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Dragon Ball is a manga written by Akira Toriyama published Weekly Shonen Jump from 1984 to 1995.
It's the story of Goku, a kid with a monkey tail who travel to find the dragon balls, , which summon a wish-granting dragon when gathered, and to became the strongest martial artist in the world.
The story is engaging and the pacing is almost perfect, expecially in the first half of the series, with lots of breathtaking fights where the author takes inspiration from Bruce Lee movies.
The characters are managed in a good way at the start of the series being all different from each other up till halfway ... of the series where the author changes their personality to be more functional to the various arcs.
Toriyama's art style is very unique and super recognizable with some amazing character designs, the direction is simply perfect, the author is an absolute genius at making the reader's eye move through the panels giving a strong sensation of movement, while reading Dragon Ball almost feels like.
The writing is not perfect mostly because at some point Toriyama stopped to plan the story and to invent the story week by week.
In conclusion, talking of Dragon Ball in 2021 seems useless, however there are still a lot of people that think that this masterpiece doesn't deserve the reputation it has and consider it overrated, Bragon Ball is not a perfect manga, it has a lot of flaws and errors, but it is still one of the most important manga in all the history, it exported the manga culure in the western world and without it all the modern shonen manga that people consider "better" than Dragon Bal wouldn't probably even exist.