Dragon Power
- $49.99
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Box, manual and game — all original, all in the photos. Game condition guide →
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Item Condition
Complete in box: the cartridge, the manual and the box, all original; anything beyond that is included only if you can see it in the photos. Look over the photos for condition, packaging and details. Every cartridge's shell, label and board are checked for authenticity when it comes into the store, and it's tested before it's listed. It ships in a collector's bag or a hard plastic case.
Item Description
A spiky-haired boy with a monkey's tail, a magic staff and a cloud he can ride: on the 1988 NES box he became a kung fu kid in a white gi and blue headband, and the words Dragon Ball appeared nowhere. Dragon Power is one of the earliest appearances of Akira Toriyama's Goku in North America, smuggled in under a new name more than a decade before Dragon Ball Z became a phenomenon in the West.
Underneath the disguise is Bandai's Famicom adaptation of the opening of Dragon Ball, developed by Tose and following the first two volumes of the manga. Goku teams up with Nora, the renamed Bulma, to hunt down the seven Crystalballs, said to grant any wish to whoever gathers them all. Along the way he meets the Hermit, Pudgy the shapeshifting pig and the desert bandit Lancer, while King Minos, the North American stand-in for the scheming Emperor Pilaf, is after the same prize.
The game alternates between overhead stages, where Goku fights his way through crowds of enemies, and side-view showdowns against the bosses. His signature energy blast, the Kamehameha, survives the localization as the “Wind Wave.” The renaming was not the only change. The Kung-Fu Tournament stages of the Japanese original were cut, making the American game shorter, and the manga's cheekier gags were scrubbed out, most famously a power-up that became a neatly triangle-cut sandwich.
Those changes are exactly why Dragon Power fascinates collectors now. It is a time capsule of how anime was repackaged for 1980s America, a real Dragon Ball game hiding in plain sight on store shelves, and a conversation piece on any shelf beside later Dragon Ball releases. For fans who know the series from Dragon Ball Z, playing it is a strange, delightful trip back to Goku's earliest days, when he was a wild kid with a tail and the story was still a treasure hunt.
Fast factsgame data via IGDB
- Released
- 1988
- Publisher
- Bandai
- Developer
- Tose
- Genre
- Beat 'em up, Adventure
- Players
- Single player
About the game
Dragon Power is an action-adventure game developed and published by Bandai for the Nintendo Entertainment System on March 3, 1988. It is a heavily localized version of the Japanese game Dragon Ball: Shenron no Nazo. Although some of the European releases retain the Dragon Ball assets (under the title Dragon Ball), the North American release removes most references to the franchise. The game follows the first two volumes of the Dragon Ball manga, as the young monkey-tailed boy Goku (along with his teenage friend, Bulma, known in the North American version as Nora), embark on a quest to find all seven Dragon Balls (Crystal Balls in the NA version), in which it is believed that collecting them grants the user any wish they desire. Along the way, they encounter various characters, including turtle hermit Master Roshi (Hermit in the NA version), shapeshifting anthropomorphic pig Oolong (Pudgy in the NA version) and desert bandit Yamcha (Lancer in the NA version). This port also has less stages than the original game.
Summary from the IGDB community database — the condition and contents of this listing are described above and in the photos.
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NES
Dragon Power
$49.99
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NES
Dragon Power
$49.99
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