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In Retrospect, Dragon Ball Super was kinda trash


Ronnie
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Grew up watching Dragon Ball and DBZ. I even watched GT as a kid though I was never fond of it. I was really excited for Super. I kept tuning in every week hoping for something different and while it had its high points, in retrospect there were a severe amount of low points.

When Super was ongoing, I considered myself a fan of it and kept watching. Now I feel like the show isn't that great when looking back at all the dumb shit it gave us. Goku was a lot dumber compared to Z. Future Trunks (my favorite character) looked like more of a bitch in Super and I still don't get the Deus Ex Machina kill he got on Zamasu. Jiren's backstory was a huge disappointment and ultimately led to one of the worst villains in the entire series. Even worse than Buu and I hate that character. Also, re-creating 2 movies in a row? Really? What a waste of time. I guess they had the opportunity to flesh out more scenes but it's still the same overall story.

The animation and art were never consistent and while DB and DBZ had its fair share of animation blunders, DBS just looks far worse the majority of the time. Of course there are episodes and scenes that look phenomenal depending on the director or animators working on the episode at the time. Honestly I never really liked how Dragon Ball looked in HD. They gave them this weird highlight that makes them look more plastic-like. And if we're nitpicking the art, I never liked Super Saiyan Blue as a transformation. The whole color thing became cluttered and lame. The technical name Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan is beyond stupid. Toriyama is as bad as Nintendo when it comes to naming things.

As for the positives, the Goku Black arc was pretty good overall. It had some inconsistencies that bothered me like Trunks and Mai being a thing, or the Spirit Sword kill, or Goku never kissing Chi-Chi wtf? However seeing Vegito again was cool and even though Trunks didn't act the way he did in Z, the premise of the new story was great. The Tournament of Power arc was my favorite for it's many highlights. First female Super Saiyan, Ultra Instinct, the final showdown between Universe 7 and Jiren. Great stuff overall. But DBS as a whole felt like 30% good and 70% bad.

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I sort of feel the same way. Out of the 131 episodes of Super, I enjoyed about 40 of them.M ostly due to the stakes involved. There was just a lot of filler that didn't went anywhere, or  slow buildup. Some of the ideas I enjoyed like the different universes, Goku Black, and the Tournament of Power. But overall it could use some refining to make a more polished experience.

Super isn't over yet, there is still the Broly movie. We will find out how his version of the legendary Super Sayian powerlevel is maximum.

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I only know of what I've heard from others about the series, and from what I've played in Dragon Ball games.

Goku was never really supposed to be a smart or mature guy - dubbed Goku is kind of a skewed representation of who he is.  That being said, yeah, Goku seemed way too dumb in Super, from what I've heard, his stupidity going so far as to potentially doom entire universes (except not really, 'cuz we knew someone from the Universe 7 team would use the Super Dragon Balls to bring the other universes back anyway).

Trunks defeating Zamasu is pretty much the definition of anime bullshit.  As far as I know, there's absolutely no reason Trunks should've been able to do that, yet it happened.  And I know that power levels have become ever irrelevant as the series progressed, but there's usually at least some distinction between tiers of power.

And while I haven't watched the show, I have seen plenty of bad stills from it.

One thing that really bothers me just in general is Toriyama's failing memory with this show.  He forgets that characters exist, he forgot that Bulla/Bra is supposed to be older than Pan, and there's just a laundry list of other things he forgets.  He also seems to forget what made his previous works so appealing.  It wasn't just a bunch of anime bullshit or Goku being great and beating every bad guy he comes across to a pulp.  Goku often would barely beat the odds - and in one instance, he straight up didn't beat the odds, but rather his son did.  In the Frieza arc, that legendary transformation meant so much more than just "oh, he's surpassing his limits again"; it was a novelty, and it had a significant amount of buildup and hype beforehand.  And many times, Goku didn't defeat the enemy on his own; he had the help of all his friends.  And that help became symbolized in one of his trademark (stolen) moves, the spirit bomb.

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44 minutes ago, Ronnie said:

It had some inconsistencies that bothered me like Trunks and Mai being a thing

Oh don't even get me started on that one. That paring really, really doesn't sit well with me. In the present timeline Trunks is a child while Mai is an adult(no matter her size) who's older than his mom. In the future timeline Trunks might be an adult but he's not all that old while Mai is STILL older than his mom. I'm really wondering what they were thinking when coming up with that pairing.

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19 minutes ago, Jotari said:

Haven't seen it yet, because time is a thing, but I do know it gave us this line, which makes me immensely glad it exists.

Oh yeah I forgot they changed the name of "Black Goku" in the English dub to "Goku Black" to avoid some implications.

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5 hours ago, Ronnie said:

I still don't get the Deus Ex Machina kill he got on Zamasu.

Immortality fused with mortality isn't stable it would seem. Only half of him was truly stable and Trunks killed the mortal half. The bigger question is how the immortal half became ethereal and effectively dominated the whole universe in a matter of seconds.
 

5 hours ago, Etrurian emperor said:

Oh don't even get me started on that one. That paring really, really doesn't sit well with me. In the present timeline Trunks is a child while Mai is an adult(no matter her size) who's older than his mom. In the future timeline Trunks might be an adult but he's not all that old while Mai is STILL older than his mom. I'm really wondering what they were thinking when coming up with that pairing.

Might stem from the fact that Pilaf's group gathered the Dragon Balls during the Cell saga and wished for youth, only to be regressed all the way back into infancy, lining their physical ages up with Trunks'. I suppose in a manner of speaking, they're looking at it in the form of stories of immortals that have had several spouses across several different decades/centuries in their eternal life. Some of those, they're most certainly older than but that's never stopped those stories from not being ragged on about the circumstance.


I personally kinda enjoyed the filler. Not because I don't think action should be present (I mean it's Freakin' Dragon Ball. The main character travelled the planet on a cloud collecting shiny objects for most of his life and fighting for even longer!), but just to help break up the more tense situations which some arcs can contain. An overabundance of filler is something that's not too good, I agree, but if it makes me laugh in a show that otherwise doesn't, I'm all for seeing the other sides to the characters once in a while.
 

Anyway, Super's a Hit and miss subject for me. Could really have done without the Movies being redone as arcs but not everyone would have immediate access to the movies so it's kinda fair in that respect at least. Otherwise, I just enjoyed it for what it was and just ignored what I couldn't be bothered to watch.

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5 hours ago, Ronnie said:

 But DBS as a whole felt like 30% good and 70% bad.

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Yeah, it wasn't as good as we want to see it is. The writing is definitely horrible in terms of powerscaling. In no way can you justify a dude going from SSJ2/3-level to competing with god-level characters by just getting pissed off. There's a ton of those right after that, but that's one of the worse case scenarios in the writing.

The three arcs past the two movie arcs were all pretty cool ideas.

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3 hours ago, Junkhead said:

In no way can you justify a dude going from SSJ2/3-level to competing with god-level characters by just getting pissed off.

If you think that's bad, you should read the manga version of the tournament of power where Master Roshi manages to go toe-to-toe with Jiren.

Next time on Dragon Ball Super: Freeza trains for 10 minutes and becomes more powerful than Zeno.

Edited by Gnome with a Wand of Death
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3 minutes ago, Gnome with a Wand of Death said:

If you think that's bad, you should read the manga version of the tournament of power where Master Roshi manages to go toe-to-toe with Jiren.

Next time on Dragon Ball Super: Freeza trains for 10 minutes and becomes more powerful than Zeno.

Next time on Dragon Ball Super: Goku and Vegeta get stomped fighting Brolyr right after the Tournament of Power. Powerlevels in this series are crazy.

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They fucked up a lot. 

It got off to a bad start by redoing the movies, then went into a solid, but consequence-free tournament arc. Then they had a pretty great set-up for the Goku Black arc and shit the bed at the end. Then there were a bunch of boring middle episodes in the Tournament of Power, which ended pretty strong. 

Not as bad as GT, but it really is like, only a quarter of quality material. 

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37 minutes ago, Gnome with a Wand of Death said:

If you think that's bad, you should read the manga version of the tournament of power where Master Roshi manages to go toe-to-toe with Jiren.

I fucking saw that.

...can you believe I'm the only one quoteokayunquote with that.

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To be fair, it appears that Jiren was only trying to use the exact amount of power necessary to beat Roshi, and once he realized that that would drag out the fight he pretty much OHKO'd him. 

 

Though apparently it's also tied to Roshi somehow using hat to tach Goku about the basics of Ultra Instinct.

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Have you considered that Dragon Ball (Z) was always kind of trashy? I mean, I also grew up loving it, but the series definitely had filler, pacing problems, dropped characters, arc fatigue and random plot changes, but you just sort of ignore all that stuff because the high points are generally really good. Maybe Super isn't all that worse than Z, we just can't look at it through a cloud of nostalgia (maybe if Super is 30%-70% good to bad, Z is 60%40%). Of course I haven't seen Super yet so I am talking out my ass, but it's a view point to consider.

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There's the "Namek will be destroyed in five minutes" thing. . .but is shitting on the series as a whole really a good thing?  Love it or hate it, it's had a lot of influence.

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2 minutes ago, eclipse said:

There's the "Namek will be destroyed in five minutes" thing. . .but is shitting on the series as a whole really a good thing?  Love it or hate it, it's had a lot of influence.

Oh that certainly is true and I'm definitely in the love it camp. But I think there's some merit in trying to look at things objectively. The series was never perfect, and maybe that's something thats just more acceptable to a younger mind. Maybe the negative opinions of Super would be vastly different if all those people were between the ages of 5-12 and the show didn't have to live up to the legacy of its predecessor.

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8 minutes ago, Jotari said:

Oh that certainly is true and I'm definitely in the love it camp. But I think there's some merit in trying to look at things objectively. The series was never perfect, and maybe that's something thats just more acceptable to a younger mind. Maybe the negative opinions of Super would be vastly different if all those people were between the ages of 5-12 and the show didn't have to live up to the legacy of its predecessor.

I was a lot older when I saw DBZ.  It wasn't perfect by a long shot, but it was still enjoyable.  If Super has that same charm, then I'll be fine with it, even if the plot has more holes than my window screen.

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Dragon Ball was the best of the story-telling department. Useful support characters, less reliance on aliens being the villains, etc.

DBZ Kai fixes a lot of issues I had with the original DBZ run. It cut out all the filler and poor pacing (though some filler were enjoyable like the rest period before Cell Games). And if we're talking about the show in terms of arcs then Saiyan Saga was fantastic, Namek/Frieza saga was also fantastic, Android/Cell saga was pretty good, Majin Buu saga was annoying/messy.

I do agree that anyone who wasn't an alien got shitted on tremendously in Z. At least Super shined some light on them even if they shouldn't have been able to stack up against the other Universe fighters.

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