What's the best anime u watched and how it compares to DBZ?

[Cipher]

You realize this is as crazy as asking what the best cartoon someone's watched is and how it compares to "x specific other cartoon that might be in a completely different genre," right?

Anime's not a genre.

The best anime I have ever seen is Dragon Ball Super.

[Soppa Saia People]

You realize this is as crazy as asking what the best cartoon someone's watched is and how it compares to "x specific other cartoon that might be in a completely different genre," right?

Anime's not a genre.

The best anime I have ever seen is Dragon Ball Super.

Thank you. I've gotten into so many stupid arguments about that.

[Ajay]

Huh. For whatever reason previous posts had given me the impression that you've been into OP for a while. Wouldn't have guessed that you only got into it 7-8 months ago.

Oh really? I don't know whether that's a good thing?

I do know that I posted this image a lot when I was getting hardcore into it:

Spoiler:

I was watching upwards of 20 episodes a day at one point. Nothing like putting off important work.

[Doctor.]

Monster is the best manga I've read and I heard the anime adaptation is pretty faithful, so I'm just going with it. If it doesn't count, then it's Fate/Zero part 2. Anyway, Monster is fantastic, a bit flawed here and there, the villain is mostly used as a plot device, even though he gets proper development, his screen time is very low. It's probably the best anime will ever get and Dragon Ball is in no way at all anywhere near as good. It's still my favorite series though, recognizing its flaws doesn't mean you can't enjoy it.

Battle Shounen wise, Rurouni Kenshin, One Piece, Fullmetal Alchemist and arguably Hunter x Hunter are all superior, but I do consider DB to be very good as far as battle manga go.

[TheAldella]

The best anime I've watched is likely Naruto Shippuden.
Hear me out here.
Shippuden's additions and expansions to what the manga do make it far superior in my mind. Not to mention the excellent dubbing, primarily voice directed by Mary Elizabeth McGlynn, the woman who primarily voice directed the english dubs for Cowboy Bebop and Digimon Tamers. This is comparable to Dragon Ball because I find that the additions and expansions that Toei have made has made a vastly inferior product from the manga, along with a mediocre english dub.
This makes Shippuden a better anime exclusively. Dragon Ball has the better manga, for me.

[Kunzait_83]

you can't beat childhood nostalgia and obsession.

Ugh. Yes. Yes you can. Easily.

This is one of the single most depressing, dispiriting, disheartening, and just all around horrible and regressive aspects of modern fandom today (anime and geek media otherwise), and its probably at the heart of almost ALL my problems with it today and why I've continued to squirm in discomfort with being considered one for much of the last decade+.

Someday I'll try to unpack all of the many, many, MANY things I have to say about this in full. Someday.

Anyway, yeah, anime is SUCH a gigantic breadth of media (and NOT a fucking singular genre unto itself, good lord), that trying to single out any one in particular as an end all, be all favorite is pretty daunting. Suffice to say that DB is nowhere remotely NEAR the "best" that I've seen (it wouldn't crack my top 10, probably not even my top 20 or 30), but nonetheless it has played a pretty vital, crucial role throughout my whole life exploring anime/manga and moreover my involvement with fandom.

Berserk or Claymore. Both good, can't decide.

Dragonball Z looks like kindergarten but to be honest the whole Shōnen genre does and that's ok, they have their target audience and I am not part of it anymore.

That's cause Shonen is a demographic, and not a genre. Shonen is any work aimed at little boys at roughly elementary school age. You can have any number of genres within Shonen (horror, mystery, sci fi, fantasy, martial arts, etc.) and the only thing that unifies them ultimately is the target audience. Shonen simply is "a work that's made for pre-pubescent Japanese school boys" and does not constitute a singular, unified "genre" with "tropes" of its own.

Guyver, Devilman, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, Slam Dunk, Ashita no Joe, Kinnikuman, Rokudenashi Blues, Fist of the North Star, Death Note, Wild 7, Venus Wars, Ranma 1/2, Silent Mobius, Bastard!, The Drifting Classroom, Yu Gi Oh!, Rurouni Kenshin, to name just a smattering few... all of these fall under the umbrella demographic of Shonen, and you'll be scarce to find a great deal much in the way of thematic or trope-driven similarities or commonalities between each of them that are anywhere NEAR strong enough to unite them all under one, singular genre. Because ultimately, the only thing they have in common that unites them as Shonen is that they were aimed at Japanese elementary school kids. That's largely it.

The "tropes" that people talk about when they discuss Shonen as a "genre" today generally spring forth from Dragon Ball (and really Fist of the North Star before it) and moreover the stuff that's come out since DB that's tried (to varying degrees) to rip it off. A large swath of those specific tropes (arguably a vast majority) generally and for the most part have their roots in martial arts fiction/wuxia, however a LARGE chunk of later manga/anime works that have tried to copy Dragon Ball either don't understand that or don't care, and the narrative beats are replicated without the cultural context... which inevitably dilutes the impact over time (applying "training" narrative tropes, for one example, that were originally native to mythical kung fu fiction over onto stories about football, pirating, playing card games, animal collecting, or even cooking without any real care given to their context means that those tropes probably won't carry anywhere NEAR the same level of weight that they originally did).

If you had to give the modern Shonen examples of these corrupted tropes in wide use a "genre label" to tie them all together, then that'd probably be "Battle Shonen" or "Battle Manga" (as has been used for some time now). Which would be a genre subset that's mostly unique to Shonen works, but doesn't make Shonen, as a collective whole, lumped together as all part of the same thing.

This idea of viewing ALL of "Shonen" ever made as a singular collective genre based almost solely on the tropes used by these "Battle Manga" works is something that I've always personally thought of as being almost a "fake genre": for one, because doing so necessitates COMPLETELY ignoring a GIGANTIC swath of Shonen works that came out for numerous decades before Fist and DB helped to popularize the format - not to mentioned numerous, numerous more that have come about during and since then - which all have little to NOTHING in common with one another beyond their native land and target audience.

I mean to get to that place of "this post-DB formula is what ALL Shonen is or has ever meant", you basically have to in essence pretend that more than 30+ some-odd years of anime and manga history did not happen and just does not exist. You'd be throwing into the garbage can of irrelevance the collective works of important artists ranging from Go Nagai to Rumiko Takahashi to Ikki Kajiwara, and on and on and on endlessly down a vast, overwhelming list.

And also moreover because the whole idea of "Battle Shonen" largely springs from a corruption and dilution of various works that were simply copying the formulas of other popular works (such as Fist and DB, and also Saint Seiya and Jojo to an extent) without any kind of understanding (or purposeful ignoring) of where they were getting their influence from.

For the most part, I generally just lump almost all of these "Battle Shonen" works under the umbrella of being simply the direct Japanese equivalent/counterpart to American Saturday Morning "action cartoons" of the 80s and 90s. And that's all well and good, but if you simply reduce all of anime and manga as a medium as being largely comprised only of THAT subset of media - as a whole, or even just within the confines of "Shonen" as a wider demographic - that's just doing a TREMENDOUS disservice to what anime and manga have accomplished as a collective creative medium over much of the last half century. And frankly it does - to one degree or another - do some measure of damage to the discourse surrounding them.

[TekTheNinja]

The best anime I have ever seen is Dragon Ball Super.

I'm not saying you can't like it or anything, but are you serious? Honest question... I mean I can believe it's your FAVORITE, but BEST? Do you honestly think it's objectively the best? How? Why? I seriously want to know. That is unless that was some kind of joke or what?

Anyway my favorite anime is and probably always will be the beautiful masterpiece that is Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. It's just so fucking amazing.

[Kunzait_83]

The best anime I have ever seen is Dragon Ball Super.

I'm not saying you can't like it or anything, but are you serious? Honest question... I mean I can believe it's your FAVORITE, but BEST? Do you honestly think it's objectively the best? How? Why? I seriously want to know. That is unless that was some kind of joke or what?

I'm 99.9999% certain that he's kidding.

[jjgp1112]

I came here to pretty much give Ajay's exact reply regarding One Piece. Aside froma few key shows I've never been much of an anime watcher but One Piece has been the one show to suck me in and immerse me to the degree that Dragon Ball did. It's amazing.

[sintzu]

I'm not saying you can't like it or anything, but are you serious? Honest question... I mean I can believe it's your FAVORITE, but BEST? Do you honestly think it's objectively the best? How? Why? I seriously want to know. That is unless that was some kind of joke or what?

I can tell you've lost all hope in humanity.

[ShaneisMC]

The Dragon Ball series, Yu Yu Hakusho, One Punch Man, Attack on Titan, Case Closed, Inuyasha, and Cowboy Bebop are all great.

[dbs fanboy]

Attack on titan. Once i started with it, i couldn't stop, the story is great, i love the character and i hate how a lot of loved characters are killed but at the same time i love the tension.
God damn it i want my 2nd season NOW!!!!!!

[dbs fanboy]

The best anime I have ever seen is Dragon Ball Super.

I'm not saying you can't like it or anything, but are you serious? Honest question... I mean I can believe it's your FAVORITE, but BEST? Do you honestly think it's objectively the best? How? Why? I seriously want to know. That is unless that was some kind of joke or what?

Anyway my favorite anime is and probably always will be the beautiful masterpiece that is Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. It's just so fucking amazing.

Huh? i thought that he was joking, it's obvious that the og db (not dbz)>dbs so yeah.

[JulieYBM]

I can't think of a 'best'. I like a lot of stuff all for different reasons. Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso for it's brilliant acting, music, coloring and animation, Yuu Yuu Hakusho for its brilliant acting, music, coloring and animation, Love Lab for its brilliant acting,, music, coloring and animation and Shokugeki no Souma for its brilliant boobies. To a large degree, Dragon Ball is devoid of these things. Even its contemporary, Yuu Yuu Hakusho, excels at coloring, animation and storyboarding over Dragon Ball.

I don't like to compare the things I like. It's like comparing pizza and a well barbequed hamburger. Both are perfect!

I'm not a very good writer.

[ekrolo2]

To Dragon Balls credit, I think it stayed pretty consistently between good and great for a vast majority of its run, it didn't really start to go downhill until the Android arc but even then it picked itself back up with the Boo Saga. That's more than I can say for a lot of its successors I've read like Bleach and Naruto. One Piece has come the closest but even that's hit a pretty lengthy rut after the time-skip.

[sintzu]

To Dragon Balls credit, I think it stayed pretty consistently between good and great for a vast majority of its run,

That's more than I can say for a lot of its successors I've read like Bleach and Naruto. One Piece has come the closest but even that's hit a pretty lengthy rut after the time-skip.

Which is really impressive considering how long it was and it being Toriyama's 2nd long running manga.

This is why I'm happy Toriyama didn't continue the manga forever cause you could tell from reading the Buu arc that he was getting tired and a bit short on ideas so ending it instead of running it into the ground was the right move for both the story and the franchise's legacy.

[Avery]

The best battle shounen IMO is Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. It has its flaws, sure, but I think it's as good as a battle shounen can get. It has phenomenal soundtrack, interesting world setting, good female characters(!) and
the main character is quite different from the usual shounen hero archetype.The animation is really good and consistent since it's only 64 episodes long. I still like DB a little better though, despite ALL its flaws.

Other anime I think were done really well (and were already pointed out by other members) are Death Note, Steins;Gate, Monster, HxH, Yu Yu Hakusho and Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

[GodKaio-Ken]

To Dragon Balls credit, I think it stayed pretty consistently between good and great for a vast majority of its run, it didn't really start to go downhill until the Android arc but even then it picked itself back up with the Boo Saga. That's more than I can say for a lot of its successors I've read like Bleach and Naruto. One Piece has come the closest but even that's hit a pretty lengthy rut after the time-skip.

I would reverse that. To me Majin Buu was just a less interesting and sophisticated form of Cell with his absorption and regeneration. I actually hated the entire Buu Saga and the ending with Uub almost made me question life. There has never been a character in any show ever I've wanted to just slap across the face harder than Uub

Only Arc worse in DB history is the Super RoF arc IMO

[saiyanvegetable]

Fate Zero and its not even a contest, its murders everything Dragon Ball ever on every level ever.

This.

[MCDaveG]

If we talk the mainstream anime, then I should go for Gundam and it doesn't compare to Dragon Ball anyhow, as it is sci-fi.
You can probably compare it to Star Wars more.

And the other Shonen's are selfexplaining, Saint Seiya is my second favorite after DB and it's like proto Dragon Ball with many ideas that it had before Dragon Ball.
Cosmo is just another form of chi, so there you go with ''chi/ki attacks'' - the chi/Cosmo is measured by the warrior rank. Athena's warriors are Bronze, Silver and Gold, with Gods having the biggest cosmo.
With training, you can close those gaps or get power up. The cloths/armors are by the ranks as well, bronze, silver and gold, so you can train or obtain the armor to boost up your power.
Other warriors in the series are usually measured by Athena's Saints - like Marinas are little less powerful than Gold Saints.
Also, bronze cloth can be transformed in gold (Super Saiyan) as it was revived before with the blood of Gold Saints and later, God Cloth/kamui (blood of God).

There is simmilarity to Bardock and family, as the cards here are given. Saint and others are born under constelation (the main hero is Pegasus) so they attain the cloth of their guardian constelation.
They can be born even under good or bad sign, which ads to their stats. Gold Saints have Zodiac armors (Libra, Aries, Capricorn etc.)
It's like with Bardock and Goku, Bronze Saints are among the lowest and doesn't have much chance in the beginning.

Same as kung fu and oriental motives in DB, I love the Greek and Northern mythology in Saint Seiya and how it plays out with characters like Andromeda Shun, Poseidon, Dubhe Siegfried, Myzar Cid or Lyra Orpheus.
It's pitty, that TOEI did some weird redesigns to the show and introduce one of the most horrendous filler. Also, the main series didn't age that well.