Chinese here, I would highly recommend the TV series made by CCTV in 1994[1]. There's an unofficial English translated subtitle out there[2]. Cried every time I watched it.
How accurate is it to frame Dragonball this way. Im not that knowledgeable about either Dragonball nor journey to the West but it seems like a massive stretch.
"Toriyama loosely modeled the plot and characters of Dragon Ball on the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West,[16][15] with Goku being Sun Wukong ("Son Goku" in Japanese), Bulma as Tang Sanzang, Oolong as Zhu Bajie, and Yamcha being Sha Wujing" [1]
It's very dense though and there's like a billion names to keep track of, I only made it through the first ~1/3 of the first volume (out of 4) before I had to give up. I want to revisit one day but I would need some sort of reading guide to follow along with that lets me look up all the character names and who is on which side etc.
I sometimes find it difficult to keep track of all the names in a science fiction book when they're in some invented language (wads Acenta the good one, or Arinca?). It's easy when they have English or English-ish names.
The same happens when reading a book with Chinese names.
An ebook that coloured the names according to their side might help.
It also doesn't help that each character has two names, like Liu Bei is both Liu Bei & Xuande, and the two names are used nearly interchangeably for most characters. And the text doesn't handhold you with dialogue & other continuity clues to remind you of relationships (e.g. "Good morning," said Alice. Bob looked up as his daughter entered the room. - without breaking the flow of the text this reminds you of the relationship between Alice & Bob).
