Dragon Ball (All Series)

[Daikun]

The movie's villain has been revealed to be Broly.

....And just like that, my interest level has gone way down.

I'm divided on this news.

My first thought: Ugh. Broly AGAIN?! He's such a boring, one-dimensional villain.
My second thought: You know... Toriyama will be writing this character for the first time. Maybe the show's creator can improve him?

Could go either way.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Would be funny if Kale showed up and met him.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

The DBZA fan in me wants him to meet Future Trunks in this canon.

Anyways, while Toriyama has noted that he will be changing up the character, I'm still very skeptical. On the one hand, he did re-write Beerus from a generic villain into a much more interesting neutral figure that was a genuinely good addition to DB's cast. On the other hand, he had made a lot of the original cast of characters significantly worse, except for Vegeta and Bulma who were by far the stand-outs of Super, and on top of that he basically helped to create his own version of a character just as bland and boring as Broly with Jiren. And let's not forget how he butchered Bardock's character, who was another fan-favorite not originally created by him. Granted, it's pretty hard to make Broly any worse than he already is.

So, I don't exactly have the utmost confidence in modern Toriyama's ability to write interesting characters or stories. That said, I'll hold out at least a bit of hope that the anime writers will work with Toriyama to iron out a more interesting narrative since on a production side they seem to be putting way more effort into this movie than any previous Dragon Ball anime project.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

FUNimation will be screening the movie in select theaters early next year: http://m.ign.com/articles/2018/07/12/funimation-is-bringing-dragon-ball-super-broly-to-north-american-theaters-in-2019

[Dr. Insomniac]

Now tell me if this Broly can say words other than "Kakarot".

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Well, this is what happens when you switch out the staff to include someone like Shintani who is a good character model designer and animation director, versus a guy who admits to being stagnated by doing nothing but Dragon Ball related projects for the last two decades.

[Dr. Insomniac]

So in the Super manga, 17 somehow found and domesticated a bunch of Cell Jrs.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Official English Dubbed Trailer: https://youtu.be/FHgm89hKpXU

[Dr. Insomniac]

Sabat teaches his daughter about Dragon Ball.

[Daikun]

Broly Trailer 2 is out.

Dragon Ball Minus is now canon.

[LumRanmaYasha]

I'm conflicted. The film looks gorgeous, but with so many characters and two storylines to juggle, I feel like it'll be overstuffed with fanservice and spectacle at the cost of a compelling story. They could improve on Dragon Ball Minus significantly, so I hope they take the time to flesh it out and explore the characters in an interesting way, instead of simply regurgitating the plot beats from Toriyama's bare-bones one-shot.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

My initial excitement of Dragon Ball returning wore down a bit over time in Super's run, but really hit a nosedive somewhere in the middle of the Tournament of Power arc. I'm not going to get into a whole rant here, but needless to say I'm in complete agreement with Mistare Fustion on that arc, and in general I'm actually a little frustrated with how low-effort the writing for Super got. In retrospect, I have a lot more problems with the Goku Black arc than I did on my first viewing of it, but I'll still always give it credit for at least trying something different, even if not handled in the best of ways. It's clear that with the Tournament of Power arc, everything was centered around just throwing in as much crowd-pleasing fan-service as possible without any regard for how to build up characters, story, rivalries, fights, drama, tension, personal stakes, or essentially anything that goes into crafting a good piece of fiction.

While Dragon Ball's original manga run wasn't necessarily the most consistent in quality, I enjoyed almost all of it to varying degrees because Toriyama at least had a sense of always building things up, even in his earlier and more humorous arcs, and I can say with certainty that each major story arc managed to feel distinctly unique and different from what came both before and after it. A lot of Super really just blended together for me outside of a few key episodes.

At any rate, the whole point of this rant is that this has also left me very skeptical going into the new Broly movie. I trust the animation staff and animation director (the same guy who worked on One Piece: Film Z) to give us an entertaining product, but I don't trust either Toriyama's current story-telling ability or any of the writers on Toei's staff to actually deliver us a memorable product that meaningfully expands Dragon Ball's lore. We haven't really had anything like that since Battle of Gods, and at this point the addition of Beerus and Whis being such major hit characters kind of feels like a fluke at this point.

[LumRanmaYasha]

I agree with most of MistareFusion's criticisms (as well as those of Team Four Star and Kanzenshuu in their retrospectives), but I admit, even though the Tournament of Power was more of a string of moments than a cohesive story, I genuinely loved watching it and found it really fun and satisfying pretty much the whole way through. You could say they succeeded in servicing me as a fan in that regard. Still, as much as I enjoyed seeing some underutilized characters get some spotlight, I think the most valuable part of the arc were the new characters from the other universes they introduced and the stories that came with them, particularly the likes of Caulifla, Kale, Ribrianne, Toppo, and Jiren (by the end of the arc), whom I'm hoping will be explored further and expanded upon in future Dragon Ball stories. It's a shame that we had to be introduced to them in a long tournament first, which really did feel like the series jogging in place after making some steps forward with the Goku Black arc.

The Super film is weird to me, because it's clearly trying to have it both ways. It's taking a step forward by giving Dragon Ball an aesthetic overhaul, but at the same time it's taking steps backwards by regurgitating stories and reusing characters we've already seen before. I'm basically in agreement with your feelings on it. It doesn't seem like the movie has any new ideas to propel the franchise in a truly new direction or expand on it in interesting ways like BoG did, which is really disappointing. I'm sure I'll enjoy it, but what I really want is to be surprised by it, which is something I haven't felt from Dragon Ball since BoG.

[Dr. Insomniac]

I've been more leaning toward the PlagueofGripes school of Super criticism, but yeah. I enjoyed the Goku Black arc because it felt like Dragonball was finally getting dragged into the modern era instead of rehashing old stories, up until the Zeno ending of course, so the Tournament of Power felt tired. Sure, the Kefla fight and the final battle with Jiren were cool to watch, but it didn't feel like Toriyama or Toyotaro were thinking ahead. I guess I liked the Other World Tournament as a kid, and watching what was essentially a remake of it was all right, but when 4/5ths of the Super arcs were either adaptations of movies or tournament arcs, you gotta wonder if either creator knows what to do with Dragonball anymore.

[Daikun]

Broly trailer #3