FAQs - Super Saiyan 2: Name and Translation History | Kanzenshuu (2025)

December 2024

Super Saiyan 2’s First Appearance

Gohan’s transformation across chapters 407 and 408 is a particularly impactful and memorable one, no doubt bolstered by its fantastic adaptation in Dragon Ball Z episode 184 (with its own unique insert song, no less!).

If you’ve been into the franchise for any extended period of time, you definitely know this transformation as “Super Saiyan 2“… but may not realize that it’s not actually named for quite some time after it appears! This is in particular contrast with the original Super Saiyan, which was explicitly built up by name over the course of an entire story arc before it finally happens.

Super Saiyan 2 Gets Named — In the Manga!

The transformation later known as “Super Saiyan 2” is not actually directly named as such for roughly another 70 chapters!

In manga chapter 474, Goku showcases various transformations to Majin Boo, and along the way to “Super Saiyan 3,” supposes aloud that you could call the stage in the middle “Super Saiyan 2”:

GOKU:
そして これがさっきみせた超サイヤ人を超えた超サイヤ人… 超サイヤ人２ってとこかな

GOKU:
And this is what I showed you before, a Super Saiyan beyond Super Saiyan. I guess you could call it Super Saiyan 2.

There it is — in an almost toss-away, rhetorical statement, “Super Saiyan 2” gets its name!

“Super Saiyan 2” is actually only spoken aloud a single other time in the original series, and only in the television adaption: in episode 248, Goku demonstrates the same progression of Super Saiyan levels in front of Goten, Trunks, and Piccolo, and notes “Super Saiyan 2” by name:

GOKU:
これが 超サイヤ人を超えた超サイヤ人２｡

GOKU:
This is beyond Super Saiyan, or Super Saiyan 2.

Super Saiyan 2 — Meanwhile In The Manga…

In the meantime, the form we know as “Super Saiyan 2” was (likely) showcased at least one notable time before it gets formally named: when Gohan takes the stage alongside Kibito at the 25th Tenka’ichi Budōkai, in paneling and framing that seems intentionally reminiscent of his transformation against Cell:

Here, Gohan only notes that he has become a Super Saiyan in general (though he sports what fans typically note as Super Saiyan 2’s trademark lightning sparks around him). Vegeta, meanwhile, gets in a snide remark about how Gohan was better back when he fought Cell:

GOHAN:
さあ 超サイヤ人になってやったぞ
これからどうするんだこのまま戦えばいいのか？

VEGETA:
あのやろうセルをやったころはまだまだそんなもんじゃなかったぞ……
平和ボケしてトレーニングをさぼってやがってからだ……

GOHAN:
As you wished, I transformed into a Super Saiyan. So, what now? Shall we just start the fight?

VEGETA:
Hmph… that little bastard… he’s far removed from what he was when he killed Cell. All because he went soft during peace times and didn’t keep up with his training…

Super Saiyan 2 Gets Named — Before the Manga!

So it took a full year and a half after the form’s debut to get a formal, published name… or did it?!

Between Gohan’s transformation in the manga at the beginning of 1993 and Goku’s dialogue in mid-1994, was there anything out there that referred to this “new form” of Gohan’s… and if so, what exactly did they call it…?

The “Anime Comic” adaptation of the Trunks TV special — a manga-formatted version with screenshots from the special with dialog bubbles inserted — was released at the very end of May 1993. These “Anime Comics” (or sometimes “Film Anime Comics” when referring to adaptations of the actual movies) were released “out of order” in Japan, where they picked up midway through the Dragon Ball Z movies in 1992, kept up with new ones as they came out, and wrapped back around again to adapt ones they had missed. The Trunks TV special “Anime Comic” was actually only the fifth one released of this bunch!

The back of the book details the various Super Saiyan transformations seen up to that point. Along with the standard “Super Saiyan” and even “Super Saiyan Grade 2” and “Super Saiyan Grade 3” — the bulkier forms shown off by the likes of Vegeta, Trunks, and Goku — it goes on to talk about what is later called “Full Power Super Saiyan” and then what Gohan becomes. Interestingly, the book keeps the naming consistency going strong, referring to them as “Super Saiyan Grade 4” (超サイヤ人第四段階) and “Super Saiyan Grade 5” (超サイヤ人第五段階), respectively.

Supplemental information and mini-guides are standard fare for the Anime Comics, but what’s notable here is the fact that some of this particular guide’s information pre-dates other, later, more-established information.

Later Supplemental Resources

Once “Super Saiyan 2” is effectively “canonized” as an in-universe term, it immediately surfaces in supplemental resources of the day — this includes, most notably, the various Daizenshuu volumes, whose release started mere months after the manga concluded (and while the television adaptation was actually still running).

The “Grade” names remain for the bulkier forms showcased by Vegeta and Trunks (the same ones quickly dismissed by Goku during his training with Gohan in the Room of Spirit and Time), but “Super Saiyan 2” gets its name alongside “Super Saiyan 3” as if it had always existed.

Video Game Appearances

Super Saiyan 2’s first — then still unnamed — video game appearance comes in 1993’s Dragon Ball Z: Super Butōden 2 for the Super Famicom (where Gohan is actually the main character; Goku is an unlockable hidden character!). Here in late 1993, we are still half a year before Super Saiyan 2’s “true name” is given in the manga.

As the series comes to an end in 1995, Gohan’s appearances in games — even in a post-Daizenshuu era — tend to simply refer to the “boyhood” aspect of his character, rather than any given transformation. This makes sense, as memory space and 2D animation capacity is at a premium (even with the advent of CD-ROMs); we have not yet entered the era of multiple character form and outfit selections in games, like we later see once the PlayStation 2 enters the scene.

Things change with the revival era at the turn of the century.

Incorrect & Inconsistent Video Game Names

Within the span of a few years, all of this gets ironed out — think to the Sparking! series with a plethora of individual forms right from the character select screen — but once the video games pick up again in 2002, Super Saiyan 2 isn’t quite as solidified in the minds of the rights-holders as you might otherwise think.

While the Budokai series gets the majority of mind-share from fans, it’s actually Legendary Super Warriors on the Nintendo Game Boy Color that kicks off the video game revival era in 2002. It’s here that we start to see more and more transformations per character, but naming consistency is not quite there yet.

We’ll see this for a bit with this generation of games, but “Super Saiyan” in Japanese tends to get written out for a while as スーパーサイヤ人 (sūpā saiyajin using the full English word “super”) rather than how it was always written in the manga as 超サイヤ人 (with the 超 character typically being read as chō, but with furigana above it indicating the sūpā pronunciation). It’s not as if there is no room for kanji (as was often the case during the early Famicom days; the 人 character is right there, after all. For whatever reason this is the case, and it ends up wasting character length that could otherwise be used to simplify some of these form names.

In the case of Legendary Super Warriors, things get even more convoluted, with the “Grade” forms of normal Super Saiyan not being written as such, but as something like “Super Saiyan — 2” and “Super Saiyan — 3”:

There is at least a difference here between スーパーサイヤ人2 and スーパーサイヤ人–2… but it’s not a great one. Had they written “Super Saiyan” with its 超 character like usual, 超サイヤ人第二段階 for “Super Saiyan Grade 2” could have fit in the same width of allotted character space. In their lower description area, the forms are written out with their correct names… but in largely with kana (minus the one 人 in saiyajin) and Roman numerals instead: スーパーサイヤ人だい２だんかい and スーパーサイヤ人だい3だんかい For Super Saiyan Grade 2 and 3, respectively.

This gets even more complicated with international localizations, with the European and American versions of the game having distinct “English translations” of the text:

The Budokai series — known simply under the “Dragon Ball Z” series title in Japan — seems to correct itself with its first entry. Trunks’ “Grade 2” and “Grade 3” forms get referred to as “Super Trunks” and “Super Trunks 2” respectively… which is still a little confusing, but at least self-consistent with itself, and distinct enough from “Super Saiyan 2”:

This all makes it unscathed, exactly as-is, over to the English localization in America:

Since the first Budokai game only really covers up to the end of the Cell arc (with a bonus Great Saiyaman unlockable character), Gohan is naturally the only character to showcase Super Saiyan 2. This appears properly in both Japanese and English, though the Japanese sports the same スーパーサイヤ人2 as Legendary Super Warriors:

Things start to get bonkers after this point, with Vegeta keeping his usual “Super Vegeta” name for his “Grade 2” form, and Trunks getting wholly incorrect transformation names! For both Budokai 2 and Budokai 3, Trunks’ “Grade” form is labeled as “Super Saiyan 2”. This is not a mistake of the English localization, as many fans back in the day presumed — this is in the original Japanese text!

This all means that the first mainline Dragon Ball video game to name “Super Saiyan 2” in the most-technically-correct way — as 超サイヤ人2 — was the first Dragon Ball Z: Sparking! from 2005:

As an aside, the western-produced Game Boy Advance release The Legacy of Goku II covered this material and had an opportunity to name it “correctly,” but the timing was a little strange: though the form’s name would obviously be well known in fandom, the game’s release in June 2003 (only a year out from its predecessor) meant its script would have already been in the works for a while, the English dub of the respective episode which names the form would have only just aired in September 2002. There was certainly time to line things up, and as seen by lines directly ripped from fansubs making their way into releases (see Buu’s Fury “I am the instrument of your defeat!”), the games’ developer Webfoot was certainly keeping up with the series… It’s all just a bit strange to see “Gohan has entered Super Saiyan Rage!” on screen here in the second game (years before “Super Saiyan Rage” was officially used as the name for Trunks’ blue-aura Super Saiyan form in Dragon Ball Super).

The Legacy of Goku II is actually the only game of the era to receive a “reverse importation” back to Japan. As part of the game’s re-localization back to its home country, the script for the game was heavily adapted, removing many of the “dub-isms” and correcting them back to dialogue accurate to the original series script. In the case of this Gohan transformation, rather than treating it as a formal “Super Saiyan Rage” name, the Japanese version of the game just describes the fact that “Gohan’s anger/rage has reached its peak/zenith!” (悟飯の怒りが 頂点に達しました!):

Akira Toriyama Forgot Super Saiyan 2?

In an interview printed within the May 2013 issue of V-Jump (released that March, timed alongside the theatrical debut of Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods), Toriyama speaks a bit about his creative process, and specifically how he creates new elements that feel like they fit the existing world.

Do you write down notes anywhere for that sort of background information?
No, I don’t do that. That’s why I keep on forgetting things. If I don’t forget stuff, new ideas won’t come to mind. For example, you know how there’s “Super Saiyan 3”?

Yes. Where the hair gets long.
I didn’t know that. (laughs) The whole time, I thought that was “Super Saiyan 2”. (laughs)

Whaaa?!
And I drew that myself. (laughs) Anyhow, I thought “2” was the one with long hair. It was like, “Man, I’ve really forgotten stuff…”.

Consider the manga itself in a bubble. Ignore things like extended TV series fights and video games with specifically-labeled forms. Looking at things this way — and considering only what Toriyama himself wrote within the pages of the manga — brings a different angle to things. The form is given extensive build-up, but then isn’t actually named until well over a year later, and then only in a tossaway character dialogue tidbit.

Toriyama’s “forgetfulness” is overly-exaggerated by Dragon Ball fandom (and even played up a bit too much by the man himself!), but in this case a little grace can and probably should be extended.

Additional Resources

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