Thoughts on Cell arc

[Gorou]

Vegeta seems the same. Simply, it is the context that is different.
A passage so radical, from slayer and destroyer in a "good boy" would have been ridiculously and not credible. The introduction of Gero is no different from that of Piccolo Daimao and Freeza, that have come out of nowhere. Usual lazy complaints

[ABED]

Vegeta seems the same. Simply, it is the context that is different.
A passage so radical, from slayer and destroyer in a "good boy" would have been ridiculously and not credible. The introduction of Gero is no different from that of Piccolo Daimao and Freeza, that have come out of nowhere. Usual lazy complaints

There was a single line foreshadowing Freeza at the end of the fight with Vegeta, but it's a very vague one.

[Gaffer Tape]

That does bring up an interesting point: the connection between the Saiyan Arc and the Freeza Arc versus the connection between the Red Ribbon Army Arc and the Cell Arc, and just how those two are completely different from each other.

Both use the previous arc as a launching point for a new story, but the similarities end there. The Freeza Arc feels much more like a natural extension to its launching point. It's certainly not perfect. There are a few minor, earlier points about the Saiyans and Vegeta that have to sort of be nudged aside to make way for this new interpretation of them. But for the most part, it takes that lore and expands upon it, particularly in the case of Vegeta. Going from Vegeta as the main villain to Vegeta's boss as the main villain makes perfect sense in that context. Shifting Vegeta from main antagonist to side antagonist and eventual ally allows for more depth from him. The idea of finding Dragon Balls on another planet is an idea that was introduced in the Saiyan Arc. The whole reason they're on Namek is because of consequences from their fight in the Saiyan Arc. They're so strongly connected that a lot of fans treat them as the same arc.

Conversely, the Red Ribbon Army Arc and the Cell Arc are not connected beyond the most superficial of ways. Now obviously the Freeza Arc had the advantage of coming directly after its parent, so to speak, while there were several years in between these two arcs. But it's just kind of funny that the TV series has the Muten Roshi open things with a big old extended flashback of the RRA events because, well, they are almost completely irrelevant to the events of the Cell Arc. All you have to know going in is that there was a Red Ribbon Army, and Goku defeated it. Revenge happens. But even that little bit of continuity is quickly dropped. The connection to the Red Ribbon Army serves no purpose besides contributing a ready-made antagonist. But there are no events from that arc that matter. There are no returning characters. The only tangible thing that ties the Cell Arc to the Red Ribbon Arc is the use of the latter's logo on some of the villains' clothes. And maybe that was the smart move in a way. Maybe Toriyama was afraid it had been too long for people to remember, or that, being a largely young audience, maybe a lot of his current readers weren't reading then.

And before anyone starts in, I'm not saying that villains have to have a big build up, that they can't just come out of nowhere. But if the Arc is supposed to be so based in this concept of tying it to events in the past, it seems like quite a waste to not do anything with it! If the whole point was to make it so he didn't have to come up with a new villain out of nowhere, then he should have used it as an asset, not made it so it didn't really matter. In my opinion, of course, the ideal should have been so that exclusively "Z"-era fans of the Cell Arc would go, "Man, all this stuff is so cool. Now I really want to go back to this Red Ribbon stuff and see what all the fuss is about!" It shouldn't have been what I more commonly see, which is, "Eh, that's not really important. I don't need to know any of it to appreciate the Cell Arc."

[ABED]

it seems like quite a waste to not do anything with it!

True, though I don't have an issue with them using a ready made antagonist. It makes it somewhat more palatable that some scientist creates beings that rival Goku. You can justify their strength more if someone has been watching Goku for years and has a reason to.

[Gaffer Tape]

Oh, I completely agree. Honestly the early parts of that arc are my favorite bits of it, and the idea of having him watch all of those battle and gain information from them is really the only part where it successfully ties into the mythos and adds context to scenes that have already happened.

[apex_pretador]

the point where transformations after transformations are introduced, is too much for me. Vegeta gets 2 transformations in the same arc, trunks gets three, goku gets three.
The room of spirit and time just happens to be like Zenkais in freeza arc.
The buildup to kami-piccolo merging is huge, since 23rd tournament arc, and it leads to nothing of importance.

Its ending is a weak point compared to most other endings. Vegeta gives up fighting, goku dies for no reason, gohan has no buildup to be a hero in this arc, Kami-piccolo's personality not explored etc.

On the other hand, buu arc has a lot of context behind it - Vegeta and goku training for years and finally surpassing Gohan. Vegeta getting back to his evil ways and finally change in heart. The gods of universe seen.
Gohan's potential fully discovered, goku saving the day and finally killing a big bad to end the series, GOTENKS etc.

[Gorou]

On what transformations you are talking about? The only real transformation is SSJ2 (which is not even referred to as such), others are refinements of SSJ.
It's funny how people continue to search buildup of events in the arc where are present more twists in throughout the manga, twists that are now no longer such, since we already know the story (not very well, apparently). For regard the various connections, the antagonist is actually directly linked to almost all subsequent events of the saiyan saga.

[Kunzait_83]

So the Cell arc.

It was my first arc, my entry point, and my real proper introduction to Dragon Ball (outside of a few Usenet discussions and some magazine articles a year or two prior during the Freeza arc), much like a LOT of other early 90s fans at the time. For whatever reason, the start of the Cell arc bumped the series' notoriety and visibility up even WAY more massively in Western anime fandom than it already was, and I was one of an avalanche of new people who tumbled into the series back in the fansub days through the Cell arc.

There's an element of sentiment there to be sure, but if I've learned nothing else from the last 16 or so solid years of anime/general geek culture fandom, its to never, ever be a slave to nostalgia. So in spite of being my "gateway drug" arc, I have no problems whatsoever admitting to its flaws and that its definitely one of the weaker arcs in the series overall.

It follows the end of what is easily the strongest long stretch of the series (22nd Budokai through Freeza) so it does in some ways represent a slide in cohesiveness. Its VERY much self-contained compared to the vast swath of storylines before it: which isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself, but it tries to halfheartedly connect itself to earlier stories with the whole Red Ribbon excuse.

The Boo arc, for all its faults, totally abandons any notion of connectivity and is VERY much up front that its even more of a self-contained story detached from much of the main bulk of the series before it. Which is ultimately to its benefit, especially considering the much more outwardly "whimsical and weird" nature of it. With Cell the Red Ribbon connections, while plenty cool in theory and on paper, is just too cobbled together and pulled from thin air in execution to sit completely right. It feels inorganic and forced, which is something that much of the rest of the series beforehand has largely always managed to staunchly avoid overall: all the more amazingly so considering the degree to which Toriyama was "free association" ad libbing the plot as he went.

The ties between the Cell and Red Ribbon arcs would've been a LOT stronger, felt more justified, and gone down a whole lot smoother had Toriyama thought of Gero back in the day and seeded his presence in the background throughout (made all the more frustrating by the fact that there were in retrospect ample and really cool opportunities to have done so)... but alas these are the pitfalls of "seat of your pants" writing.

There's also a couple of stretches where the flow of the arc gets muddy and bogged down: namely the island fights which take up a MASSIVE chunk of the middle of the arc, and lacks the variety and palpable sense of dread and doom of the enormously dense Freeza fight.

The filler in the anime is also some of the weakest in the entire series, including horrendous, nigh-unwatchable Marron bits early on as well as a ton of godawful, momentum-killing cutaways to Mr. Satan's irritating entourage during the Cell Games. And the animation is without the slightest doubt at its most fluctuatingly uneven and sloppiest of any other arc here, slingshotting wildly from peaks to valleys and back again with WAY too much rapidity. The good episodes indeed look gorgeous, but the bad episodes in equal measures look like absolute dogshit.

And of course Vegeta's entire (lack of) direction in this arc can just get downright maddening, all the more so since before and even after it he is otherwise consistently among the most solidly written and fleshed out characters in the series.

BUT... for all its flaws, its still ultimately Dragon Ball during its heyday. The magic is largely still there, even if its diluted somewhat by Toriyama's gas tank gauge starting to dip its way lower. There's just far too many standout moments and enduring characters and ideas introduced here to dismiss it: Trunks, Mr. Satan, Cell, 17 and 18, the Room of Spirit and Time, Gohan stepping up to the plate finally as front and center-most character, Piccolo re-merging with Kami, etc.

And for whatever dud, soggy areas there are to be had (namely a LOT of the stuff involving 2nd form Cell, much of which just kinda sits there lifeless compared to everything else), there's still TONS of excellent, show-stopping, iconic fights and setpieces to be had throughout: Piccolo vs 1st form Cell, Piccolo vs 17, Gohan vs Perfect Cell, Vegeta vs Perfect Cell, Vegeta vs 18, Goku and Gohan's RoSAT training, the fantastically brutal introduction of 19 and 20, a sick and dying Goku vs 19, Tenshinhan's immensely fist pumping stand against 2nd form Cell, Trunks' iconic introduction and satisfyingly harsh one-sided ass whipping of Cyborg Freeza and King Cold, the gang's cat and mouse hunting for Cell in his weakened 1st form, the excellent build up to Cell's introduction, and what is by far and away one of the best ever executed "super kinetic" fights in the entire damn series (and one of my all time favorites) Goku vs Perfect Cell.

And even the anime filler, here in its weakest throes by far, is still not without some incredible shining moments here and there also: most notably the little one-off episodic escapades during the downtime before the Cell Games, Kuririn's awesome throwdown with Cell at the Basil airport, and ESPECIALLY the entire Z crew - lead by Piccolo natch - jumping into the fray to assist Gohan against Cell at the 11th hour (which is so damned good and so narratively and emotionally right and perfect it frankly should've been in the manga). Also of course the goddamn Trunks special, which is VERY near angling for the top most tier of best ever animated anything involving Dragon Ball.

And while the anime's animation suffers from giant fits of bi-polar disorder, within the manga Toriyama's art continues to impress, with some incredibly elegant scenes throughout. A lot of people find it to be some of his weakest, but I very much disagree: I certainly don't share in the "anti-angular" sentiment of most here. The angular style largely works and is plenty cool (so long as its Toriyama himself or one of the better anime studios who are doing it: in lesser hands it looks horrendous obviously). I personally love it just fine myself.

Its the most uneven arc in the whole series I'd say: neck and neck with Boo for the title, though I'd posit that Cell probably just edges it out. Boo's got WAY too much innovation and imagination going on that keeps it interesting throughout (and the anime quality bounces WAY the hell back to fighting shape in terms of both filler and animation).

I think the thing about the Cell arc that gets a lot of people is that its the most straight ahead arc in the whole series: but this being Dragon Ball, "straightforward" is a VERY relative concept here. We're still ultimately talking about a storyline where supernaturally powered mystic Wulin Kung Fu warriors face off against cyborgs and get challenged to a martial arts tournament by a gigantic mutant Cicada person who fights with all their moves and melts the flesh off of people with his scorpion-like stinger/tail. Dragon Ball's version of a "straightforward" story arc is still utterly bonkers insanity by most other metrics.

I mean what can I say: I primarily got into Wuxia and came up into the fandom for it both during the mountain height of its "off its meds, wacky genre-hybrid" era and because of it: there's a very simple, direct reason for why DBZ managed to hook me so immediately at that specific point in time through a story arc exactly like this one, and a lot of it boils down to "Wulin fighters and mystics vs Aliens and Cyborgs was all the rage in the early 90s".

The Cell arc, both for good and for bad, in many ways feels like a perfect distillation and snapshot of that precise moment in time in the early/mid 90s where the "delirious fever dream" period of Wuxia media hit its absolute peak before beginning to break and settle back down (albeit VERY slowly and gradually until the early 2000s) over the latter half of the 90s.

[Trunksuu]

The Cell Arc was one of my favorites. It's a lot more darker than the other sagas. (Even though those are plenty dark to begin with.) I mean, the Z fighters have to hide a possibly sick and dying Goku, the most dependable fighter on their team, from the Androids who are basically playing Cat and Mouse with them. Not to mention that it's so horrifying that the only living survivor of the future "Z Fighters" (not like you could call it that, all of them are dead anyway) had to travel back in time to warn them about saving the post-apocalyptic world that Future Trunks lives in through the past timeline. Other than that, they're all horrified. Two robotic genocidal murderers on planet Earth is completely new to them. But I guess this different and terrifying idea for a DBZ saga is the reason why I like it so much.

[ABED]

Cell is surprisingly very active in the arc. Usually stories like this have the big bad have others do their dirty work as the plot builds to the final confrontation.

[ekrolo2]

Cell is surprisingly very active in the arc. Usually stories like this have the big bad have others do their dirty work as the plot builds to the final confrontation.

That's also one of the things I like about him. He's got no friends or allies, meaning that if he fucks up, he's done for. He has no one to back him up or anyone he can sacrifice to get a one up on everybody else.

[Lord Beerus]

Cell is surprisingly very active in the arc. Usually stories like this have the big bad have others do their dirty work as the plot builds to the final confrontation.

That's also one of the things I like about him. He's got no friends or allies, meaning that if he fucks up, he's done for. He has no one to back him up or anyone he can sacrifice to get a one up on everybody else.

Vegeta disagrees.

[ekrolo2]

Cell is surprisingly very active in the arc. Usually stories like this have the big bad have others do their dirty work as the plot builds to the final confrontation.

That's also one of the things I like about him. He's got no friends or allies, meaning that if he fucks up, he's done for. He has no one to back him up or anyone he can sacrifice to get a one up on everybody else.

Vegeta disagrees.

Oh snap!



Shame you said Vegeta instead of the entire cast . Cause really, its all their fault

[Lord Beerus]

Oh snap!



Shame you said Vegeta instead of the entire cast . Cause really, its all their fault

You're right. But Vegeta could have ended it right there and then, but he succumbed to Cell's verbal ass-kissing and decided to become his BFF.

[GodKaio-Ken]

I think if you count the entire Arc it is the third best behind the Saiyan Arc and Frieza arc. However as a villain I think Cell compares well to Frieza as #1. I always loved how articulate and logical Cell was. He was never driven by anger or revenge...he was driven by nothing but the programming given to him by Gero. It made him a calm cool customer.

[StrawHatPatriot]

Why do people say that the arc was unfocused or had no foreshadowing?

The whole point of the story style was to have plot twists.

That's why Trunks and the crew fight the androids so soon after he arrives; because those androids weren't meant to be the main villains. there was another in the shadows.

Obviously Toriyama only did that because of his editors, but still. Not every story needs heavy foreshadowing just because.

[Super Saiyan Swagger]

My thoughts on the Android arc (Cell arc, whatever you want to call it) change all the god damn time. It went from one of my favourites to one of my least favourites to one of my favourites again... now it's back to being one of my least favourites in the DBZ anime.

Let's get into what I liked about it: Future Trunks and his introduction. Holy shit. What a way to introduce a character. Freeza's alive? What? He has a dad? Whaaat? There's another Super Saiyan? WHAT? He's Bulma and Vegeta's son from the future?? WHAT??? I still remember absolutely losing it when I first found out about this. Future Trunks decimating Freeza and then disintegrating him was one of the most satisfying things I had ever seen. To this day, Future Trunks is my favourite character in the entire series (and I'm so glad that he returns in Super).

Gohan's development throughout the arc was really nice to see and his interactions with Goku in the Room of Spirit and Time was always interesting to watch. Gohan's confrontation with Cell, the transformation and the climactic Kamehameha battle were all great. It was so nice to see someone other than Goku taking the spotlight for a bit, what's also cool was all the build up to his transformation. We've all seen Gohan snap at times throughout the series, so seeing him explode into a Super Saiyan 2 and throw down on Cell was immensely satisfying.

Most of the androids were cool. 19 and Gero were kind of forgetful so they don't matter to me too much. 16, 17 and 18 all had really cool designs and were involved in some pretty sweet fights, Vegeta vs 18 and Piccolo vs 17 being up there in some of the best fights in the arc. Cell is fucking awesome. His eery reveal is still one of the scariest moments in the series for me, especially when he drinks a man to death and all that was left of him were his clothes. I love his cocky attitude and when he shits on Vegeta several times throughout (Vegeta was being a dickwad in this arc and I'll get to that soon). I like the designs for Cell's first and perfect form... but his second form is really weird... weird in a bad way. I think it's his face. First form Cell had a beak and Perfect form had a mouth and a nose but his second form has this weird Magikarp mouth with a flat shiny "nose" (is it a nose?... Seriously, what is that?) above it. He looks like a green man with a fish face.

I loved the moments in the Android arc. You all know the moments, right? Vegeta revealing his Super Saiyan transformation, Tenshinhan keeping Cell down with his Tri Beam/Kikoho, Vegeta's Final Flash, Goku's Warp Kamehameha, Goku's sacrifice, the Father-Son Kamehameha and so much more. They're all so great and they all run chills down my spine, especially the Warp Kamehameha... oh man that was so cool!

The fights, most of them, are great and the arc includes one of my favourite fights in the entire series. Goku vs Perfect Cell is so good! I've always said that the best fights of the series are the ones were the people fighting are almost or equal in strength. Goku vs Cell is just non-stop furious action with the two of them jumping across the arena, blowing the arena, unloading some heavy attacks on each other and ending it all with the shocking "I give up" from Goku. Insane fight. It's in my top 5 favourites.

Now, what I didn't like. There's quite a few. Firstly, bringing Freeza back and revealing that he has a daddy. Y'know, for someone that's described as the "ruler of the universe", am I the only one who finds it incredibly off putting that he has a dad that is possible stronger than him? I really don't like that. I also don't like that he was still alive even after Goku "killed" him which was after him having his life spared. He should have been left dead... but at the same time we wouldn't have gotten all those awesome moments with Future Trunks so I am very conflicted.

Vegeta's a complete jackass throughout the arc, making stupid decisions, throwing hissy fits and suddenly getting angry over Trunks's death EVEN THOUGH he was treating him like shit throughout the entire arc. There are times where I'll be rooting whoever Vegeta's fighting in that arc just to see his dumb ass get kicked.

The pacing is so off in the Android arc. There are these times where it doesn't feel like much is happening and then there are times where it feels like something is never going to end. That gap between Vegeta's fight with 18 and Piccolo's confrontation with Cell, I swear if you asked me what happened during that period of time I wouldn't be able to tell you. A bunch of stuff happened, there's my answer. There's also the incredibly slow battle on the islands. Cell transforms TWICE in these fucking island battles! It starts with Piccolo vs 17 and it ends with Cell telling Trunks about the Cell games... That's 18 episodes of things happening on some islands! Toriyama could have at least changed the location of some of the battles or something.

The Cell games themselves, while it makes sense for the showoff that is Cell to hold his own tournament, just feels like it came out of nowhere and was just like "...huh? A tournament?... Sort of?... Not really?... Okay." It also doesn't help that the only people that really faced off Cell was Goku and Gohan. It just felt like such an ass pull to just suddenly whip out a "tournament". Also, Gohan vs Cell, while it has its cool moments, is just a fight where the fighters take turns at beating the shit out of each other. It really doesn't deserve all the praise it gets.

Overall, the Android arc is one of my least favourite DBZ arcs. Don't get me wrong, it's still a cool arc, but it has far too many problems for me to love it. It definitely has its moments though and I can see why so many fans praise the arc. From best to worst DBZ arcs for me it's: Buu, Freeza, Android and then Saiyan.

[RandomGuy96]

Now, what I didn't like. There's quite a few. Firstly, bringing Freeza back and revealing that he has a daddy. Y'know, for someone that's described as the "ruler of the universe", am I the only one who finds it incredibly off putting that he has a dad that is possible stronger than him? I really don't like that.

Cold isn't "possibly stronger" than Freeza. He's very explicitly weaker than him, though in the same general league. Freeza boasts about being the most powerful in the universe while Cold is standing right behind him, he disregards Cold's advice several times and generally treats him like a sidekick, he treats himself as the main event of the battle on Earth with Cold being his back-up, and Cold himself notes twice that anyone capable of defeating Freeza (even a non-buff version- which we know from the previous arc means he was at only 70% or so of his power) is by definition the most powerful person in the universe- by far.

The anime kind of fucks this up by having Tenshinhan and Vegeta say that they sense both Freeza and a ki much stronger than Freeza's, seemingly contradicting the above scenes. But immediately after this, Gohan notes that the powers they're sensing right now are nothing and that Freeza's true power (which only he and Goku witnessed) is far above it.

[Super Saiyan Swagger]

Now, what I didn't like. There's quite a few. Firstly, bringing Freeza back and revealing that he has a daddy. Y'know, for someone that's described as the "ruler of the universe", am I the only one who finds it incredibly off putting that he has a dad that is possible stronger than him? I really don't like that.

Cold isn't "possibly stronger" than Freeza. He's very explicitly weaker than him, though in the same general league. Freeza boasts about being the most powerful in the universe while Cold is standing right behind him, he disregards Cold's advice several times and generally treats him like a sidekick, he treats himself as the main event of the battle on Earth with Cold being his back-up, and Cold himself notes twice that anyone capable of defeating Freeza (even a non-buff version- which we know from the previous arc means he was at only 70% or so of his power) is by definition the most powerful person in the universe- by far.

The anime kind of fucks this up by having Tenshinhan and Vegeta say that they sense both Freeza and a ki much stronger than Freeza's, seemingly contradicting the above scenes. But immediately after this, Gohan notes that the powers they're sensing right now are nothing and that Freeza's true power (which only he and Goku witnessed) is far above it.

Thank you for correcting me on that. I've always thought that Cold was stronger than Freeza, it's probably due to what Tenshinhan and Vegeta said.

[ABED]

Gohan's development throughout the arc was really nice to see and his interactions with Goku in the Room of Spirit and Time was always interesting to watch. Gohan's confrontation with Cell, the transformation and the climactic Kamehameha battle were all great. It was so nice to see someone other than Goku taking the spotlight for a bit, what's also cool was all the build up to his transformation. We've all seen Gohan snap at times throughout the series, so seeing him explode into a Super Saiyan 2 and throw down on Cell was immensely satisfying.

His development was lacking because he's such a peripheral character for the bulk of the arc. Even when he's training with Goku, that's more of the B-story. His confrontation with Cell felt more like he was acting as Goku's proxy. It didn't have the dramatic oomph that a final confrontation between hero and villain should in large part because there's no connection between Cell and Gohan. The SS2 transformation was great, but could've been set up so much better.

With Cell the Red Ribbon connections, while plenty cool in theory and on paper, is just too cobbled together and pulled from thin air in execution to sit completely right. It feels inorganic and forced

I disagree since having that connection with the past creates a reason for the events of the story and does away with much of the exposition.

The ties between the Cell and Red Ribbon arcs would've been a LOT stronger, felt more justified, and gone down a whole lot smoother had Toriyama thought of Gero back in the day and seeded his presence in the background throughout (made all the more frustrating by the fact that there were in retrospect ample and really cool opportunities to have done so)

Not saying I disagree, but for example? Other than having seen him prior, I don't think Gero's hatred would've been any more understandable. We know why Gero did what he did.