The Dragon Balls were intended to be a thing of extraordinary magic and power, something to be revered, not for the ease of their method, but for the dream of never having to use them. They are large, crystalline spheres of varying sizes and colors that feature five-pointed stars ranging from one to seven, and also varying in sizes and colors, along with being either rigid or flat in appearance inside of themselves akin to glass art ; individually, they have no powers, but united they have the ability to call forth their associated Eternal Dragon who can grant usually one wish s. Concept In the , the author, , explains that there are seven Dragon Balls because there are eight balls in , a famous Edo-era Japanese novel, and that he would have hated for them to be exactly the same number, so he had the amount of Dragon Balls be changed to seven in number. Unlike other forms of fiction that involve wishes being granted, the Dragon Balls seem to grant a wish exactly as the wisher imagined it, rather than warping the wish so that it is technically granted, but ends up making the wisher's life even more difficult. For example, when wished for youth, he was not reduced to an infant, but rather, appeared in his prime. Also, when a victim is revived from the dead, they are not , but rather, are truly alive. This is likely so that there is a legitimate reason to pursue the Dragon Balls by the protagonists, as they would not have a justification to rely on them if they knew they would never grant a proper wish. Also, unlike wishes in other literary works, the eternal dragons are actually sentient beings; thus, they may be capable of interpreting a wish however they see fit, but usually choose to interpret them how they know the wisher actually wants, as a courtesy rather than as a rule. Credence is lent to this theory in the movie , where Shenron was asked to move all the dead people back to the. He claimed that he was perfectly capable of granting the wish precisely as it was uttered, but knew what consequences the Z Fighters were expecting that the onslaught of undead would be resolved and peace would be restored , and told them of the futility of the wish. The only time a wish was not granted exactly as the wisher imagined it was during the , when Piccolo was wished to Planet , but not to the Z-Fighter's specific location. However, this is still consistent with the theory that an eternal dragon can interpret wishes; is much more cynical than , and so it makes sense that he would twist a wisher's words out of sheer spite. Another example is and who's wish ended up reverting the Pilaf Gang to childhood in the main timeline and infancy in Trunks' timeline, though it is suggested that this was fault of Pilaf and his future counterpart when they made their wishes, rather than Shenron as Pilaf has a history of bungling his wishes as Pilaf accidentally causes Goku to revert to a child with a wish to in Dragon Ball GT which offers further evidence that it was the fault of Pilaf in those cases in contrast to Shu in and both Shu and Mai in ; in both cases, they had their wishes granted money for Shu and ice cream for Mai with little trouble other than them arguing about the nature of each other's wish and how the other could have made a better wish. Additionally, the Dragon Balls may have been inspired by the that set out to retrieve in , the primary source of inspiration for the Dragon Ball franchise. Overview The Four-Star Dragon Ball The Dragon Balls come in sets of seven with each ball displaying the number of stars that signifies its respective number in the set. It was said by that the Dragon Balls are unbreakable when he dropped a fake Dragon Ball. While the Dragon Balls take a year to return to normal, there have been two cases where they were used more than once in a year. The first example of this was when Kami revived Shenron and told Goku it would normally take a year since King Piccolo made a wish to restore his youth just days earlier but he decided to make an exception for Goku and his friends this once. The second and currently final time this happened was when Piccolo, and subsequently Kami, died during the battle with Nappa, and was later revived, effectively restarting the Dragon Balls, allowing them to be used to revive all those killed by Frieza and his men on Namek, with the first wish being to revive Goku happened around a month earlier. The exception to this is when the summoner chooses to save their wishes, at which point the Dragon Balls become inert for four months. To create an opportunity to summon an Eternal Dragon, one must travel all over the globe to retrieve them. As technology eventually progressed, this became somewhat easier, and became relatively simple with 's invention of the. Dragon Radar designed by Bulma Restrictions on the Dragon's powers are set by the relative capabilities of the Dragon Ball set's creator. A big problem throughout the series is that with any set of Dragon Balls is that their
