Draconic wrote:Tournaments have always been the best arcs in Dragon Ball. The fact Grimlock is shitting on them is everything you need to know about how relevant his opinion is. The 21st, 22nd and 23rd Tenkaichi Budokais are better than Online's shit. The Tournament of Power shits all over the Prison Planet arc. Zamasu alone is better than anything out of the Dark Dragon Balls arc. Get real.
Throwing out "TURNMENTZ GOOD? BLEARGH" is laughable
I think the more important distinction is that constantly judging arcs by their premise rather than their content is no way to go about discussing a series. It is all in the execution. You could have the best idea in the world and it wouldn't matter if your execution is trash, and Heroes' ideas are the equivalent of "let's give THIS existing character an existing form!", rather than anything that would actually be interesting or meaningful to the story. Super does that plenty of the time too, but it also has new characters with personality, dynamics with existing characters, some actual attention payed to the original lore and ideas of the series, and a sense of actual fun that even Z sometimes fumbled. This is why you do not see games like Neverdead on anyone's "best ever" lists. It sounded like a great idea for a game, but the product was made out of duct tape and decade-old french fries. That's what Heroes is.
If you even look at a single minute of Heroes' story you can tell the massive difference in writing quality between it and any other Dragon Ball series, including GT. It has nothing to say, no emotion, no heart put into it. Everything just happens. No ties to anything Dragon Ball was ever about before except "fight though", no personal stakes for anyone involved, the characters don't even act like themselves half the time. They're bland stand-ins that could be anybody for all their personalities actually play into their interactions. Even if it was a show full of good ideas (which it really isn't), it does absolutely fucking nothing with any of them. Oh, a giant hybrid planet that Goku and the others have to explore? Better have the exact same fights we could have anywhere else and never see anything interesting about the setting. A saiyan whose ki can turn people evil? Better have Goku get affected for like 3 seconds and then it doesn't even matter. Fusion? As pointless as it is in the fun continuity. Great apes? Oh boy, we haven't found a way to turn THOSE boring yet! (That's a lie of course, GT did) It's endless mindless emotionless battles with no tension, no movement, no ambitions, a series on total autopilot with most of the worst staff from Super just to show you how much anyone creating it actually cares about it.
Tournaments of course, totally do have stories. A tournament is nothing but a setup to quickly get into the action, a story is a course of events with twists and turns, characters that interact with one another, fight with the narrative that says they should fail, change over time, become different people than what they started as. Tournaments don't remove any of that, they're just a simple structure for what fights occur between what characters. If you honestly say a tournament is inherently not a story, you're saying that Tien's character arc didn't exist. That Piccolo's never started somewhere. That Goku's struggle to win a single competition over like 150 episodes of Dragon Ball wasn't real and never mattered. It's an insult to the series legacy, and to the intelligence of the people you're arguing with.