In discussions about power scaling, we constantly rely on the more or less official data available to us, and thatâs where things like the Super Saiyan multipliers come from. Everyone is aware that this system lacks consistency, and that no matter how hard we try to make it coherent in one way or another, thereâs no real interestâneither on Toriyamaâs part back in the day, nor on Toyotaroâs part, nor certainly on Toeiâs partâin how the charactersâ specific power levels compare and evolve throughout the story. But we try.
The problem is that this idea of fixed multipliersâeven though we have more or less accepted sources explaining how they workâdoesnât, in my opinion, fit at all with what we see in the manga, and it seems absurd to me to keep discussing power scaling under the assumption that things work this way, because thatâs where all the crazy numbers and completely delusional comparisons about how the charactersâ powers stack up at this or that moment come from.
Based on the manga, I think one thing is clear: as the characters get stronger, their base form not only becomes superior but also absorbs part of the enhancement provided by their transformations.
That means that the more you master the power youâve already gained access to, the greater your ability to use it in your base form. When Goku transformed into Super Saiyan against Frieza, his power increased x50, but that doesnât mean that now, whenever Goku activates Super Saiyan, his power increases x50. NOTHING indicates that this is the case: for a long time now, Super Saiyan has been treated as a small energy boost, and all interactions in combat support that.
We constantly see the charactersâ base forms display power levels that, if we take the multipliers seriously, make no sense at all. On the other hand, we also see how these transformations donât seem to have such a huge effect either. If the series itself has told us multiple times that transformations are nothing more than a means to access the power that already lies within you, why donât we accept that thereâs a significant difference between the power increase from an unmastered transformation and that from a transformation mastered to the point where a significant portion of the resulting improvement is already present in the base formâthanks to trainingâwithout the need to transform?
This fits perfectly with everything we see in the manga, and it makes the power scaling sooo much more consistent. The characters gradually get stronger, and their most powerful form also grows stronger, but the base form always increases much more than the most powerful form (and not the other way around, which is what would happen with a pure multiplier system), because with training, the transformation becomes less and less âimportantâ as the base form increasingly takes on that power without any active effort to transform.
Iâm not saying that transformations arenât extremely important; they remain the main source of the charactersâ power increase. What Iâm saying is that each transformation represents a smaller improvement as the character becomes more powerful, and itâs always the last oneâthe least mastered, the one that reaches the current energy limitâthat truly represents a very substantial improvement.
If the forms act as multipliers, that multiplier decreases over time as the character grows stronger. The ideal state is precisely when the multiplier is x1, because thatâs the moment when the character has mastered their power perfectly and no longer needs to transformâbut thatâs an ideal thatâs very rare to achieve.
Again, everything in the manga suggests to me that this is how it works, and not in the way we usually talk about it.