Dragon Ball ends with Goku flying off on a dragon.
Mr. Satan ends it with the people of Earth trusting him enough to save the world.
Western coverage of Mr. Satan tends to treat him as comic relief — the blowhard who stole credit, the coward who got lucky, the punchline. Japanese fans who’ve sat with the Buu arc for thirty years have a different read. In a series built entirely around the idea that power determines outcomes, Mr. Satan is the character who won using nothing but human connection. Japanese fans find that genuinely remarkable.
What Piccolo said about him
Near the end of the Buu arc, Videl asks Piccolo why Majin Buu — even in his most dangerous, most mindless form — never killed her father.
Piccolo’s answer is one of the most-quoted lines in Japanese Dragon Ball fan discussions: “While we were trying to solve this with power, your father chose to try to become Buu’s friend. He may not be able to match our strength. But your father is a proud world champion.”
Piccolo is not a character who says things he doesn’t mean. Japanese fans take this as the series’ own verdict on Mr. Satan: he did something none of the fighters could do, using a skill none of them had. The read isn’t that he got lucky. It’s that he was genuinely better at this specific thing than everyone else in the story.
I find this one of the most interesting moments in the whole series. Piccolo — who started as a literal demon, who has spent years transforming into something like a person through his relationship with Gohan — recognizing that friendship is its own form of strength. Coming from him, it means something.
The element the fighters couldn’t provide
At the end of the Buu arc, Goku needs to fire the Spirit Bomb. The Spirit Bomb requires energy donated willingly by living beings. He asks. Nobody responds. The people of Earth have just watched the sky fill with explosions and seen their planet partially destroyed. They don’t trust the voice asking for their help.
Mr. Satan asks instead.
And everyone listens.
Japanese fan discussions return to this moment specifically because it reframes the entire arc. Goku needed two things to defeat Buu: the power to fire the Spirit Bomb, and the trust of ordinary people to fuel it. He had the first. He couldn’t get the second. Mr. Satan was the only person in the cast who could.
One Japanese blogger described it plainly: the gap between Goku and the people of Earth was too large. He’d spent decades fighting threats ordinary people couldn’t comprehend, and in doing so became incomprehensible himself. Mr. Satan was the bridge. That’s not a small role. That’s the role nobody else could fill.
He never died
This is a small detail that Japanese fans find quietly significant.
Mr. Satan is one of the only characters in Dragon Ball Z who never dies. Not once. Goku dies. Krillin dies multiple times. Vegeta dies. Piccolo dies. Even characters with far greater power than Mr. Satan die over the course of the series.
Mr. Satan, the weakest named fighter in the cast by a considerable margin, survives everything. Including Buu’s attack that nearly killed him, which he shrugged off in a way that defies any rational reading of the power levels.
Japanese fans don’t read this as an accident or an oversight. They read it as Toriyama’s way of protecting the character he’d come to love. Toriyama has said on record that if he were to do another Dragon Ball story, he’d want to center it on Mr. Satan and Buu — a comedy about those two living together. The person who said that treated Mr. Satan as a main character, not a joke.
The real world champion
Here’s what Japanese fans have settled on over the years: Mr. Satan is the actual hero of the Buu arc by the rules that the Buu arc establishes for itself.
The arc is, at its core, about the limits of pure strength. Goku and Vegeta and Gohan and Gotenks are all more powerful than anything the series has previously produced, and none of them can end it cleanly. The arc keeps escalating because power alone isn’t the answer. The answer turns out to require something Goku doesn’t have: the trust of ordinary people and the ability to make a genuine friend out of a mindless destroyer.
Mr. Satan solved both. He befriended Buu when nobody else would try. He reached the people of Earth when Goku couldn’t. Those are the two things the arc actually needed.
Western fans see the blowhard who took credit for things he didn’t do. Japanese fans see that too. But they also see the guy who, when it actually mattered, did the things nobody else could. The title ‘World Champion’ is a joke for most of Dragon Ball. By the end of the Buu arc, Japanese fans read it as the one title in the series that was genuinely earned.
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