The basic rhythm of gameplay in DB arrive in a new area as a weak creature, and attempt to kill the boss (and sometimes over-boss) that controls it. In each area, there are a finite number of lesser animals that you may hunt in order to grow strong enough to do so.

However, one of the trickiest aspects of DB lies in how you go about hunting and transforming. Although you need to transform as many times as possible to gain rank, you must also take great care in choosing the order in which you kill and transform to maximize both rank advancement and gained ability when all lie slain.

Making a mistake in this order (for example, leaving one of the weaker class of animals for last or hunting randomly and mismatching your colors) will leave you weak an underpowered for the boss battle.

Upon defeating the boss, you gain a special item known as a flesh item. Please refer to the Items page for more information. When you eat the flesh of the defeated boss, its special item mark is assumed into one of your body parts. This serves three purposes: to endow you with special abilities, allow you a chance to mate, and to act as ‘keys’ to the area exit. The flesh items and abilities are as follows:

MATING:

Getting a flesh item from a boss allows you to proceed to the next area and mate, although not necessarily in that order. When you receive a flesh item from a given area boss, you can enter the mating grounds where you are ‘greeted’ by a group of females. The number of females you can mate with increases along with your rank, so it’s best to transform as much as possible before entering the mating grounds.

Also related to the number of partners is the number of offspring you produce. From these offspring, you must choose one as your heir. Also, if you possess 100 or more attraction hearts (see Items), your choices are increased further.

When choosing an offspring, it's a good idea to press the Z button to pull up the map of transformations. To increase your rank by one here, choose an offspring that is gray on the map. Also note that the farther right on the map it is, the more powerful it is. Animals in the third tier are the dark shades; those in the fourth tier are the mixed-solid types; those in the fifth tier are pure, solid-color types. If you get lucky enough to have a potential offspring in the fourth or fifth tier, take it! Those animals are very difficult to get by absorbing colors; the mating process allows you to get them for free, right then and there. Carefully choosing your offspring using the transformation map becomes very important when you're trying to reach rank 100 or 150.

This choice is also important because after you mate, you keel over and die. Whichever offspring you have chosen as your heir will begin life anew as a young, weak creature, but with all the inherited strengths and abilities of its sire. Furthermore, you can transform back and forth into any of the animal forms of your previously chosen offspring at will (by using left and right on the D-pad), limited only by the number of body parts you have (i.e. you can’t change into any of the two-part animals unless you too are currently a three-parter).

Thus the gameplay cycle begins again, as you enter the next area and face a fiercer bunch of animals and bosses.