Eiichiro Oda has said it as plainly as anyone says anything: Dragon Ball is why he draws manga. He read it as a child, decided that was the job, and has talked about Toriyama as the person he most wanted to be read by. What carries over is the architecture of the genre Toriyama built: a journey structured as a sequence of destinations, a crew that accumulates, an escalating ladder of opponents who are beaten and then absorbed into the cast, comedy and enormous violence in the same panel, and a hero defined by appetite and good humour rather than by brooding. Toriyama drew a crossover one-shot with Oda in 2006, and Oda's tribute when Toriyama died in 2024 said the same thing again.