What's worse: 5 minutes of Freeza or 48 minutes of TOP?

[TheRed259]

Personally, I think that the 48 minutes of the TOP are worse.

There is no way that 1 minute (in some cases 2) is passing in every episode with all that exposition from Krillin and the others and the staring, talking and fighting in the ring. At least you could say that Freeza was mistaken about the 5 minutes on Namek (and they turned out to be more than that) but you can't say the same about the Grand Priest.

[Robo4900]

My pet theory about Freeza's "5 minutes" is that he just said it in an attempt to stress Goku out and throw him off his game. It fits well enough in the story, given this is Freeza we're talking about.

Honestly, I think they should have just dumped the Tournament Of Power time limit; just take away the time limit, and say that if either there's only one universe with participants left, or if Zeno gets bored, the tournament ends. That'd get around this whole issue. If they weren't going to even slightly attempt to conform to the time limit, this would have made a lot more sense.

[jeffbr92]

Both are over the top (no pun intended), but the 48 min is worse to point of being surreal! These last episodes, with fast paced battles, but still with the fighters talking and the audience having time to make their observations on only 30 seconds in the real time?

I remember seeing a fast edited compilation with the first episodes to show to how time was actually passing through the arc, but I'm sure the guy who came with this time, drop it after some time. It just can't be done.

[Metalwario64]

My pet theory about Freeza's "5 minutes" is that he just said it in an attempt to stress Goku out and throw him off his game. It fits well enough in the story, given this is Freeza we're talking about.

I've always felt something like this, like he was just taking a guess, and was so arrogant that he went ahead and stated it as a fact.

There were no hard, set in stone numbers there, unlike the Tournament of Power.

[mute_proxy]

My pet theory about Freeza's "5 minutes" is that he just said it in an attempt to stress Goku out and throw him off his game. It fits well enough in the story, given this is Freeza we're talking about.

When you read the manga, it feels just like 5 minutes though

[sunsetshimmer]

When will you people learn that 5 minutes on Namek lasted about 5 minutes? (of course Frieza couldn't know that it will take EXACTLY 5 minutes)

DB and DBZ anime series were based on manga in which entire 5 minutes didn't seem so long.
Anime was always making things a lot longer.

Gohan vs Cell kamehameha took entire episode or more while in manga it took one or two pages.

I am 100% sure that entire tournament in DBS manga will also be much shorter and seem like actual 48 minutes despite being made after anime.

Also, things are supposed to happen very fast so time in fights is supposed to flow slower.
When Goku in GT said that he will finish Eis Shenron in 5 seconds, entire thing actually was pretty short (less than 30 seconds) but Eis was counting loud so you can say that everything was just happening fast (just like tournament in Super), but for story it was 5 seconds.
Still, if GT had manga, entire "5 seconds" scene would probably take 3 minutes at least.

[Dbzfan94]

My pet theory about Freeza's "5 minutes" is that he just said it in an attempt to stress Goku out and throw him off his game. It fits well enough in the story, given this is Freeza we're talking about.

I've always felt something like this, like he was just taking a guess, and was so arrogant that he went ahead and stated it as a fact.

There were no hard, set in stone numbers there, unlike the Tournament of Power.

Thats my theory too. And then later on Freeza flat out says something like "guess I was wrong, its still got time left" when it didnt blow up.

[PacificOceanDub]

The pacing in the anime for Namek’s “final five minutes” is terrible. Had the anime never existed, and all we had was the manga to go off of, the universal joke about this part of the story would never have happened.

The 48 minutes in the TOP dragging out for 50 episodes is totally justified because in a battle Royale environment, there are going to be tons of different scenarios to hone in on, not just Goku vs Frieza. So of course, I have to say, 5 minutes of “Frieza time” is the more ridiculous. I mean, that one episode “Pathos of Frieza” (forgive me purists for not using the ep #, I don’t know it) is a total snooze-fest. Recapping the events of the supposed last 5 minutes? Give me a break

[ABED]

The pacing in the anime for Namek’s “final five minutes” is terrible. Had the anime never existed, and all we had was the manga to go off of, the universal joke about this part of the story would never have happened.

The 48 minutes in the TOP dragging out for 50 episodes is totally justified because in a battle Royale environment, there are going to be tons of different scenarios to hone in on, not just Goku vs Frieza. So of course, I have to say, 5 minutes of “Frieza time” is the more ridiculous. I mean, that one episode “Pathos of Frieza” (forgive me purists for not using the ep #, I don’t know it) is a total snooze-fest. Recapping the events of the supposed last 5 minutes? Give me a break

Even the manga doesn't feel like 5 minutes. It's not even the pacing, it's the timeframe.

[SuperCyan2]

Definitely Super's ToP arc. Dragon Ball Z's Freeza arc dragged on for too long but it was eventually over whereas the ToP arc seems to be taking an eternity! And it doesn't help the characters, story or dialog isn't very entertaining or interesting to put up with it.

[Gaffer Tape]

I'm so glad somebody made this thread because it's an idea I've been bandying about in my head of late, as the Tournament of Power's length has become more and more and more unbearable by the week. So, yeah, without further ado, I'm casting my vote for the Tournament of Power. It's much, much worse. For Freeza, the manga isn't even that bad. For Dragon Ball Dissection, in a purely unscientific study, I timed how long it took me to read that portion of the story, purposely slowing my reading to a more naturalistic pace, and I got through it in about 15 minutes. So obviously bloated but not too bad.

However, it's really more fair in this case to compare it to the anime, since that's where it's really bloated, and presumably where "5 minutes" became such a notorious thing. And I don't doubt for a second that Super took the idea from that (I mean, it borrows everything else from the Freeza Arc). Super seems to revel in this awful idea far more than Z ever managed to do, especially since the announcer counts down a minute every episode now. They almost seem proud of making this so agonizingly slow that they have to actually remind us of it every week.

So it takes ten episodes in Z, which means each episode averages to about 30 seconds of real time. So just from a purely mathematical standpoint, the time in the Freeza Arc is dilated twice as far as that in the ToP. And yet it still feels much easier to get through than Super. I mean, the simplest explanation is how much time it is for us in real time. And 35ish episodes of such extreme time dilation is just so much more to have to swallow than 10. I'm not saying ten is great by any stretch of the imagination. But to put that into perspective, 35 episodes is how long the entire Saiyan Arc was. And think of every single thing that happened in it, all the different locations, the focuses and growth on all the different characters, the varied fights, the Gohan adventures. And yet in Dragon Ball Super, that's all just one, boring, repetitive tournament.

And to compare it to other tournaments, none of which have lasted this long in an anime format, they at least had clear, demarcated lines that helped break up the action. They had matches. They had preliminary matches. Final matches. Dialogue in between matches. The TV 22nd Budoukai had days break up matches, so characters could regroup and discuss and bond and have adventures. This has been 35 episodes of nothing but straight fighting. The idea of a battle royale intrigued me at the beginning, but it has become the biggest handicap in this arc. Because it's made it so that everything jumbles together. Well, not it in and of itself. It's the fact that it's a battle royale with far too many characters that has gone on for far too long. First off, stories just need levels. You can't keep everything 100% action all of the time, because then it becomes a repetitive tone that all blends together. I can never remember anymore what happens from one episode to the next. I remember the early episodes. But after that, it all just became so generic and same-y. Second, the tournament grounds, while an interesting looking locale at first, are not interesting enough to sustain the length of time looking at it. It too has just become this dour, boring brown swirl with dour, boring, broken rocks floating everywhere. It seriously makes Namek, the ultimate example of boring Toriyama fighting locations, look absolutely beautiful by comparison.

And that brings me back to the Freeza Arc. You know what helped that, as sacrilegious as it sounds, given how they're the staple of everything said to be wrong with DBZ's pacing? Cutaways! They helped that two-fold. One, especially for the cutaways that were actually part of the story and not filler, it helped with the sense of time dilation. It tricked your brain into not being able to keep time as easily. And you could always tell yourself that a lot of these cutaways were happening simultaneously with the action, which helped the time dilation even more. Two, it helps with the levels I talked about earlier. Just a brief moment to catch your breath, to focus on something other than people beating the crap out of each other, helps the action so, so much from getting boring. What I wouldn't have killed during the ToP to have gotten a scene every once in a while of just Goten and Trunks on the nature preserve. Something. Anything! Just stop making me look at the swirling brown clouds for just a few minutes. Let me see a blue sky! Let me see other characters. Let me see something new! By comparison, there is certainly talking in the ToP. But all it is is the characters explaining what we just saw.

So, yeah. As bad as the Freeza fight is, it is leaps and bounds better than what we're getting now in Super.

[ABED]

But how much of your perception of those DBZ episodes is influenced by Freeza specifying the time limit?

[Lord Beerus]

Both scenarios abuse the concept of time to absurd degrees, but neither should ever be taken as literally as they are started in-universe because time never flows in a fashion that is realistic in fiction, and especially more-so in shonen anime or manga. It all really comes down to how much mileage you get out the scenarios that stretch out the concept of time for the sake of the plot.

Taking that in consideration, the "five minutes" scenario on Namek is worse, but I'm strictly speaking of the anime. Say what you will about the Tournament Of Power, but it at least had had the insanely large cast of characters to justify taking it's time with narrative.

[Robo4900]

When you read the manga, it feels just like 5 minutes though

Wouldn't be the only time the manga and the anime have had differences. IIRC, the way Videl finds out Great Saiyaman's identity is pretty different in the manga. And Goku doesn't get the Ultra Divine Asspull in the manga's Piccolo arc.

Besides, "Feels like" doesn't mean that was literally how it was. No offense.

Still, if the manga and the anime not being totally consistent does bother you, there's always Kai, right?

Thats my theory too. And then later on Freeza flat out says something like "guess I was wrong, its still got time left" when it didnt blow up.

It's been ages since I saw the Freeza arc, but yeah, that does sound kinda familiar.

The 48 minutes in the TOP dragging out for 50 episodes is totally justified because in a battle Royale environment, there are going to be tons of different scenarios to hone in on, not just Goku vs Frieza.

Implying there was literally nothing going on in the anime other than Goku vs Freeza.
There was also the shenanigans about Gohan, Bulma, Piccolo, and the Namekians getting back to earth, etc.

Plus... From what I've seen, the TOP tends to progress in a linear fashion which would preclude the possibility that 48 minutes of events are happening in parallel(Especially as, from what I hear(I'm not currently watching the show), this last episode was basically just Goku vs Jiren for 20 minutes, despite only being about 2 minutes of time in-universe...), and have people constantly commentating on what's going on. It actually makes absolutely no sense in any conceivable way. They were given a concrete number of 48 minutes, which is still being adhered to by the recaps and previews, but the episode contents just don't make any sense from that point of view.

When Freeza said "5 minutes" it was an untrustworthy guy saying that he estimates a certain timeframe. He could be lying, he could be wrong, there are tons of factors here. It wasn't a concrete number, and people need to get over it; it's funny to joke about, but the "5 minutes" thing isn't a plot hole.

But, honestly, I don't think the 48 minutes or 5 minutes things are necessarily indicative of any pacing issues in their respective shows. While both the Namek arc, and Super as a whole both have massive pacing issues, I don't think one small oversight is worth fixating on. The 48 minutes of TOP thing is definitely something that indicates a lack of due thought from the writers, and overall production staff, but while that is a discussion worth having, I don't think an oversight of how timing is measured in a meta sense in recaps/previews really gets down to the true issues of the show.

[Logania]

The tournament definitely. Freezas time limit was said once then they fight. The time is stupid but it's minor.

The tournament however mentions the time left every episode, breaking the immersion a bit. If they would've just said the time was 48 minutes at the start and that's it, I wouldn't mind nearly as much.

[Kokonoe]

ToP's 48 minutes was absolutely terrible, so that.

[Kataphrut]

5 minutes of Freeza has an excuse (needing to pad time for the manga) and with the manga and Kai, there are versions of that which don't have the issue. Plus, it's so inconsequential you can laugh at it.

48 minutes of TOP really didn't need to happen, they aren't adapting anything. My theory is it was part of Toriyama's outline and nobody at Toei wanted to tell him that while 48 minutes might be doable in manga format, it just doesn't work for an anime. Maybe they thought they could get away with it as a meta-joke given how infamous Dragon Ball is for time dilation, but nobody bothered to make a joke out of it.

[ABED]

Even reading the manga, it does not feel like five minutes. The pacing and Freeza's comment are two separate issues. How much of people's perceptions of those episodes is colored by that one comment.

[Gaffer Tape]

But how much of your perception of those DBZ episodes is influenced by Freeza specifying the time limit?

I've been thinking about this, and I believe you do have a point. Z is plagued with a couple of episodes that are just really bad or inconsequential on their own. There's one episode that you can literally skip and never feel you've missed anything. And there's another that is entirely Kaio recapping in flashback what you just saw. But other than that, I don't feel it's that bad.

Conversely, the ToP would be just as bad even if the announcer wasn't constantly hammering in how little time had passed. It would still be just as boring, just as tedious, and just as unnecessarily long. Like Robo4900 says, while the numbers are problematic, and they highlight existing issues, they're not the source of the problems.

[ABED]

I remember the clip show (likely a product of its time, understandably), but which episode is the one you can skip over?