All in all, are you happy the revival happened?

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Re: All in all, are you happy the revival happened?

Post by FoolsGil » Mon Oct 28, 2019 3:27 pm

Well, I'm not unhappy. But it became quite clear that Super was not the series for me. I rather watch GT, and at this point am hoping that Jaco The Galactic Patrolman gets its own OVA or series, or The Time I got reincarnated as Yamcha gets an OVA or a fleshed out series. Otherwise I'm neutral and done with this revival.

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Re: All in all, are you happy the revival happened?

Post by KBABZ » Mon Oct 28, 2019 3:38 pm

FoolsGil wrote: Mon Oct 28, 2019 3:27 pm Well, I'm not unhappy. But it became quite clear that Super was not the series for me. I rather watch GT, and at this point am hoping that Jaco The Galactic Patrolman gets its own OVA or series, or The Time I got reincarnated as Yamcha gets an OVA or a fleshed out series. Otherwise I'm neutral and done with this revival.
I feel like it was a mistake to put Jaco in RoF just to promote the manga; a prequel series featuring him would have been amazing.

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Re: All in all, are you happy the revival happened?

Post by BlazingFiddlesticks » Mon Oct 28, 2019 3:45 pm

I was and firmly am in the mindset that Dragon Ball ended in 1995~6 and the all subsequent material is just extra, so that really dampens any desire of mine to get too flustered about anything. The social element of taking in new Dragon Ball material at the same time the world over is probably the best part of it, and it came not long after I was reevaluating Dragon Ball for myself, no less (thanks to the Kanzenshuu staff for making that a much deeper tunnel than I intended to scour at the time! :clap: ) If everything is extra and I can watch Super for free through officials channels, I do not think I have much to complain about!

I do enjoy the Super era having an unusually consistent focus on exploring the highest god hierarchy Beerus introduced, which is both new for traditionally spontaneous Dragon Ball, and appropriate considering where the Buu arc left off and how strong these characters are now. It's newfound appreciation of character episodes feels well-intentioned but half-baked, some are more followed up on than others and Super's generally coming off as if every story arc takes place a week after the previous one makes everything feel even more transparently arc-by-arc than the original did. Battle of Gods was cute, F was weak with some choice bits, and I would agree Super: Broly is less than the sum of its parts but I enjoy the parts so as a one-off of Saiyan pomp and frantic fighting that is good enough for me.

It has, as has been the refrain, been cause for far more interesting video games, which probably conencdies with more Japanese developers involved having crossed the "HD hurdle" and many switching to Unreal 4 to homogenize development as well. Namco pursuing more out there concepts of the likes of Xenoverse, Fusions, FighterZ, and Kakarot, stiff as the bookends of that list may be, do feel like a bit of second wind after about seven years of iterative sequels and most of another seven of Namco releasing whatever they can to keep that sweet annual license. Not to disparage all the portable games of that time, mind you, seeing as they were often where the creativity was!
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Re: All in all, are you happy the revival happened?

Post by DestructoDisc » Mon Oct 28, 2019 4:01 pm

Of course! Ever since I was a kid I was a huge Dragon Ball fan. I watched every single series, movie (except Evolution because I heard it sucks) read the manga, and even collected some merchandise of it that I could find in my country, like posters and trading cards (sadly I lost them and don't have them anymore.) I rewatched the anime so many times when I was younger, I don't think I ever rewatched a series as much as I did with Dragon Ball. I even watched the filler episodes again. When I first heard about Super I was super excited and happy. I was dissapointed with its animation for the first 3 arcs, and the fact that the first 2 arcs were movie retellings, but I was just happy to see new Dragon Ball content again.

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Re: All in all, are you happy the revival happened?

Post by Robo4900 » Mon Oct 28, 2019 4:09 pm

Well, Super is pretty much unmitigated shit, and Kai was mostly just a waste of everyone's time,* but the Broly movie was pretty great, and the Yamcha manga and the 2008 OVA were pretty fun...
*I may retract this from "mostly" to merely "largely" when Wow or whoever finally get the molasses out of their ass and we get Ocean's Kai dub on air.

Honestly, I kinda wish the revival had just stuck to being weird spinoff mangas with a movie/OVA every few years, though.
Shueisha's 2008 "Yo Son Goku" OVA was a fun little return to the Dragon World, which I think was slightly done dirty by its poor distribution, and the fact it was never really followed up on (if Super's tone and vibe had been more like that, as has been the case for many of its filler episodes, I'd probably hate it significantly less).
The two subsequent OVAs Toei then did, Episode Of Bullshit Bardock and Plan To Remake A Shitty Choose-Your-Own-Adventure No One Actually Played Eradicate The Super Saiyans, were about as lame and dumb as my struck-out mockery of them is, though I will admit the Plan Remake is honestly a kinda fun half-hour in the same way the second Coola movie is; no one was asking for this, no one was desperate to tell this story, but the characters feel right, the music is really good, the animation's actually quite nice despite a few iffy-looking faces in one or two scenes...
As far as new works in the Dragon Ball franchise go, the two Toei OVAs were honestly pretty poor, and combined with the rather shallow Shueisha OVA, were not a good start to the "Revival era", but as long as the subsequent works had a more creative, fresher feel, a lot could have been made out of a return of Dragon Ball...

But the three OVAs ended up being something of an omen of what was to come.

Battle Of Goddammit, this movie really hasn't aged as well as a film released only 6 years ago shoulds was a kinda fun little return to Dragon World, kinda like the 2008 OVA... In fact, it really just feels like Toei looked at that OVA and decided "What if we did a theatrical movie that's basically just that but with a more substantial villain." And that's kind of a good thing, kind of a bad thing... A lighthearted little side-adventure is kinda fun, particularly when you've got antagonists as fun as Beers and Whis, but it's pretty deliberately designed to not stand out, as it was considered in-canon with the original DB+Z+GT run at the time, and thus was kind of written in a straightjacket.
And then its two follow-ups were Resurrection Fuck me, are we really out of ideas already? Alright screw it, let's just use the most popular villain again and give him a new form I guess idk. Screw it, give Goku and Vegeta new forms too, a bland mess that really didn't even deserve the minimal effort I put into the shade I just threw at it.
And then Super... A show that, rather than learning the lessons of the shortcomings of Resurrection Fuck me, are we really rehashing this shit again?, paid attention to the fact that having tons of marketable, previously-popular characters on screen at once while (as per BOG) not making any real changes to the status quo, and overall trying to recapture/maintain an ephemeral, flanderised vision of what the original run used to be at various highly-marketable points creates a successful moneymaker, and thus Super went on to spend its entire run trying as hard as it can to throw as many characters as it can into meaningless fights with boring, flat villains, with no actual room for characterisation or development of anyone, with a general style of writing that inherently resists moving anyone or anything forward in any meaningful way. Essentially, we have a series that's pure eyecandy and fanservice. In the well-balanced cake of Dragon Ball, you would usually have flashy fights, old returning fan favourite characters, etc. as the icing on that cake, but Super is all icing, all the time. Which, for me and many others, just leaves one feeling sick and unfulfilled.

And then suddenly Broly happened and was utterly amazing in all the ways it needed to be, and at this point I have no idea what to even say about it other than jesus christ that's a good movie.

I guess there was Kai too, but... Well, I can't remember where I heard this, but I recall reading somewhere that after the success of the 2008 OVA, Shueisha wanted a new Dragon Ball series greenlit, but Toei didn't want to spend the money on that, so they instead decided to rehash the most marketable parts of the franchise in the cheapest way possible, and we got Kai.
I think that sums up Kai pretty neatly.

So...

I dunno. Honestly, I feel like Dragon Ball would've got on pretty well without a full-scale revival; if he hadn't been moved to the Super manga, Toyotaro would have continued work on Victory Mission, and we'd have probably either got an official translation of that eventually from Viz, or the fan translations out there wouldn't have stalled out in the super-early parts.
Not only is Victory Mission a fun, rather clever little spinoff/sequel to the original Dragon Ball story, but it does something different with a Dragon Ball instalment, gives us something unique to enjoy, and I think without a full-scale revival, we'd probably have not just got more of this, but we'd have likely still got the Yamcha manga, the occasional OVA, and video games like Xenoverse. Which... Honestly, sounds good to me...

Dragon Ball was a completed work until 2015. Goofy spinoffs like Victory Mission, the OVAs, and the videogames gave us new content that wasn't expected to carry on the legacy of Dragon Ball, the expectations that ride on a new installment of a franchise like this, which I think breeds a certain amount of creativity that we're being starved of in Super. So, honestly, while we're still in the position where great stuff like Broly is the exception, not the rule, I'd have preferred not to get a full-scale revival. I'd prefer to just have a steady stream of goofy spinoff mangas and OVAs. Maybe Super will come back under Shintani and the Broly crew, and it'll be awesome... Though having read the current run of the Super manga, and thus being privy to the contents of the next storyline... Well, it's shit to be honest with you. It's like a rehash of the Piccolo Daimao arc but with its teeth taken out, and with a bunch of marketable but frustratingly shallow nonsense thrown on top.

So, no, I'm not really happy with the revival, and I don't expect my views on this to change anytime soon.

But hey, whatever happens, the original run is still there. And maybe one day someone will finally finish fan-translating the Victory Mission manga and I can finally read the rest of that. (Seriously guys, Shueisha have the manga available for free for all to read, in Japanese, on their website right now. The chapters aren't even that long...!)
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Re: All in all, are you happy the revival happened?

Post by DragonBallFoodie » Mon Oct 28, 2019 6:05 pm

I'm happy about the revival, even though I may have changed some things.
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Re: All in all, are you happy the revival happened?

Post by KBABZ » Mon Oct 28, 2019 6:23 pm

Robo4900 wrote: Mon Oct 28, 2019 4:09 pm And then suddenly Broly happened and was utterly amazing in all the ways it needed to be, and at this point I have no idea what to even say about it other than jesus christ that's a good movie.
I think the most frustrating part about the Broly movie is the fact that it gave us a taste of what Super SHOULD have been had they not decided to jump the gun and pump out an anime NOW, and instead stepped back, developed the story more, and gave the animation more room to express itself.

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Re: All in all, are you happy the revival happened?

Post by WittyUsername » Mon Oct 28, 2019 7:15 pm

KBABZ wrote: Mon Oct 28, 2019 3:38 pm
FoolsGil wrote: Mon Oct 28, 2019 3:27 pm Well, I'm not unhappy. But it became quite clear that Super was not the series for me. I rather watch GT, and at this point am hoping that Jaco The Galactic Patrolman gets its own OVA or series, or The Time I got reincarnated as Yamcha gets an OVA or a fleshed out series. Otherwise I'm neutral and done with this revival.
I feel like it was a mistake to put Jaco in RoF just to promote the manga; a prequel series featuring him would have been amazing.
Hadn’t the manga already ended a year ago by the time RF came out? I assumed that Toriyama just wanted an excuse to have Jaco appear in animated form.

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Re: All in all, are you happy the revival happened?

Post by Hellspawn28 » Mon Oct 28, 2019 7:37 pm

I'm pretty happy with the cool stuff that we got since 2013. I do take it over GT and most of the older DBZ movies in my opinion. I knew that Dragon Ball would return one day and it was a matter of when. Big popular franchises never stay dead forever if you ask me.
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Re: All in all, are you happy the revival happened?

Post by ABED » Mon Oct 28, 2019 8:04 pm

It's a shame they don't. I think everyone assumes the next big thing won't come along so they have to trot out the carcass of the old hotness, but the next big thing always comes around. There are a few franchises that have stayed dead - Jaws and Back to the Future.
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Re: All in all, are you happy the revival happened?

Post by GreatSaiyaJeff » Mon Oct 28, 2019 8:12 pm

I am happy that it has happened, it gave DB a breath of new life. Has all of it been perfect? Far from it, but I think we got some good out of it. Battle of Gods movie, Goku Black, Jaco, expanded universes, etc.
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Re: All in all, are you happy the revival happened?

Post by WittyUsername » Mon Oct 28, 2019 9:36 pm

ABED wrote: Mon Oct 28, 2019 8:04 pm It's a shame they don't. I think everyone assumes the next big thing won't come along so they have to trot out the carcass of the old hotness, but the next big thing always comes around. There are a few franchises that have stayed dead - Jaws and Back to the Future.
In the case of Back to the Future, you can thank Robert Zemeckis for that. There definitely would’ve been a fourth movie by now if he didn’t have anything to say about it. I’m actually kind of surprised that Jaws hasn’t been dug back up yet, but I suppose the abundance of killer shark movies is a bit of a trade off.

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Re: All in all, are you happy the revival happened?

Post by Block88 » Mon Oct 28, 2019 10:34 pm

Bout 50/50 with the occasional good and bad along with the outright fuckery of modern DB

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Re: All in all, are you happy the revival happened?

Post by Robo4900 » Tue Oct 29, 2019 1:04 pm

KBABZ wrote: Mon Oct 28, 2019 6:23 pm
Robo4900 wrote: Mon Oct 28, 2019 4:09 pm And then suddenly Broly happened and was utterly amazing in all the ways it needed to be, and at this point I have no idea what to even say about it other than jesus christ that's a good movie.
I think the most frustrating part about the Broly movie is the fact that it gave us a taste of what Super SHOULD have been had they not decided to jump the gun and pump out an anime NOW, and instead stepped back, developed the story more, and gave the animation more room to express itself.
Agreed, man.

Toei slowing down and letting the manga proceed ahead with the next arc gives me confidence in a way: Maybe they'll develop the story more, and we'll get a much tighter, much better version of this arc in the anime... But as I say, I don't think the story is actually that good, so... I'm not holding my breath.
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Re: All in all, are you happy the revival happened?

Post by ABED » Tue Oct 29, 2019 1:14 pm

Robo4900 wrote: Tue Oct 29, 2019 1:04 pm
KBABZ wrote: Mon Oct 28, 2019 6:23 pm
Robo4900 wrote: Mon Oct 28, 2019 4:09 pm And then suddenly Broly happened and was utterly amazing in all the ways it needed to be, and at this point I have no idea what to even say about it other than jesus christ that's a good movie.
I think the most frustrating part about the Broly movie is the fact that it gave us a taste of what Super SHOULD have been had they not decided to jump the gun and pump out an anime NOW, and instead stepped back, developed the story more, and gave the animation more room to express itself.
Agreed, man.

Toei slowing down and letting the manga proceed ahead with the next arc gives me confidence in a way: Maybe they'll develop the story more, and we'll get a much tighter, much better version of this arc in the anime... But as I say, I don't think the story is actually that good, so... I'm not holding my breath.
I don't think that's the case. It's a film which always have a far less ambitious schedule than TV. And how was Broly a tight(er), well developed story?
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Re: All in all, are you happy the revival happened?

Post by Mister_Popo » Tue Oct 29, 2019 6:31 pm

For reasons of nostalgia, yes, for reasons of pure quality, no. I don't hate the first round of Super, because i know the creative people had to work in very difficult conditions and against almost impossible deadlines. Knowing the tight schedule, it was remarkable what they pulled off in the second half. Knowing that, it could have been so much better as well. Nontheless, the show got the job done to watch it till the end, had some memorable moments and kept me relatively entertained in the second part, but that's about it. I would be pretty much left disappointed if the first round of Super were to be "the end result" as the successor of DBZ for this generation. Or if we would get more of the same in the coming years. The management should learn from their mistakes during the first round (planning) and give the fans something that's completely worthy as the successor of the original series.

One of the more positive effects of the revival were indirect. It made me watch the whole original anime series (GT included) again and read the original manga (which i hadn't done before). It stimulated fans to discuss the original content and other aspects of DB. I discovered new things about the franchise. I don't say the fandom is completely dead now (nor that it was before the revival), but when Super aired, things (broad spectrum of DB, not only Super) were discussed even more vividly.

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Re: All in all, are you happy the revival happened?

Post by SSJGAffleck » Wed Oct 30, 2019 11:44 am

All and all I'd say yes. While I prefer GT over Super and I think for the most part Super is very underwhelming, if I have to endure Ressurection F and the anime adaptation of it to get Battle of Gods and DBS Super, I'm happy to. I love the world-building Toriyama has been doing in interviews, I just wish that stuff would be incorporated more into the anime or manga. 17 and 18's real names, Mr. Satan's backstory and Tenshinhan's alien ancestors, that all great and again if I have to endure S-cells for that stuff, I will happily do so.
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Re: All in all, are you happy the revival happened?

Post by ABED » Wed Oct 30, 2019 12:22 pm

Battle Of Goddammit, this movie really hasn't aged as well as a film released only 6 years ago should
How do you figure?
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Re: All in all, are you happy the revival happened?

Post by Robo4900 » Wed Oct 30, 2019 12:58 pm

ABED wrote: Wed Oct 30, 2019 12:22 pm
Battle Of Goddammit, this movie really hasn't aged as well as a film released only 6 years ago should
How do you figure?
IMO it's a bit... Meh. Like Super, it was exciting when it was new, but now that the excitement of "OMG NEW DRAGON BALL!" has died down, there's not really much to it.
Like, some things feel a little shallow in retrospect; Vegeta's "MY BULMA" scene feels a bit stupid and clumsy to me, Goku and Beerus's fight is actually a little boring, the Pilaf gang and Goten & Trunks are just kind of annoying...

It's not bad, it's just... A pretty decent movie? Which is okay, I guess. Really, this is mostly just about my sourness over how much the modern era tends to be like this; exciting in the moment, but the longer you sit on it, the more shallow it becomes, and once you've really had time to digest it fully... There's really not much to it.
ABED wrote: Tue Oct 29, 2019 1:14 pm I don't think that's the case. It's a film which always have a far less ambitious schedule than TV.
Yes, but given the difference between Super and Broly is that Super is a pile of shit while Broly is a great movie... Well, it seems clear to me that either there has to be a middle-ground where Toei can produce shorter seasons of higher quality, or if there's really no way for them to not shit out something awful when they make a series (which I find hard to believe; given the utterly goddamn moronic way they scheduled the series, I think there's mountainous room for improvement), they could make a movie every couple of years instead.
ABED wrote: Tue Oct 29, 2019 1:14 pm And how was Broly a tight(er), well developed story?
Tighter because it had a sense of pacing, and actually was a fleshed-out story rather than being basically a series of meaningless fights padded out with dull exposition, and it was a well-developed story because it wasn't just a metaphorical brick wall approaching the goodguys that Goku has to punch through.

I could go more into detail, but I don't have a ton of time to do so right now, and I think I've made my position on this clear in previous posts. But if you're still interested, I can come back to this another time.
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Re: All in all, are you happy the revival happened?

Post by KBABZ » Wed Oct 30, 2019 1:22 pm

Battle of Gods suffers for being so dang similar to the Jump special, and being a "good start". It got half a pass purely because it was the first brand new piece of substantial Dragon Ball content, with Toriyama's name attached no less. It lays some brand new narrative threads with Beerus and Whis and the implications of new universes (onwards and upwards!) that are more exciting for what they could be in Super than what they actually contribute in Battle of Gods, outside of the fight requiring Super Saiyan God.

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