Part 30: Goku's Training Begins!! Can He Defeat An Old Foe?!
Howdy, folks, and welcome back! Last time, on Attack of the Saiyans, we arrived at King Kai's planet, where we made him laugh and qualified to train with him. Today, we're going to start said training, so let's head out.
So, we've gotta catch Bubbles the Monkey. He's very fast, and we're in ten times gravity, so this could be difficult.
Also, if nobody has thought of it, if there's a live-action movie (a good one, mind you), Geop would make a good King Kai.
In response, we're going to go raid King Kai's pad.
What the hell is that.
Oh, it's Gregory! He runs the shop on this world.
The regular items are your standard fare, so let's move along.
His accessories are upgraded versions of what we've already seen.
Some are pretty solid, but some I haven't used much. I generally don't have problems with Speed, for example, so I've never equipped one of these.
This one is interesting, as chains are pretty powerful when they activate. However, a 5% chance is pretty low for my taste.
And Bracelets raise the associated stat by 5, instead of 3. I pick up some Power Bracelets and a Fighter's Emblem for Goku.
He also has this Capsule, which could come in handy in the future.
Alright, let's explore everywhere else.
I'm sure I saw a piece like that in an art museum once.
Well, Geop, if you're reading, this is a shoutout to you.
And an extra 300 HP for someone! Probably Gohan.
And that's all I found in there. I could very well have missed something.
King Kai has a pretty bitchin' car. A 1957 Chevy Bel Air, to be specific. Don't know why, don't know where he got it, or where he drives it, but he has it.
Alright, let me take this moment to quote Carbon dioxide, who nerded out on the issue of gravity.
Carbon dioxide posted:
Seriously, you folks start talking about physics but don't even take your calculator out?
To do calculations with the gravity we need to know the gravity of the planet and the size.
The surface gravity is simple. 10g, or 10 x 9.8 m/s^2 = 98 m/s^2.
For the size, I went to the Dragon Ball Wiki. It says that King Kai's car is a 1957 Red Chevrolet Bel Air. According to Wikipedia, that car has a length of 195.6", or almost 5 meters.
The scale seems to differ a bit between the anime and the game, but I'll go with a picture from this game. It won't change much anyway.
As you can see, the diameter of the planet is about six and a half times the length of the car. That makes 32.5 meters. The radius is half the diameter, 16.25 meters. By the way, that's a tiny house.
Now, we can use the formule g = GM / r^2, with g being the surface gravity, G the gravitational constant, M the mass of the planet in kg, and r the radius in meters. Let's rewrite that. M = g*r^2 / G.
Filling it in: M = 98 * 16.25^2 / 6.674E-11 = 3.88E14 kg
That's a rather big number, but it doesn't tell us that much by itself. But we can use it to calculate a mean density of the planet. Density is simply mass divided by volume.
The volume of a sphere is given by (4/3)pi*r^3. For King Kai's planet, that is 17974 cubic meters.
The density is 3.88E14 kg / 17974 m^3 = 2.16E10 kg / m^3 or roughly 21.6 billion kg / m^3. For the Americans, that's about 1.35 billion pounds per cubic foot. Imagine lifting a block of that stuff.
Anyway, that density is in the same order of magnitude as a white dwarf. That's a very dense, relatively small star that has almost burned out. As it completely burns out, which can take hundreds of billions of years, it might turn into a black dwarf, with similar properties except that it doesn't glow. Its matter is in a 'degenerate' state, meaning that the atoms are so close together they don't act in a way we're used to. The only reason a white/black dwarf is stable is because it is about as heavy as our sun. This gives it so much gravity that it can keep itself together.
King Kai's planet weighs many, many, many orders of magnitude less than our sun. This means that in reality, this planet would immediately blast apart in an enormous explosion.
Of course you could try to prevent this by using a different kind of mass distribution. Put something much denser in the center, and make the outer layers a bit less dense. For instance, put a neutron star or a black hole in the center, those are both much denser than a white dwarf.
The thing is, this wouldn't be stable either. Either the black hole is too strong, the gravity is way higher than 10g, and everything is sucked in, or it's not strong enough and the planet explodes (or if it's exactly in between, the inner part would be sucked in while the outer part would be blasted away).
The only way I can think of to make a planet like this keep together is by using some magical "forcefield" that prevents it from flying apart. The force required for such a thing would be incomprehensibly large. And you need to keep applying it every nanosecond.
Oh by the way, if King Kai's planet were possible, the small size distorts gravity so much that Goku's head would experience significantly less gravity than his feet. Enough to make anyone feel a bit... lightheaded.
Which all sounds good, but how does ground water factor into that? Is it possible for ground water to be here? And how does Bojack deal with that?
Alright, I'm going back to my old theory; King Kai's planet is magic. I'm not thinking about it any further.
So, where did Bubbles get off to? We're supposed to be chasing him.
Hey, there he is! He certainly didn't go far.
Hey! Get back here, you furry son of a bitch!
But, first, treasure.
Now this is definitely not something I'm turning down. Full HP/Ki restores are always good things to have. And they don't really have the Elixir hoarding effect here, since they're not exactly uncommon. And if I remember right, we can just buy them later on.
Alright, back to chasing the monkey.
So, this is pretty much just following Bubbles around the planet. No actual chasing involved.
Where there's another treasure, which could come in handy at some point. However, by the time we're really looking to use Ultimate Attacks and needing our Rage Gauges full, they'll already be full. Plus, when we starting uprgrading the Rage Gauge filling ability, we'll be able to blast them to full in a short time.
On the next screen, we catch Bubbles. I'm glad there's not a stupid minigame for this, unlike in Legend of the Super Saiyan.
For those of you who were wondering what happened to Danaru's Legendary Side Story, his life has gone a little crazy, so that project is on hiatus for the moment.
Though, I am looking for someone interested in doing the Legacy of Goku games.
At least the first one; that covers the events of this game, and the Namek stuff.
I'm trying to find people to do stuff like that, to provide a nice counterpoint for what we're seeing here.
Also, chasing down Bubbles, buying from Gregory, and looting King Kai's pad took us forty days to do.
Speaking of Gregory, he was an anime-only character. The manga only featured Bubbles.
In the anime, Goku was tasked with catching Bubbles, like here, but also had to smash Gregory with a hammer.
Gregory is the little cricket fellow that we bought stuff from, if you didn't know.
Oh, shit, King Kai is talking. Whoops. Uh, sure, we're up to whatever you got!
That's one of my favorite things about Goku; he's all about hard working and training, and he's willing to give anything a try. He had a line in an episode I saw as a kid that's stuck with me; he once said, "Where there's a will, there's a way."
And this is a bit of advice that Goku seemed to take to heart, considering how he became a Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan (holy shit, that is cumbersome).
Well, Goku is better at punching than just about anyone else, so he's at least halfway there.
Editor's Note: Goku believes "mentally" is a type of way to prepare rice and chicken.
Which brings us to the meat of this update. King Kai's favor isn't very hard, but it takes a bit of time.
: There seems to be trouble in Yemma Forest...
: ...Yemma Forest? Mez and Goz told me that the fruit from the Yemme tree was King Yemma's favorite...: ...That's right. Normally, King Yemma would go in there and take care of the problem himself...But he's been busy lately. He heard you made it here and has been begging for you to come lend him a hand! 
: Oh...Well, he did help me before...OK! I'll go to Yemma Forest and take care of whoever's causing the problem! ...Good. Think of it as part of your training. : OK. So, if this is like training, then is whoever is causing trouble in the forest strong? : Heh heh heh...It's someone you know quite well, actually!: ...Someone I know? 
Well, King Kai, Goku doesn't really know Raditz all that well. He pretty much just knows that he's a dick and Piccolo killed him.
This is also some stuff that happens only in this game. Someone pointed out that this is based on the Kai label, which is true. It's also true that this game features more filler than the anime, which is kind of funny.
Either way, we've gotta go kick Radtiz's ass. Which shouldn't be hard, since we should be a lot stronger now.
There's also a bit of a...Gimmick, maybe?
Whatever you want to call guest party members out of your control.
Bubbles is going to be accompanying us for this bit of training.
Which, hey, I could think of worse party members to have.
Makes me wonder why Chi-Chi couldn't join us earlier...
(Goku will be faster than Bubbles in combat)
This is a complete lie.
...Kind of sucks.
Never mind his sprite being large enough to see, Goku still misses him.
He's a bit of a loud mouth and I don't care for him much.
In fact, I didn't even make a portrait for him. I made one for Bubbles, who only makes monkey noises, but not one for a character who actually speaks.
Gregory is just kind of a shitbird.
Though, according to the DB Wiki, Bubbles has a power level of 1,000, while Gregory's sits at 1,100. I don't know how that makes sense, but whatever. It's Dragon Ball.
You'd think so, but Goku is going to do 99% of the work here.
Which even he knows.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm going.
I'm not sure if this means that Yemma Forest is extremely far from King Kai's planet or if it's in a different kind of plane from it.
Alright, let's head out. We've gotta go beat up a formerly formidable foe, so we better get to it.
Huh. I would have thought that warp would look a little more impressive.
And in we go!
And we pop into Yemma Forest.
We won't be here for very long, but we'll be back in bigger detail later.
As we're not doing anything with these stumps, but they're here. It's not hard to figure out that we'll be spending time here later.
Since we'll be back later, I won't take the time to explore.
Even though I start off by going the wrong way.
This raises your chance of a critical attack for a few turns, which is kind of interesting, if situational. I might find a use for this later, but it'll probably wind up as vendor trash since I'm still collecting carrots.
Heading back left, we go north on the first screen and then to the east.
And no, I have not encountered a fight yet. It's kind of weird.
Another clue we'll be back later is this obstacle that we need the Level 3 Ki Blast for. Not that I didn't try blasting it anyway.
For our first new enemy, we find these upgraded demon fellers.
They've got an energy blast that does low damage, but looks cool.
Bubbles and Gregory aren't actually party members, in that we can control them, so they do a few different random things. They've got three actions each (if they have more, I've not seen them), and they're mostly here for low amounts of support.
Bubbles, being a monkey, likes bananas.
It heals him for a bit of health. I'm not sure how much they have, but if they take too much damage, they will flee.
You can't hit a Guard with either of them, though, so you only have to worry about Goku. And if they flee a fight, they'll be back in the next one, at full HP.
Gregory turns into a ball of light for his attacks.
In his first, he'll attempt to blind the enemy party. It's about as useful as you'd expect; most enemies you'd want to blind are immune to it, and in most cases, it's just better to wail on them for the extra damage, fully incapacitating them, instead of rendering them mostly harmless.
I haven't had much chance to show off chain attacks, but they are extremely powerful. In this shot, Goku did roughly triple his normal damage from a single chain. They don't come up often, but when they do, the enemy is fucking aware of it. I'm still not sure if an extra 5% chance at getting one is worth an accessory slot, though.
Bubbles also has a King Kong impersonation.
And then he makes like Donkey Kong and punches the shit out of the enemy. It's not very powerful, but c'mon, a fucking monkey just punched a demon. What more do you want?
It's nothing fancy when they exit the battle, but here it is if you wanted to see it.
And one last monkey punch for the road. Which also finished this fight.
Oh, yeah, I blew all of Goku's AP (and the Finisher Bean) on raising his abilities.
There's some treasure here, but nothing too fancy.
This makes you impervious to Sleep, but that doesn't come up very often.
Up the ladder is this capsule, which does a high amount of Fire damage to an enemy. I use it later on.
But not in this fight!
Caterpillars are upgraded versions of what we've seen before. A lot of enemies in this game are like that.
Nothing too impressive, even if they do take a bit of a beating before going down.
Uh...Good try, Gregory. Thanks for the effort.
These guys can hit every party member with their rolling attack, but it doesn't deal a lot of damage. Were this to a single character, maybe, but spread across three people, 240 isn't much.
Ah, here's the single target version. 240 isn't a huge amount of damage, but it can get dangerous.
They also have the string-shot attack to lower your Speed and Evasion.
As well as dropping a juicy bit of EXP.
Alright, let's get to the fratricide.
Wait, if he's already dead, does it count as that?
Hell, I'll figure it out later.
As Raditz is busy blowing up a tree.
Huh, did anyone else just imagine Goku as Captain Planet?
: I thought I would run into you eventually...What are you doing here?
: I came to stop you! : ...Stop me? You were barely able to take me down before with two people! With the power of the fruit from the Yemma tree, I'm going to surpass King Yemma himself!! : I've begun training under King Kai! I've gotten a lot stronger! You haven't been training at all, so there's no way I can lose! : ...Interesting...Well, let's see who's stronger than, shall we? 
Well, looks like Raditz is just itchin' for a second death. Let's indulge him.
He's got 7,500 HP this go 'round, which is 1,500 less than before, but this time, we don't have an instant win button.
However, we have a monkey this time around.
Who is showing off his third attack.
It deals no damage, but has a chance to inflict Stun.
Can I point out how cool I think Raditz's normal attack is? It's got a bit of a slick charm to it.
Also, Gregory is still...Certainly there.
So, we're not doing too shabby with just regular attacks. That's nothing that'll end the battle quickly, but it's not bad damage.
Also, Raditz seems to really hate Gregory for some reason.
At first, I thought maybe crickets were big pests to growing radishes, but I didn't find much about that. Or look very hard, as that's kind of a dumb thing to think about for why Raditz is attacking Gregory.
I decide to buff Goku's Attack for a turn, just to see what kind of damage we can do.
As it turns out, it's quite a fucking lot. 20% of a bosses health in one go is nothing to scoff at.
For his part, Raditz isn't too much different from when Piccolo and Goku took him on.
In fact, he does around the same amount of damage, which is kind of a neat detail; it helps us realize just how much stronger we've gotten.
Raditz can dish out some pain, but as long as you're ensuring Goku is #1 on your list, you should be alright.
And Goku should be top dog in this battle; if he dies, it's all over.
This may very well be one of the most satisfying screenshots I've ever taken in an LP.
Raditz can still use a Super Explosive Wave to hit everyone for big damage; he doesn't have any new tricks, but don't let that make you too cocky. He'll beat your ass if you give him the chance.
However, chances like that are not given when you're launching Kamehamehas at him like an orbital laser.
Whenever I defeat a boss and someone doesn't gain a level, a pit of despair wells up in me, shrinking my heart, and slowly killing me.
Though, maybe that's just a sign that I'm a tad overleveled. I don't know. I haven't actually done any grinding here.
Not that it's a bad thing to be a little ahead of the curve.
No, I didn't miss any dialog. Raditz just flies off after that.
Eh, it's fine, Goku. I'm sure we'll never see him again.
Definitely never seeing him again.
Normally, I'd just omit the journey, but something happens during this one.
The last new enemy appears!
Another Ghost-type enemy; super-weak to Ki, weak to elements, and doesn't take shit from physicals.
Interestingly enough, Gregory's energy ball attacks are physical, not Ki-based. Utterly unimportant, but still neat to note.
180 HP at max, these guys don't stand a chance against non-physicals.
Case in point, our new Burn Capsule.
And we get good EXP for little effort.
And back to King Kai we go!
Why does he look so surprised that we made it back?
Well, we're here, he's not; you do the math.
"I have a feeling he's going to be a recurring boss fight."
Jesus, game, we fucking get it; we're going to fight Raditz again!
King Kai, after you see the asses I'll be later on, you'll find that I'm up for any kind of ass kicking.
Well, Goku put it simply, but he agrees.
Probably the opposite of that, actually, Goku.
600,000 miles would do that to a person, you'd think. Or the 750,000 Goku did, plus the stuff in Hell and with Princess Snake.
: That's right, Goku! Oh, looks like you have a guest!
Who the hell would be visiting Goku when he's dead?
Well, were it anyone else, I'd be surprised, but it's been established that Baba has some ability to travel and speak with the dead.
And with less than four months to go...
What a conundrum.
I imagine it was a pun-off.
Baba can bring people back from the dead for 24 hours.
And looks like she's pulling that card to get Goku to help find the Dragon Balls.
: Just think of looking for the Dragon Balls as part of your training! You want the Saiyans to show up with you not being able to be wished back? 
: Well, no...
Well, that was quick...
And off we go, back to the realm of the living!
Which we'll talk about in the next chapter and the next update.
Stay tuned!