(Well, and some lengthy training sequences to set them up, but that sort of goes without saying.) All that said, if you want fighting, then boy will this box set hook you up. Here, the fighting tournament is mainly just an excuse to put on a whole bunch of fights. Dragon Ball Z hews to a more traditional standard. It's a plot device, not the entire plot in and of itself. In both of those cases, though, the fighting tournament furthers the overarching story of the series, and there's even a little character development mixed in from time to time. For that matter, all the rescue-Sasuke arc is missing is a set of brackets and someone to handle the color commentary. The Chunin exams in Naruto, for instance, are a sort of fighting tournament in disguise – the first and third acts neatly bookend the tournament that makes up the middle of the story.
Nowadays, a more creative generation of writers has learned from the lessons of the past, and they've come up with some subtler variations on the fighting tournament. Cue the great big fighting tournament, where Earth's mightiest warriors slug it out for Cell's amusement. The newly-Perfect Cell could destroy the planet Earth if he really wanted to (and Vegeta could have destroyed Cell at the end of the last box set if he weren't a total idiot), but instead, he's going to play with the world for a while before he kills it. This is basically what happens during the Cell Games saga in Dragon Ball Z, which takes up most of the new Season Six box set. You can tell when an author has run out of real ideas for what to do with his story and his characters, because he throws everyone in a great big fighting tournament while he waits for some kind of genuine inspiration to strike. It's only even remotely funny if you read a lot of shonen manga, or watch a lot of the cartoons that wind up being adapted from the same. Hey, nobody ever said it was going to be a funny joke. Question: When is a plot not a plot?Īnswer: When the plot is a fighting tournament. “Battle of Gods” delivers not only the familiar look but also the slapstick comedy, character interaction and over-the-top martial arts fights that “Dragon Ball” fans want and expect.Here is a joke.
Beerus recognizes a fellow warrior, and the battle ends with the planet intact and the combatants honoring each other’s noble spirits.Īlthough there are a few flashy CG special effects, the animation is generally flat, limited and hand-drawn, like the TV show. Although their fight will decide the fate of the Earth, Goku’s unsatisfied: That staggering power was a gift, not the product of training and inner strength. The search brings him to Earth and Goku, who draws on the powers of his friends and family to attain a god’s strength. When he awakens from a decades-long nap, Beerus, the feline God of Destruction (Jason Douglas), decides to investigate the prophecy of a “super-Saiyan god” whose fighting power rivals his own. The story by Akira Toriyama, the creator of the original manga, brings together all the familiar cast members but focuses on the redoubtable Goku (voiced by Sean Schemmel, re-creating his TV role), the martial artist of the Saiyan race from the planet Vegeta. The first “Dragon Ball” feature in 17 years, “Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods,” scored a huge hit in Japan, selling more than 1 million tickets in six days. “Dragon Ball Z” is the cartoon equivalent of a gateway drug: One of the most popular franchises in animation history, the TV series and related films have introduced millions of children to the pleasures of anime adventures.