I have to be honest. I am... not a fan of most of the work Akira Toryama's worked on. I've never liked DragonBall. Even as a kid, I found DragonBall to be kinda stupid. The only Dragon Quest games I really like have mon-taming in them. Blue Dragon was okay, I guess. The thing is, Akira Toryama has an artsyle, and I do happen to admire it. He's created a lot of charming character designs in his life. My ultimate issue, however, is that they're almost ALWAYS the villains of the story, with the heroes rarely being afforded the same level of charm or creativity, being comprised of generic humanoids and not much else. It gets really annoying when you see characters like Boss Carrot and I'm forced to ask "HOW IS THIS A VILLAIN CHARACTER!?"

Still, his artwork and monsters were a huge influence for me. Heck, Earthquake Warriors includes two seperate renditions he made of a big, fat and blue rodent character among it's roster of playables. And Baalf? Honestly, he was greatly inspired by Akira's chonkier characters. I always thought that style of legless, rolls over the feet, kinda chonks were adorable. They have so much size presence to them, and they're kinda goofy.

I decided to draw this just to pay a bit of tribute to one of the inspirations for Baalf.