Well, I'm definitely awake after that.
You know, now that I think of it. I think I appreciate these detailed blow-for-blow descriptions of the fights way more than when I actually saw them in the anime. Though, even though I could see it well enough to pick up some traces of Toriyama's style, the sort of action in DB/Z was vaguely confusing to keep up with under my existing limitations. I'm trying to remember how much of the Buu saga I'd seen by the time I stopped bothering to look at the screen... Although come to think of it, even when I could see well enough to make sense of the images I didn't actually look all that often (I payed more attention to dramatic closeups in the Namek arc than anything).
Meh. The reason I got off on that tangent was because Goku/Vegeta fights have never really given me that "!!!!" sense of excitement that they seem to give everyone else, though the way you handled it this episode kinda helped cement the first one as awesome for me. (Honestly, during Goku and Majin Vegeta's fight I was more interested in what Goten and Trunks were doing. Gohan and Kaioshin going after Babidi had its moments, but since it was pretty obvious what would happen and how much time there was before it... Meh.).
After watching the Piccolo Daimao saga for the first time about two and a half years ago (and very little but the movies since...
), I like Yajirobe a bit more, so with this being his *cough* shining display of teamwork was pretty awesome.
Vegeta is a lot more likable in this part of the story as well. I think I've mentioned it before, but until I was told that Vegeta would be returning for the post-Freeza stuff, I wasn't counting on having to deal with him anymore. And then we get the character-melting combination of Vegeta's messed up atitude in the Cell Saga with Criss Sabbat's portrayal... and yeah. I don't like Main Character Vegeta and his egoism.
I find it interesting that in the Nappa fight, we had everyone going after him Legends-style and nothing successful happened and everyone but Gohan and Kuririn died. Then with Vegeta, who's three to five times stronger than Nappa, we have everyone going after him far more successfully (Granted, a lot of things were different; Gohan actually fighting seriously, the element of surprise, Goku and Vegeta both getting beat up from their part of the fight, the way the environment was used (Yajirobe fought awefully ninja-like considering his samurai-ness... XD )).
And I think I like the Genkidama here more than its other uses (especially the movies, where the bloody thing saves the day three in a row, with variations in two other movies...). Here, it's not just another generic blast with a fancy name (There was absolutely nothing memorable about the Gyarlic ho itself; I'd've missed it completely had Trunks not reminded us of it in the Cell saga). It's not the huge ten-episode chargeathon that it becomes later, and guess what: it doesn't work (I wonder if Toei ever picked up on the success rate of that technique...). Heck, the Genkidama in this volume was effectively traded off between three people (Goku - Kuririn - Gohan). This is pretty much how I was introduced to the technique (through the Ocean/Saban/FUNi dub back in the day; I think I saw the training episode first, so the fact that it had some build up and still turned out like this was freaking awesome).
It's kinda funny, really. In the Nappa fight, only Goku could do anything (Kuririn and Gohan got a couple hits in, I guess...), while in the Vegeta fight, it's teamwork all the way other than Goku and Vegeta roughing each other up a bit at the start.
I think the Vegeta fight helps set up the directions the characters go in the next phase of the story rather well. We see Gohan realizing he can help, Kuririn kinda winds up with a lot of responsibility he hasn't been given before, and we've got Yajirobe's stepping into large-scale battles (he didn't really do that with Piccolo), and pretty much determines that, in fact, he doesn't particularly want to raise the stakes much higher.
'Course, this pretty much cements Goku, Gohan and Kuririn as the main characters, and since everyone else is dead and it takes a long time to get them back (though arguably this is kinda like the Red Ribbon arc in a sense?), it seems like things are just begging the "shafted humans club" that we eventually get.
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Tehehe. "Stop messing up my waveform!"
