Best received Dragon Ball arc?

[DBZAOTA482]

• Search for the Dragon Balls

• 21st Tenkaichi Budokai

• Red Ribbon Army / Fortuneteller Baba

• 22nd Tenkaichi Budokai

• Piccolo Daimao

• 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai

• Saiyan

• Namek / Freeza

• Artificial Human / Cell

• Great Saiyaman / Majin Buu

Which has the most rave among audiences and critics alike?

Personally, I'd say the Namek / Freeza arc is overall the best received. While the Artificial Human / Cell arc is more popular, there are plenty of people who dislike it or at least many aspects of it while no one really hates on the Namek / Freeza arc (outside the horrible pacing in the Z anime).

[MasenkoHA]

How are we quantifying this? Tv ratings? Personal observations? I don’t think you’re going to find too many professional critic reviews on the various Dragon Ball arcs.


I’d say Namek/Freeza is the most famous arc but not necessarily the best received. The length of the Freeza vs Goku fight in the anime is a joke to fans and non-fans alike. Sure, that’s not true for the manga but I think people’s experience with the anime spills over to their perception of the manga.

The Piccolo and Saiyan arcs are probably the best received. I rarely see too many complaints of the arcs and they tend to be somewhere on top of most fans list.

[kyppk]

It has to be the Namek / Freeza arc.

Freeza is the most iconic, and arguably popular, continuous villain in DB having returned multiple times in one way or another (mecha, revived RoF, fought in ToP revived afterword, Broly movie), and the decision to bring them back over any other previous villain signals, in a business sense, that when it comes to DB as a franchise most people will think of the Freeza as the defining DB villain. Combine that with DBZ battles being forever stereotyped as taking forever and endless screaming because of the Freeza fight and the original SSJ transformation that everyone and their brother knows about, you have every inclination to believe that the zeitgeist of DB is the Freeza arc without mentioning any of the other reasons.

Andrioid / Cell is good, but a lack of clarity and focus because of the editing decisions made throughout the Android section really hampers the overall story, and likely, the overall public rating/reception because of that.

[SuperSunnyDee]

It’s been mentioned before, but I think that the Frieza arc is the most well received arc in the series. The Saiyan arc comes a close second but the Frieza arc established a lot of the tropes the series would follow to even now. Frieza himself is enduringly popular, the Super Saiyan transformation is an icon in super powers, and the characters relevant to that story have been the only ones able to maintain something resembling relevance.

[Planetnamek]

I'd say the Cell saga as the Freeza saga while mostly well-received also got a lot of complaints for being too long and drawn out and that there were too many episodes with not much happening(one of which was almost a clip-show), whereas I never really heard those same complaints about Cell/Androids.