Dragon Ball: That Time I Got Reincarnated As Yamcha #1-3

Dragon Ball: That Time I Got Reincarnated As Yamcha #1-3

Originally released in 2016

Written by Dragon Garow Lee

Art by Dragon Garow Lee

The isekai genre of anime is not one that I'm overly familiar with, though by my understanding, it has some similarities with The Wizard Of Oz or The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, in that an ordinary child/teenager is transported into a fantasy world.  This series takes that concept and combines it with Dragon Ball, with a twist - instead of being reincarnated as someone like Goku, Vegeta, Gohan, or Piccolo, the nameless protagonist is reincarnated as Yamcha.

For those who aren't familiar with Dragon Ball, this is a problem, because Yamcha does not get treated well in this series - his first death became a meme (both for the pose that he died in and how he died to cannon fodder), he loses his girlfriend (Bulma, the series' heroine) to Vegeta, and beyond the fight against the Saiyans, he is completely irrelevant.  Only a handful of heroic characters seem to have it worse - Akira Toriyama completely forgot about Launch, and Chaotsu (the little odd-looking friend of the three-eyed Tien), whose lameness isn't even a meme - he loses a fight due to basic math, dies as often as Krillin without anything to show for it, and his best-remembered moment is self-destructing only for it to reveal after his death that his opponent wasn't even scratched by the attack.

Not wanting to be suffer the fate of being Yamcha, the protagonist vows to get stronger using his knowledge of Dragon Ball. (though he's aware that even with that knowledge, he has his limits - there's no way that Yamcha is going to be defeating gods, for example)  The first chapter ends with him surviving the Saibaman suicide attack, making it clear how different this will be compared to the original series.

The protagonist is happy to be in Yamcha's situation of being in a relationship with Bulma, and is tempted to let Vegeta die in order to maintain that.  However, he can't bring himself to do it - not only would it mean that Trunks never exists, but as he's a fan of Dragon Ball, he knows how Vegeta grows over the years and becomes a valuable ally.  As a result, he's willing to sacrifice his own happiness in this case, which was a nice bit of development.

Weirdly enough, there are characters who have or gain some awareness of the protagonist's situation - Guru, the massive elder of the planet Namek, reads the protagonist's mind, while Kami (and, by extension, Piccolo in the later arcs) is also aware of the situation to some extent.  Beerus (the God of Destruction) and Whis (his mentor) from Dragon Ball Super make a cameo showing that they're also aware of this situation.  None of them react to the idea that, in the world that the protagonist comes from, they're all fictional characters.

Kami is also aware that one of the other Dragon Ball characters is in the exact same situation as the protagonist.  Thanks to Yamcha's power-up, everyone survived the attack of the Saiyans, whereas originally, there were about four episodes in a row for the original anime where the title was basically "(insert character here) Dies!"  As a result, there are only a handful of options, and with the other person wondering how many lives it took for the protagonist to power Yamcha up to such an extent, that narrows it down further since it implies that the other person had died several times before this point.

The final chapter has the main cast of Dragon Ball getting ready for the Cell Games, which is the last time in the manga where Yamcha's even remotely relevant. (he does get a moment to shine in an episode of Dragon Ball Super where Goku's friends are playing baseball against the citizens of another universe and Yamcha's the only one who knows the rules, but there's a running gag in the lead-up to the final arc where Yamcha is waiting to be asked to join a team-based tournament for the fate of the universe and he winds up being completely forgotten about)

However, Yamcha isn't present.  He's discovered who the other impostor is thanks to some out-of-character comments that had been made at earlier points in Dragon Ball's history.  These comments happened off-screen, though the number of possible options for who this could be are small, and this person has been considerably less effective at improving the character that they possessed than the protagonist was.

It's Chaotsu!  Having died several times (seemingly, he's stuck in a time loop until the people responsible grow bored), he's given up on being heroic and has decided to combine his knowledge of Dragon Ball and Chaotsu's psychic powers to take over the world.  As Goku and Gohan (and Mr. Satan, the powerless martial arts champion) are facing off against Cell, Yamcha and Chaotsu must battle it out for the fate of the world, which is not a sentence that I would have expected to type a few years before this came out.

Dragon Garow Lee does a good job at emulating Toriyama's art style for most of the series while using a different art style for the "real world" scenes that book-end this story.  The premise is an entertaining one, and it's a fun little what-if that doesn't feel like it goes overboard. (Yamcha isn't turned into a God Mode Sue figure, and his knowledge of Dragon Ball comes with its downsides)  I wish it had gone on a chapter or so longer, and when that's the worst that I can say about it, it's a clear sign of how much I enjoyed re-reading it.