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EP. REVIEW: Dragon Ball Super

Tomibiki wrote:

This saga ended pretty much the exact way the series had been telling us it would the entire time so....yeah. Gods said, don't time travel, Zen'ou will wipe your shit out if he catches you. Cause it isn't fixable, it's not supposed to be, because you're not supposed to time travel.

Except he didn't destroy the future timeline because they time-traveled, he destroyed the future timeline because he thought it was ugly. And then Goku time-traveled with the King of All in order to fulfil his previous promise to bring him a friend and neither the present one nor the future one seemed in any way bothered by it. As for not being fixable... Trunks fixed it just fine the first time around. If it wasn't for this bizarre timeloop scenario which somehow happened despite going against the previously established time travel logic...
(So let me get this straight: Zamasu got the idea to go through with his plans from meeting Goku and finding out about the Super Dragon Balls... But Goku only met him in the first place because he'd previously battled Goku Black... who came back from the future... and who is Zamasu who got the idea to go through with his plans from meeting Goku and finding out about the Super Dragon Balls?
I mean I know stable time loops are a thing in fiction and all that, but when time travel specifically runs on the logic that "Each time jump causes a new alternate reality", having a stable timeloop in there, particularly one which doesn't leave any room for a start as the chain of events here naturally led up to Beerus destroying Zamasu and if you're gonna excuse it that the timeline split again when Whis rewound time... where did the Goku whose body Zamasu stole even come from? Shouldn't he have disappeared from that timeline when Whis turned back time?)
...the future would have been fine. But of course, as this arc showed, NOPE. Future Trunks's world was just doomed from the start with no conceivable way to save it, it seems. Despite the fact that his time-travel led to Goku's timeline being saved just fine.


Man, this ending just utterly unraveled the entire arc for me. A lot of these flaws I had been willing to defend before, but now? ...No. Just no.

SkerllyF wrote:

This franchise could have some interesting expansions. Like Star Wars,

Which would likely be jettisoned by a studio mandate

SkerllyF wrote:

characters and have the dynamic duo of Goku and Vegeta saving the world.

Which isn't a recycled idea due to the fact that pretty much every DragonBall arc centered around Goku taking on the big bad. Hell the Red Ribbon Army was essentially dismantled by Goku alone.

TranceLimit174 wrote:

People wanted stakes and consequences and you got em.

Pretty much.

1-What do you mean by the word jettisoned?

2-I think by this point Dragon Ball can have a teamwork being the stars in an arc instead of only Goku or Goku and Vegeta. It becomes a little boring after a while

I'm surprised the ending was the straw that broke the camel's back not the confusing aspect of time traveling, paradoxes, stable time loops, and all that.

BadNewsBlues wrote:

I'm surprised the ending was the straw that broke the camel's back not the confusing aspect of time traveling, paradoxes, stable time loops, and all that.

I can forgive a lot of little problems if the overall execution is solid, and the ending can easily make or break a story for me. While it is true that the arc as a whole has been about as convoluted as Steven Moffat's run on Doctor Who, the overall execution and tone of the story had been solid enough for me to forgive it. Plus, really, the only notable gap in the internal logic here was that the timeline somehow split when Beerus killed Zamasu despite Toriyama having previously stated that Whis's rewinds don't do that.

This, though? An ending that renders every single thing our heroes did throughout this entire arc 100% moot? I can't defend that. Dragon Ball has never been this pointlessly cynical and depressing. And the episode barely even seemed to acknowledge just how depressing this really is; Trunks was the only person who expressed any sort of angst over it after all was said and done. Like, okay, I know Goku and Vegeta didn't live in that world, but you'd think they'd be a bit more concerned about their friend (or son, in Vegeta's case) literally seeing his entire world vanish in front of his eyes. And of course, since this is presumably the end of Trunks's story for real this time (god knows there's pretty much nothing they can do to make his life worse save for putting him through the same hell again and having him actually die this time), this basically leaves no lasting impact either. Was anything learned here? Goku and Vegeta sure didn't seem to have been changed by the experience in any way.

BadNewsBlues wrote:

I'm surprised the ending was the straw that broke the camel's back not the confusing aspect of time traveling, paradoxes, stable time loops, and all that.

I can forgive a lot of little problems if the overall execution is solid, and the ending can easily make or break a story for me. While it is true that the arc as a whole has been about as convoluted as Steven Moffat's run on Doctor Who, the overall execution and tone of the story had been solid enough for me to forgive it. Plus, really, the only notable gap in the internal logic here was that the timeline somehow split when Beerus killed Zamasu despite Toriyama having previously stated that Whis's rewinds don't do that.

This, though? An ending that renders every single thing our heroes did throughout this entire arc 100% moot? I can't defend that. Dragon Ball has never been this pointlessly cynical and depressing. And the episode barely even seemed to acknowledge just how depressing this really is; Trunks was the only person who expressed any sort of angst over it after all was said and done. Like, okay, I know Goku and Vegeta didn't live in that world, but you'd think they'd be a bit more concerned about their friend (or son, in Vegeta's case) literally seeing his entire world vanish in front of his eyes. And of course, since this is presumably the end of Trunks's story for real this time (god knows there's pretty much nothing they can do to make his life worse save for putting him through the same hell again and having him actually die this time), this basically leaves no lasting impact either. Was anything learned here? Goku and Vegeta sure didn't seem to have been changed by the experience in any way.

But for crying out loud, that animation is just horrendously awful. Actually, I think even the classic 80's TV series (simple as it was) had better animation in comparison. I was completely taken aback by the off-model character shots and laughably low-framerates (seriously, for some shots it's like they just cycled between 2 images). You'd think Dragon Ball and Dr. Slump would be much too venerable to be treated with such unfathomably horrible production values, but I guess not.

If you just jumped on for this episode, then of course you're going to think the animation is bad. We just came out of a pretty long story arc where the animation took a huge spike upwards, especially in most of the important fights. Check out Goku VS Black & Zamasu, Vegeta VS Black or Vegito VS Fused Zamasu to see some much better animation work. Of course the animation is going to drop in quality a little now that we're in the cool off period between arcs, especially in a filler-y episode like this. Dragonball & DBZ had plenty of their own animation errors, but like everything else from our childhoods, they get the pass because of nostalgia.

Actually, I rewatched the first 20 episodes of DBZ just a little over a year ago, and the production quality was nowhere near as horrible as the animation in this episode of DBS that I watched.

This was my first introduction to Super. I thought the crossover in the original Dragon Ball series was handled better.