While Frieza is regarded as one of the greatest villains in Dragon Ball history, mostly due to how impactful he was in Goku’s exponential rise in power, he hasn’t been the most successful in terms of achieving his villainous goals aside from carrying out the occasional destruction of a planet. In fact, Frieza wasn’t even able to top Dragon Ball’s first world-ending villain who actually succeeded where Frieza so brutally failed.
Frieza made their debut in Dragon Ball chapter 247 which officially kicked off the Frieza Saga. During the Frieza Saga, Lord Frieza and his army invaded Planet Namek to steal their world’s Dragon Balls so that Frieza could use the artifacts’ magic to make himself immortal. However, the Z Fighters of Earth traveled to the planet to stop him, and they proved to be a thorn in Frieza’s side at every turn. While Frieza proved to be much more powerful than any of the fighters who came to stop him, he eventually met his match in Goku who arrived on Namek just in the nick of time. During the battle between Goku and Frieza, Goku is able to unlock the Super Saiyan transformation for the first time–making this fight go down in history as perhaps the greatest in the series. In the end, Goku defeated Frieza and seemingly killed him, effectively preventing the intergalactic tyrant from having his wish granted and taking over the universe.
In Dragon Ball chapter 147 by Akira Toriyama, King Piccolo–who is the evil original version of Piccolo, the heroic Z Fighter fans know and love today–finally got his hands on all seven Dragon Balls after trying for some time to hunt them down. King Piccolo wanted to use the Dragon Balls’ wish-granting magic to make himself young again and restore his power to its prime, thereby making himself virtually unstoppable. While Goku and the other Z Fighters fought desperately to keep Piccolo from making his world-ending wish, the villain was unfortunately successful and became an enhanced version of himself that was basically invincible.
King Piccolo and Lord Frieza have remarkably similar motives in their separate sagas. Frieza wanted the Dragon Balls to make himself strong enough to rule the cosmos forever, and Piccolo wanted the Dragon Balls to do the very same thing, except his sights were solely focused on Earth. However, where the two differ is how each of their respective Dragon Ball quests ended, with Piccolo being successful exactly where Frieza so miserably failed.
Even though Piccolo was able to collect the Dragon Balls and have his wish granted, unlike Frieza, his story still had the same result as Frieza’s: he, too, was defeated by Goku. Just as Frieza was seemingly obliterated by a devastating counter attack by Goku on Planet Namek, Piccolo was also killed by the Saiyan warrior after Goku used himself as a living projectile and plunged himself through the Namekian villain, gruesomely killing him. In the end, both villains were taken down by Dragon Ball’s greatest hero, but before that happened, King Piccolo can at least say that he succeeded in his mission to find and wish upon the Dragon Balls–a success that Frieza shamefully cannot relate to.