used to, say, Eiichiro Oda's carefully foreshadowed One Piece: Toriyama was not charting multiple arcs in advance. He often wrote Dragon Ball week by week. Torishima even points to one of the franchise's biggest reveals — Goku being a Saiyan — as something that was not mapped out from the start. He calls those moments 'unexpected surprises,' and they are a feature, not a bug.

• Toriyama did not stack intricate double-crosses or lore dumps; he dropped light hints and moved on.
• When he needed a twist, he would add a new idea rather than reverse-engineer a prophecy.
• The spontaneity worked because he kept the tone and rules consistent, then patched any rough edges with clever fixes.

On paper, that sounds like heresy in an era where fans love to connect red-string clues across years of content. In practice, Dragon Ball's snap decisions rarely felt out of bounds for its world. Simplicity plus creativity beat complexity for complexity's sake.

Why that approach still plays in 2025

Dragon Ball kicked off in manga form back in 1984, then hit TV in 1986 and ran through 1989 for the original series. Four decades later, the brand is still active: the new series Dragon Ball DAIMA is on the way, and there is even a new video game, Dragon Ball: Gekishin Squadra, in the pipeline. The staying power is not just nostalgia — the straightforward structure makes it easy to revisit without homework.

If you are looking at ratings across crowd-pleaser platforms like IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and MyAnimeList, the franchise continues to sit near the top alongside fellow shonen pillars like One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach. The exact numbers bounce around depending on which specific series or era you check, but the takeaway is the same: nearly 40 years later, Dragon Ball still charts extremely well.

Simple vs. complex, and why Dragon Ball chose simple

Toriyama's method flies in the face of the usual writing advice about planning everything in advance. It also made Dragon Ball easy to follow and easier to love. You did not need to reread half a saga to catch some foreshadowed payoff; you just showed up and the story delivered. Risky? Maybe for anyone else. For Toriyama, it became the series' superpower.

Dragon Ball is streaming on Crunchyroll if you feel like testing the theory yourself.