Janemba by Manabu Yashiro

Son Gohan Beast by Hungry Clicker

Androids by Lum

Frieza by Corey Lewis

Father Son Kamehameha (Future World) by ruto830

Gogeta by Young Jijii

E3 2017 - Dragon Ball Fighter Z

Even though they shovel out enough anonymous anime tie-ins to sink a fleet, Arc System Works do occasionally play an absolute blinder. Dragon Ball Fighter Z looks set to do for Akira Toriyama's peerless masterpiece what their 2005 Fist of the North Star coin-op did for Tetsuo Hara and Buronson's, namely transform hundreds of pages of static pose downs into a 2D fighting game kinetic enough to get the Justin Wongs of the world excited.

METS

Dragon Ball: Plan to Eradicate the Super Saiyans

Dragon Ball: Plan to Eradicate the Super Saiyans is an updated, shortened redraft of an OAV originally released in conjunction with a NES game. Continuing the interactive tie-in theme, unless you live in Japan, this TV episode length fighter is only available with the Dragon Ball: Raging Blast 2 video game. Although stuffed with beefed up versions of the pre-Cell Saga movie villains, Eradicate centres around the throwaway idea that the Saiyans were not indigenous to the planet Frieza destroyed. Eradicate begins with Saiyans, in their monstrous Great Ape form, trashing the science-focused civilisation of the Tuffles. The dying race's greatest scientist, Dr Lychee, constructs a machine powered by grudges that gathers the animosity created by the invading brigands.

Eventually this emotion refining super computer gives birth to an avenging android named Hatchiyack. In this sense, Eradicate is a galactic reconfiguring of Dr Gero's Red Ribbon revenge with Hatchiyack standing in for Cell. Design wise, Hatchiyack isn't really up to the high standards set by Akira Toriyama's bestiary. There are few interesting design flourishes - an executioner's cowl and suspenders, both cerise coloured growths covering his milky pink flesh - but the artificial fighter reads more like a background heavy. Eradicate should be great - a short, concise, rummage through Dragon Ball's well established action tropes - but the show comes off as business-like and impersonal. It's not all drab though, a few wide shots have spikier, off-brand renders of the main cast and Hatchiyack's defeat as at least built out of a Son Goku character moment. The best bit is when all the Z cast line up to throw their ki blasts, their cataclysmic powers warping the short film's visuals into fluid, molten energy.

Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods

Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods further explores the celestial chicanery at work in Akira Toriyama's martial arts universe. This astral plain is a functioning bureaucracy, full of bizarre middle-managers who spend their days tending to their own micro-planets and gawping at galaxy shredding match-ups. The latest edition to this heavenly hierarchy is Bills, a purple man-sized cat who also happens to be The God of Destruction.

Like most felines, Bills is lazy and capricious, tending to obliterate planets according to whim rather than strictly reasoned logic. Journeying to Earth on the off-chance there's someone there powerful enough to fight him, Bills instead spends the majority of his time breakdancing and sampling appetisers at Bulma's birthday party. Although Goku does eventually ascend to a new super saiyajin form buff enough to stand toe-to-toe with Bills, Battle of Gods is more of a comedic victory lap about oral-stage fixated idiots, who just happen to be insanely powerful, than a gruelling battle for survival.

TEN BILLION

The Dragon Ball Z movies tend to exist parallel to the established continuity of Akira Toriyama's manga. This sixth installment, Dragon Ball Z: Clash!! 10,000,000,000 Powerful Warriors, plays around with the idea of despotic alien enemies being returned to life as unbeatable mechanoids - a strand that was otherwise explored during the Androids / Cell Games arc.

Director Daisuke Nishio (Crying Freeman, 3x3 Eyes) stages a meta-clash for the ages. Goku and Frieza's older brother Cooler fight incessantly over a flooded wasteland, while a bleak, nuclear wind whistles around them. The framing and shot composition owe a surprising aesthetic debt to Spaghetti Westerns and the psychologically charged oaters that followed. Impact pops sound like processed macaroni pistols, while pose down interludes are littered with extreme close-ups of glowering eyes. There's even an advancing doom shot that quotes High Plains Drifter's heat haze nightmares.

GINYU FORCE

SUPER SAIYAJIN 2