Black Myth: Wukong vs the Novel: What the Game Changed, and Where Goku Came From

Two things get said about Black Myth: Wukong by people who have not read the novel. The first is that it retells the book. The second is that it looks a lot like Dragon Ball. Both are wrong in the same interesting way, because both have the direction of travel backwards, and getting the direction right makes the game better and the cartoon funnier.

• ✅The game is a continuation. It begins after the novel has ended, with a new monkey, and it never retells the pilgrimage.
• ✅Its first chapter is genuine book material. The bear who steals a robe from a burning monastery is in the novel, in chapter sixteen.
• ✅Goku is Sun Wukong. Not a coincidence and not a homage. Akira Toriyama said the theme was Journey to the West with kung fu added.
• ✅The parallel goes past the monkey. Bulma, Oolong and Yamcha map onto the other three pilgrims, in order.

Below is what the game keeps, what it invents, and how much of the Dragon Ball resemblance is documented rather than assumed. If you would rather play the episode the game opens on, the playable Journey to the West includes the night the black bear robs the monastery.

🎮 Is Black Myth: Wukong the story of the novel?

No. It is set after it. Game Science has said it chose to craft a story following the ending of the novel rather than a version of it, and reviewers who have finished the game place its events about five hundred years later. That is why the character you play is called the Destined One and not Sun Wukong: he is described as an almost identical physical copy of the Monkey King, sent to recover six relics of him. The original is a figure the game talks about rather than a character you are.

That decision explains most of the confusion Western players report. A retelling would introduce its cast. A sequel assumes you know them, and this one does: it hands you a bear demon, a pig with a grudge and a headband with a history, and gives you almost nothing about why any of that carries weight. Players who feel they arrived in the second half of a conversation have diagnosed the game correctly.

There is a reasonable case for the decision, and it is worth making because the internet tends to treat any departure from a source as a failure of nerve. The novel has already been adapted more times than anyone can count, almost always by taking the same opening seven chapters and staging the war in Heaven again. A studio that wanted to do something other than the twentieth version of the monkey's rise had two options: adapt the middle, which is eighty chapters of episodic demon encounters with no through-line, or go past the end. Going past the end is the braver of the two and the only one that leaves room for a boss fight in the third act.

It also frees the game to invent. Places like Crouching Tiger Temple and Turtle Island are the studio's own, built to fit rather than to match, and characters who appear in the novel come back with their temperaments turned. The pig is the clearest case: the book's Zhu Bajie is a lazy, warm, chronically hungry complainer, and the game replaces most of that with arrogance and recklessness. Whether that trade is worth it is an argument we make at length elsewhere.

The playable version gives you the version the game skipped: arrive at the monastery as the monk who owns the robe, as the monkey who has to get it back, or as the abbot who wanted it badly enough to start the fire. Role-play Journey to the West →

🐻 Where does the game's first chapter come from?

Straight out of chapters sixteen and seventeen of the novel, almost intact. The bear the game sends you after on Black Wind Mountain is a real character in the book, and the episode he comes from is one of the sharpest small stories in the whole pilgrimage.

In the novel the pilgrims stop at a monastery, and the monk shows off the brocade kasaya the Buddha sent him. The abbot wants it. He arranges a fire to kill his guests and keep the robe, the fire gets out of hand, the monastery burns down, and in the confusion a bear demon living on the next mountain walks in and takes the robe for himself. The couplet that closes chapter sixteen says it flatly: fire flares, wind rises, the monastery is ruined, and the black bear steals the brocade robe by night.

What happens next is the part the game does not tell you. Wukong cannot beat him alone, Guanyin has to be fetched, and once the bear is finally beaten she refuses to let him be killed. She has a use for him. The back of her own mountain is unguarded, so the demon who burgled a monastery is given a job as its guardian spirit and walks away employed. He is one of a handful of characters in the novel who survive losing to Sun Wukong, which is exactly why he was available to be a boss in a sequel five hundred years later.

☁️ Did Dragon Ball's Goku really come from Sun Wukong?

Yes, by the author's own account, and the debt is larger than the name. Akira Toriyama began Dragon Ball in Weekly Shonen Jump on 20 November 1984, and set out to write a story on the basic theme of Journey to the West with, in his words, a little kung fu added, mixing the novel with the Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee films he liked. Son Goku is simply the Japanese reading of Sun Wukong's name.

The first arc keeps the shape of the novel and swaps the goal. Instead of a monk travelling west to collect Buddhist scriptures, a girl travels to collect seven orbs that grant a wish, and she picks up the same companions in the same order.

The direction of the borrowing is the part people get backwards, and often in a specific way: a common search on this subject asks whether Sun Wukong was inspired by Goku. He was not, by roughly four hundred years. The novel was in print in the 1590s and the monkey had been accumulating stories for centuries before that, out of folk tales, temple murals and stage plays; scholars have argued about whether he began as a river-taming ape spirit from Chinese myth or arrived by way of Hanuman, and the argument is not settled. What is settled is which way round the twentieth century borrowed.

Grounding it that way is more useful than the version that circulates online, which usually stops at “Goku is based on the Monkey King” and leaves the impression of a single borrowed character. What Toriyama borrowed was a party, a road, a collect-them-all structure and a comic register. What he dropped, quite deliberately, was everything the novel is about: the ordeal count, the Buddhist frame, and the monk's authority over the monkey. There is no headband in Dragon Ball because there is nobody in Dragon Ball entitled to use one.

🔢 Which of the book's famous numbers are real?

The important one is real and is stranger than its reputation. The pilgrimage is supposed to involve eighty-one ordeals, and the novel handles that count as bookkeeping rather than prophecy. In chapter ninety-nine, with the scriptures collected and the pilgrims flying home, the guardian spirits hand Guanyin a register of everything the monk has suffered, and the entries are numbered.

The last one written down is the eightieth. She reads the list, notes that in the school of the Buddha nine nines return to truth, and nine times nine is eighty-one, so eighty is one short of the number required. She then sends a runner to have one more arranged immediately. The eight guardians carrying the pilgrims home get the order in mid-air and drop them, with the horse and the scriptures, into a river.

There is a detail here worth having. The four-character phrase for “eighty-one ordeals” never actually appears in the Chinese text of this edition. Neither does the nine-times-nine formula that people quote as the book's own. What the novel does is count to eighty in front of you and then manufacture the last one, which is a much better joke than the slogan, and it is why the final trial the pilgrims face is not a demon at all. The same register also states the length of the road: a hundred and eight thousand li, a figure the monkey has already told the Buddha he can cover in one jump.

Players have noticed that the game carries some of the same numbers, and it is a nice thing to notice, but nobody at Game Science has said the resemblance was deliberate, so it is being left here as a coincidence readers are welcome to enjoy. The book's numbers are checkable. The game's reasons for its own are not.

Every chapter reference above was checked against the Chinese text at Project Gutenberg. If the game sent you looking for the book, the translation you pick matters more than you would expect, and if you want the screen versions instead, they are ranked for faithfulness here.