Ok, I'm scraping the Dragon Ball Z barrel now, there's not much left without starting to play more of the video games, so I guess it won't be too long before I move onto Dragon Ball. Sometime around the week Goku took off in the Perfect Cell Saga, mysterious creatures appear along with a gas that is slowly killing the planet. Heading out to deal with the issue, Goku, Gohan and Piccolo soon clean up the random monsters and meet up with Vegeta and Trunks to take out the last gas generator, only to discover themselves fighting Freiza, Cooler, Lord Slug and Turles. When the final villain, Doctor Lychee, is revealed, the truth comes out that the Z Fighters have been battling ghosts the entire time, ghosts out of a machine built by an alien race destroyed by the Sayians long ago. Man, is it just me or are the Sayians getting to be like Batman's parents with the amount of stuff they've meant to have done before getting killed off?
In terms of DBZ, Plan To Eradicate the Sayians is not great, the story is weak and it doesn't add much to the franchise, but I love Doctor Lychee as a villain and I'm going to gush over him for a while again. One of the issues with the storytelling style of the Dragon Ball franchises is that villains (other than Freiza and Broly) never really get to come back, so there always needs to be a new threat and we don't get new fights with classic antagonists. Doctor Lychee gets around that, by being able to bring back heavy hitters from the past, without leaning on the Dragon Balls or other magical loopholes. I've been crafting a character in the image of Doctor Lychee for my broader Equalisers SS4 setting, but if I could get the actual character in 28mm, he'd be a regular in many of my convention games as well. Just think about the Marvel Rising characters getting their shot against the "Super Axis" or The Legion of Superheroes coming up against the Sinister Six, that's exactly the kind of game I started writing my SuperSystem Ultimate Alliance rules to do.
The argument can be made that Doctor Lychee is just an excuse to recycle villains and makes the fights repetitive, but I think that shows a lack of imagination. Just an example from Plan To Eradicate the Sayians, we've never seen Freiza and Cooler fight together, sure, it doesn't last long, but seeing combinations like that is a big part of the appeal of Dragon Ball Multiverse, which I also enjoy quite a bit. The post-52 series of Booster Gold does something similar with time travel for excellent effect, with four versions of Blue Beetle getting to team up and fight a team of Silver Age villains. I really can't stop coming up with ideas for Doctor Lychee in Ultimate Alliance games, like, he's pretty much a perfect match for both the Legion of the Unliving and the Black Lantern Corps without even doing anything to tweak either. I can see Nekron wanting to get his hands on the technology that drives Lychee, and he seems like a much better lieutenant than Black Hand. Alright, now to convince someone to make me a Doctor Lychee in the right scale.
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