Pull almost any thread in modern games and pop culture and it eventually unravels somewhere absurd. Here is one of the best: a straight line runs from a seventh-century Buddhist monk to the spiky blonde hair on your favourite anime hero, and onward to Keanu Reeves. It sounds like a fever dream. It is actually a real chain of cause and effect, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it in the character art of half the games on your hard drive.
Call it a causality chain: a sequence where each link seems reasonable on its own, but the start and end points have no business being in the same sentence. This is the story of how a pilgrimage became a genre convention.
Link One: A Monk Walks to India
Around the year 627, the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang set out on a roughly 17-year journey from China to India in search of authentic Buddhist scriptures. He came home a legend, and his real account of the trip seeded something bigger than theology: roughly a thousand years of folktales, retold in writing and passed down orally, each version adding a little more myth to the historical bones.
That slow accumulation is the raw material for everything that follows. History became legend, legend became literature, and literature eventually became loot-drop fantasy — but it all starts with one determined traveller and a very long walk.
Link Two: The Monkey King and a Blonde Shortcut
In the late 16th century, those folktales crystallised into Journey to the West, a novel following the monk Tang Sanzang and his chaotic bodyguard, the Monkey King Sun Wukong. Fast-forward to the 1980s, and manga artist Akira Toriyama used the novel as the template for a new series — Dragon Ball — modelling his hero Son Goku directly on Sun Wukong, tail and all.
Then comes the detail that quietly rewired pop culture. As Dragon Ball leaned harder into battle-manga spectacle, Toriyama introduced the Super Saiyan transformation and drew Goku’s hair blonde and spiked — reportedly so his assistant would spend less time inking all that black hair. A labour-saving hack became one of the most imitated visual signatures in the medium. Spiky, gravity-defying, colour-shifting hair is now shorthand for “this character is about to get serious,” and you will find it on protagonists across countless RPGs and fighting games.
Link Three: From Spiky Heroes to Keanu
Here is where the chain does its final, gleeful leap. The archetype Toriyama helped codify — the stoic, unstoppable warrior with an iconic silhouette — is exactly the mould modern action heroes are poured into, and no one embodies it more completely right now than Keanu Reeves. The quiet intensity, the flowing hair, the sense that violence is a form of meditation: John Wick is, functionally, a live-action Super Saiyan who trades ki blasts for a pencil.
Games closed the loop for real. Keanu didn’t just inspire the archetype from afar; he walked straight into it as Johnny Silverhand in Cyberpunk 2077, one of the most talked-about PC games of the decade. A monk’s pilgrimage, filtered through a novel, a manga, and an inking shortcut, ends with Keanu Reeves headlining a role-playing game. Whoa, indeed.
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The Bottom Line
None of this is a coincidence, exactly — it is culture doing what culture always does, borrowing and remixing until the source is invisible. Journey to the West didn’t just influence a few games; it helped define what a hero looks like, from a monk’s staff to a Super Saiyan’s spikes to Keanu’s stubble. The next time a spiky-haired protagonist powers up on your screen, remember you are looking at the tail end of a 1,400-year-old game of telephone. And honestly, that lineage is more impressive than most origin stories the games themselves bother to write.
