Matches Malone wrote:I'm just using it as an example, personally, I think the 22nd Tournament and after is more or less the same thing in terms of the quality of fights. Be that Kid Goku vs King Piccolo, Roshi and Kid Goku vs Tien, etc.
A Z fight is like Pizza, you can't define what makes it work, but you'll know when you eat it.
Well, to me pre-DBZ fights may resemble a pizza, but they lack the ingredeint that defines a DB fight to me: internal coherence.
23rd TB Goku vs Piccolo is a mess in that sense (even King Piccolo vs Kid Goku was better), I mean, the last bit of the fight is very forced with Piccolo going from not able to do nothing to I'm strong enough to kill everyone + kami just so no one can interfere in the fight.
The one time gimmick attacks are also a trait of the original DB and are very present in that fight.
TheGodfather93 wrote: ↑Wed Jul 22, 2020 1:27 pm
There's no reason whatsoever that things should be as shit as they are in the future timeline. Why haven't Bulma and her father made a spaceship to go to Namek and use their Dragon Balls?
They don't know even where the new planet Namek is, and Bulma's father is dead at that point so I don't know if they even had a spaceship able to go there or the resources to send one -the ones they made to go to Namek were Saiyan technology based and there were little resources in the future-.
TheGodfather93 wrote:Why hasn't King Kai told anyone the location of New Namek?
Why haven't Goku, Piccolo or Kami told Gohan and Trunks about the ROSAT, or how to train more efficiently?
Or maybe the androids destroyed the palace of Kami -there are no senzus in the future-. In your second point, you're right, it's true that Goku should have been able to properly tell them how to better train their SSJ through Kaito, but that's not a big plothole but a tiny small one.
But it's obvious by his interactions that Goku never made contact with any of the survivors in the earth. Maybe him dying from an illness incapacitated him for good in the other world as well? Any excuse justifies this.
TheGodfather93 wrote:How is Gohan, who has immense potential, so weak after almost two decades of constant training and fighting, that he gets his ass beat by a weaker version of Android 17 who's only using 50% of his strength?
He never has Goku to train him on how to properly achieve and master the SSJ state and any experienced fighter is long dead, so they're stuck in their unmastered SSJ forms not being able to progress any further (as demonstrated in the Cell saga through Vegeta and Trunks 2nd ROSAT training).
TheGodfather93 wrote:Putting all that aside, after Trunks travelled to the past and told everyone about the androids, the entire issue could've been resolved then and there if our "heroes" actually decided to do the rational thing and use the Dragon Balls or Baba to find Dr Gero's location, and then go and stop him before he can finish building his killer robots that would, in another timeline, commit genocide and rule over the Earth as tyrants. Before you say it'd be out of character for them to kill him, they wouldn't have to kill him.
But that's a plotpoint the manga itself adresses perfectly. Bulma tells them to do exactly what you're telling, and Goku's answer is "no, I want to fight them".
Goku could've also used instant transmission to help Piccolo kill Cell before he got his perfect body, but Goku NEVER did it because he want's to fight the strongest oponents and not save earth.
You can't say that something the manga specifically explains is a plothole. Of course you can disagree with Goku and say you would have taken a different course of action, but Goku is not you, Goku is Goku and he wanted to fight against strong oponents more than anything else.
TheGodfather93 wrote:They could just destroy all his research and warn him to stop what he's doing, or get him arrested. But no, that'd require too much common sense. Instead, Goku, Piccolo and Tenshinhan decided to risk the lives of millions of innocent people across the planet, including their own friends and families, just because they wanted to test their strength against the androids.
Well, yes, that's who they are in fact.
They are fighting maniacs that between a good fight and milions of people potentially death, they choose to fight. I mean, Goku didn't kill Fat Bu in his SSJ3 just because he wanted Goten and Trunks to properly train, and he thought that Bu killing anyone cold be fixed with the Dragon Balls.
TheGodfather93 wrote:Fast-forward a bit to Cell's introduction, where he reveals his entire origin story and future plans to Piccolo in a brilliant piece of writing that removes any potential intrigue that would've benefited the story.
What? Present's Cell's actions couldn't take place in the near future because he still would be an embrion for years. What intrigue did you want there? The only one would've been to pospone Cell's appearance and play more with the "deserted cities" concept before introducing him.
Anyway, this is not a plothole.
TheGodfather93 wrote:Fast-forward a bit farther to when Semi-Perfect Cell is running rampant and Vegeta decides to let him absorb 18. Trunks could've easily swooped in and vaporised Cell with no difficulty whatsoever, but didn't. He also could've flown down and wiped out 18 so Cell couldn't absorb her.
Semi-Perfect Cell wasn't as weak as you make him to be. Besides his above average resistance to damage inherited from Freeza, Vegeta fought him at full power and Trunks was weaker than him. Cell resisted tons of attacks from Vegeta, so I don't think Trunks had the power to erase him in 1 attack.
Regarding Trunks and the androids, Trunks still wasn't fond of them but they had already spared them all without killing no one. And he thought he had time to kill Cell before Vegeta could return, so it's only logical that his first course of action was to face Cell after sending Vegeta far away with that Ki blast.
But then Cell already uses the solar flare so Trunks has only had time to land 1 kick on Cell and that's it.
Things could've gone different, but none of the characters act stupid or out of his role for that to happen.
TheGodfather93 wrote:Fast-forward some more to the Cell Games, where Gohan suddenly decides that he's a pacifist and doesn't want to fight anymore. Because it's not like he willingly fought Freeza and Freeza's soldiers on an alien planet in order to save his friends. It's not like he chose to train to fight the androids with Goku and Piccolo. That's not out of character at all.
Gohan only participated in fights obligated by the circumstances, also in Namek where they were found just after arriving, their spaceship destroyed and forced to hide.
I mean, it's not as if he didn't go to fight Cell, but the difference there is that unlike in most of his previous fights in this one he was fighting not because he had the necessity or the desire to do so, but just because Goku picked him as Cell's next oponent.
And in fact, in the other fight where he was involved against his will (when Piccolo tosses Nappa to him) he even refuses to fight and is paralysed by the fear.
Gohan has always been a pacifist, from day 0, and of course has participated in fights where he or his friends were in immediate danger, but he never wanted to fight for the sake of fighting.
From Gohan's POV, he surely expected Vegeta or even Trunks to go there before him, so he hadn't still had the time to even mentalize himself that it soon would be his turn.
He was 100% in character to me.
Regards.