Dragon Ball: Could Goku & Vegeta Learn to Use Gotenks’ Most Bizarre Attacks?

One of the wildest fights in Dragon Ball Z was between the composite Super Saiyan Gotenks and the villainous Super Buu for the fate of the universe. In addition to revealing his own Super Saiyan 3 transformation, Gotenks boasted an incredible array of truly bizarre attacks -- befitting a fused warrior comprised of two young boys, Trunks and Goten -- that drew from their own childish imagination in developing fighting techniques.

Crude but effective, the question remains if Gotenks' strangest attacks could be learned by the other Z Fighters, including their fathers Goku and Vegeta, and incorporated into their own fighting styles.

Among the fighting techniques Gotenks unveiled against Super Buu, first in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber, was a method to trap Buu and a spectral attack that effectively saw Gotenks create his own army. The fused Saiyan's first technique was dubbed the Galactic Donut, with Gotenks forming a band of energy rings to trap his opponent and, in one instance, completely encompassing Buu into a makeshift volleyball construct and spiking him down to the ground. The second technique was the Super Ghost Kamikaze Attack, with Gotenks blowing out a ghostly doppelgänger of himself which exploded upon making physical contact with his target.

The Galactic Donut in and of itself isn't the most uniquely innovative technique in Gotenks' arsenal, with the idea of fighters using energy bands to confine their opponents being seen throughout the franchise before. Majin Vegeta used energy bands to trap Goku against rock during their duel, with Vegeta able to constrict the bands and visibly increase their pressure. During the Dragon Ball Super manga series, Gohan is seen employing his own form of the Galactic Donut attack in a failed effort to contain Moro when the magical supervillain comes to Earth. Similarly, Super Buu replicates the Galactic Donut attack on Gohan during DBZ after absorbing Gotenks into himself.

The Ghost Kamikaze Attack is a bit more unusual and has only been seen a handful of times in DBZ and the non-canonical anime film Dragon Ball Z: Fusion Reborn. The idea of a fighter creating duplicates of themselves was first unveiled by Tien toward the end of the original Dragon Ball but the Ghost Kamikaze Attack takes it in a radically different direction, both in terms of the ghosts' combustibility and each one taking on a mind of their own. Super Buu actually improves on the technique after absorbing Gotenks, with his ghostly doubles able to perform energy attacks like the Kamehameha Wave and Masenko. However, only these two characters have ever canonically been shown to perform any variation of the Super Ghost Kamikaze Attack to date.

Goku and especially Vegeta are both likely to dismiss the possibility of employing the Ghost Kamikaze Attack themselves, preferring to get in the fight themselves rather than outsource the dirty work to ghostly duplicates. Vegeta would probably see the whole technique as a childish bit of antics he wouldn't have the time for anyway. The Galactic Donut is a technique that Vegeta has unveiled his own variant and has been demonstrably learnable before and just stands as a much more conventional attack that the Z Fighers would employ and have done so before. And while it's been sometime since Gotenks has made a canonical appearance, hopefully the next time will come with another host of new, innovative techniques.

About The Author