Highlights

Tailed Beast Balls are powerful, versatile, and can cause massive destruction depending on size and delivery method.
Tailed Beast Balls are fueled by chakra, resemble spheres, can be combined or fired as beams, beams, or waves.
The technique inspired the iconic Rasengan, created by Minato Namikaze, surpassing mountains in power.

Extremely dense orbs of chakra that boast immense destructive potential, the Tailed Beast Ball — alternatively known as the Tailed Beast Bomb, Bijuu Bomb, or Bijuu Dama — is the ultimate technique of the nine tailed tailed beasts and their jinchuriki. As evidenced by how prominently it is featured throughout Masashi Kishimoto's Naruto, this ability is one of the main reasons why hidden villages use tailed beasts to maintain the balance of power in the shinobi world.

Versatile and utterly devastating, Tailed Beast Balls are capable of wreaking havoc on a massive scale, and the range of destruction can vary depending on the size of the technique as well as the manner in which it is fired. Most perfect jinchuriki are able to use this technique as their trump card, which is why they are so feared throughout the world of Naruto. Interestingly, the Tailed Beast Ball also served as the inspiration for one of the series' most iconic jutsu — the Rasengan — which was invented by the Fourth Hokage, Minato Namikaze.

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What Is a Tailed Beast Ball?

Essentially, a Tailed Beast Ball is a sphere of compressed chakra, created by mixing positive black chakra and negative white chakra, in an 8:2 proportion. Generally, tailed beasts execute this technique by gathering and blending the chakra in their mouths, to fire it at a target, in a manner that has been likened to vomiting, according to Gyuki, the Eight-Tails. There is virtually no upper limit on the volume of chakra that can be funneled into a Tailed Beast Ball, as long as the 8:2 ratio is maintained.

This allows the technique to be supercharged to ridiculous scales, along with the option of having multiple tailed beasts combine their Tailed Beast Balls into a single large mass of highly condensed chakra. Despite being suspended in the air, the extreme density of a Tailed Beast Ball exerts a great deal of weight on the surface beneath it, such that it instantly creates a crater below it when formed close to the ground. However, they move at an alarming rate once fired, regardless of which way the tailed beast or jinchuriki chooses to release the technique.

Variations Of The Technique

Generally, Tailed Beast Balls are fired as spherical masses, just like they are created, which leads to a slight delay between the time of release and the moment of detonation. On one hand, this method maximizes the range of the technique and the area of impact, as the energy from the explosion spreads out in all directions over a large radius. Alternatively, some tailed beasts can choose to consume the sphere and fire it as a beam, which focuses the destructive power of the technique towards a single target.

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Lastly, there is also a third mechanism of firing, used by Gyuki, which combines aspects of both of the earlier methods. Instead of consuming the Tailed Beast Ball, the Eight-Tails is able to fire it as a wave, expanding its effective area of impact, without having to release it like a projectile. Even so, the speed at which the technique moves once fired is quite rapid, as seen in the case of the Ten-Tails, which could fire its own Tailed Beast Balls with enough force to cover several miles in a matter of seconds.

A Tailed Beast's Ultimate Weapon

Considering the enormous chakra reserves that each of the nine tailed beasts possesses, it is no surprise that the Tailed Beast Ball is a technique whose destructive capability is enough to obliterate entire mountains in its standard form. Visible from afar, the explosion that follows the Tailed Beast Ball's detonation is quite massive, and it poses a huge threat to life and infrastructure in urban settlements, since it vaporizes everything within the blast radius.

Taking things one step further, Kurama was able to create a Tailed Beast Ball many times larger than itself. This version of the technique could potentially decimate entire mountain ranges, and have its impact felt across a whole continent. Some jinchuriki were also able to create and fire the Tailed Beast Ball in distinct ways.

For instance, Obito Uchiha and the Ten-Tails, by extension, could create and fire multiple Tailed Beast Balls at once to wipe out enemies over a large area if necessary. Naruto Uzumaki can create Tailed Beast Balls of varying size in his hands while in Nine-Tails Chakra Mode. He was even able to augment them with natural energy via senjutsu, and use them to counter Truth-Seeking Balls. The manner in which he forms these Tailed Beast Balls is very similar to his use of the Rasengan, which also has its roots in this technique.

The Foundation Of The Rasengan

Another reason for the Tailed Beast Ball's significance comes from how it was the main source of inspiration for the Rasengan, a now iconic jutsu invented by the Fourth Hokage Minato Namikaze. Seeing that his lover, Kushina Uzumaki, who was a jinchuriki, would be deployed to take on other jinchuriki from enemy villages, Minato sought to find a technique that could match the Tailed Beast Ball in terms of destructive capability and chakra volume.

After studying the fundamentals of the Tailed Beast Ball, Minato initially struggled with his early concepts for the technique, but was able to make a breakthrough after realizing that the act of rotating condensed chakra in multiple directions, helped stabilize it into a condensed sphere. With this, he completed the Rasengan, a technique that would come to be regarded as the pinnacle of shape transformation.

Naruto is available to stream on Crunchyroll.