Anime & Donghua

One Piece is the only other thing I could come up with really. There are half-giant half-fishman in one piece, very much just what oda felt like drawing in that way. Also the huge disparities in tech. Nothing quite as diverse as dragon ball but still wide-ranging more than most else.

I wouldn't say they're quite the same scope or the exact same type of weirdness, but Space Dandy and Blood Battle Blockade are pretty weird (especially Space Dandy). I do appreciate Dandadan's "yokai vs aliens" bit, which reminds me a little of what you're talking about, mainly thanks to the yokai and curses, which can be pretty varied. Obviously all of these series have other criticisms you can also make, but that's not the topic at hand.

Early Hunter x Hunter had facets of what you're talking about, sometimes significantly, though that decreased drastically as it went on, since it has "York New City" and GPS but also an inhabited island where there's a basically-mythical fish that is somehow both hopelessly elusive despite modern technology but exists in a very definite location and is just a flesh-and-blood fish that happens to be really big. Also shapeshifting fox people just exist, and so does whatever silly but wildly dangerous animal that happens to occur to Togashi (but again, these get sidelined completely unless you want to count Chimera Ants or the funny creatures on Greed Island).

I think a lot of series tended to have more mysterious or evocative or whimsical settings but moved away from it later on. It's easy to forget that even Naruto (which became the symbol of boring world-building) had a much more mysterious and varied setting early on. Gaara's sand demon was originally literally just a big spirit that happened to exist, but then later on it got folded into being the "One-Tails" to be part of a unified cosmology of "Tailed Beasts" for the sake of the "Ten Tails" plot. It's worth noting that this mirrors how Goku used to be much more inexplicable but then got turned into Saiyan Lore, though that's not as egregious because it doesn't flatten different concepts together like the Tailed Beast thing does. Also, can you even imagine a plot in Naruto that centers on a capitalist fucking with mundane infrastructure like the Bridge Arc has, and that being the central issue in a mortal conflict? There's not even a prophecy or reincarnation or anything! It's literally just hitmen fighting over a bridge due to competing economic interests, but the hitmen have magic to do the fighting with.

idk, I'm the kind of dweeb who prefers harder fiction, but that should still leave room for bizarre mysteries. Things being reasonable only needs to mean there's an absence of contradiction, not that everything is given an explanation. I think the issue isn't hard fiction itself but the need to have elaborate and elaborated-upon "lore" for every little detail to put in "data books" or somehow also merchandise and use as grist for more volumes of slop. Also the constant need for escalation, of course (DBZ's power levels should be marked as a poison for most of their tenure), prevents anything from being that much bigger than the protagonist by the end, or at least completely encompassed in the conflicts of the plot rather than something that exists for itself and for some thematic or stylistic purpose.

I think Harry Potter was always trash, but I think it's a good example here of things being whimsical and arbitrary but then becoming over-elaborated upon due to market demands.

the nerds won, and they all want lore books

Terry Pratchet's books have alot of whimsy and colliding themes, although it's not a direct 1:1 to what you're describing.

I'm with this post tbh, db being all over the place in what stories you'd see was fun. Mystical to sci-fi to alternative realities time line stuff man I'm for all that. I did watch Diana and while I was there for some of the animations idk didn't really pull me in like dragon ball did

Sounds like you missed out on DAIMA

Anyone who thinks DBS is bad has not watched the Tournament of Power arc while incredibly stoned, and I'll stand by that.

I like how you jump straight to Super being terrible because it implies that GT doesn't even exist. Bravo.

Dragon Ball does mix magic and tech well. Reminds me of Shadowrun and Arcanum in that way. The mish mash of everything still feels cohesive

'everything and the kitchen sink' setting

this is one piece (except its also cohesive and makes sense as a unified world with history outside of the protagonist, rather than JUST an artist putting in stuff he thought would be fun. Oda absolutely does a fuckload of that, but its disarming and can often come back around 600 episodes later and turn out to have always been plot relevant and very interesting if you had noticed it as more than just a joke)

there's a million islands, on some of them it rains lightning, on some of them its the stone age, on some of them up is down, or its an island of queer and trans people (who are also revolutionaries plotting to overthrow the world government)

I think it really has to do with Toriyama's incredible imagination and unique style. The things in DB just seem to "click" together and it really is Toriyama's great artwork and attention to detail that can get overlooked (I know super eyepatch wolf has great videos on this).

However, I personally found the Buu saga to be where the series started losing a bit of focus.

DBS can only really be enjoyed as slop, which it succeeds immensely at.

Have you tried "Ranking of kings"? I remember it had that everything but the kitchen sink approach but applied to a fantasy universe instead of martial arts tropes. And it had that Cutesy style thing going on of the first Dragon ball.