Dragon Ball Super: Beerus - Episode 1 - Official Discussion Thread

[Michelle91]

It's fine. It mostly feels like the same episode that I watched 11 years ago, but with a different coat of paint. I like the lack of music when Beerus is on screen making him feel more powerful. You can feel the impact that he has on the universe when he destroys a planet. Meanwhile, we had more new scenes. I like the scene in the manga better when they had the caterpillar-like humans instead.

Kibitoshin is still fused which shows that they consider Daima to be its own thing and not connected to Super.

[SHINOBI-03]

People got the wrong idea, the series was explicitly promoted as an "Enhanced Version", it was never advertised as a remake.

Guess I missed the memo in my lack of interest in getting yet another Battle of Gods retelling.

[JulieYBM]

Commercial art, especially Dragon Ball, shall always be a slave to the whims of those who fund it. Toriyama not having a desire for anally making continuity make sense is always going to be propped up by the idea that following his ideas as closely as possible is the best course of action.

Look no further than the series director not wanting to use their real name on this project. The project exists to fulfill the whims of Toriyama, Iyoku and the production committee members needing a recap lead-in to the next main series. Anything good about Dragon Ball Super: Beerus will be inspite of a lot of things working against the creative vision of the people actually creating the series.

[M16U3L2015]

Kibitoshin is still fused which shows that they consider Daima to be its own thing and not connected to Super.

Well, considering that they're still using the voice recordings from 2015, there was no way to tie this to Daima without having to re-do several scenes and record new dialogue for it.

[MugiMikey]

I just got done watching it and it was alright I suppose.

The minimal usage of background music was a highlight, and the lack of highlights on the characters' skin was a highlight lol. The visuals are overall pretty nice even if it's the dated Yamamuro art style. Anyway, this show gets right to the point and that's cool and all, but it makes me remember what I looked forward to about the original Dragon Ball Super as it began airing-- I wanted new content that added to it and bridged the gaps between both series. Yes that's here, but a lot of character-driven stuff is removed. That being said, the original still had new material that just was not interesting, like the dinosaur planet bit... which was kept here and was a bit of a drag. But whatever. I get that this is ultimately a budget project so I get why they threw the baby out with the bathwater, but it is still not above criticism.

I think recycling most of the dialogue from the original is a pragmatic choice even if I would have preferred new recordings, but I think they dropped the ball by keeping the voices of characters who had voice actors pass away like Mr. Satan and Kaio. It would have been the perfect opportunity to update them... especially Kaio since this is not Joji Yanami's best performance as he sounds incredibly lethargic and he was replaced not long after these original recordings. I guess their line of thinking was it would be disrespectful in some kind of way to update the dialogue so they kept it for the sake of the actors' legacies... but... I dunno, they did update the voice actors for Dragon Ball Kai, but I guess their excuse was they had no other choice since it needed clear audio recorded with modern technology.

But yeah, ultimately it was a better introductory episode than the original Super's first episode if the goal is to keep the wider audience actively engaged and hook new fans especially as attention spans apparently continue to shrink. I have been invested in this series for most of my life at this point so I am more than willing to watch the characters screw around and do slice-of-life shenanigans. In fact, I think I like that aspect the most and wish there was more of it, so removing content like Vegeta hanging out with Bulma and Trunks was something I did not care for. Ultimately this is definitely not for fans like me and I am okay with that, but I still wanna continue seeing what they do with it since there is some new stuff here and there.

The new opening was okay. It doesn't feel like Dragon Ball to me really, but it's got cool visuals and while the song feels lacking I feel like maybe I could get used to it after a few listens. I liked the ending song a bit more but holy shit the visuals were just not great. These songs feel more in line with Daima's ED which I also thought was not great. I love Jaka Jaan though... I feel like that was the last good Dragon Ball song we've had in a great while.

[PhantomSaiyan]

For all we know, they'll try to connect Daima to Super in one of the future arcs.

If they didn't do it in this version, now in this arc, then that ship has sailed (that ship never existed really)

[Kenji]

Watching MistareFusion's Dragon Ball Dissection show reminds me of an interesting bit.



So, what's happening here:
In the anime version of the Beerus arc, Beerus tells Goku an important plot point that would be referenced in the Champa arc. Since the manga version is a rushed retelling of the anime, Toyotaro felt it wasn't important to the story at large and chose to omit that. Low and behold, the Champa arc references said plot point. Toyotaro's solution to this discrepancy in continuity is to draw a quick gag of Goku suddenly having a one-panel flashback of Beerus running back to tell him about it. "Oh, yeah. I remember it now, that happened!"

This is hardly the only example. Toyotaro loves to reference events that only happened in either the TV version or the movies, even though they're either absent or entirely different in the manga version. They're all connected. There is nothing stopping either Toei or Toyotaro from trying to shoehorn Daima into continuity later on.

[M16U3L2015]

You know, one thing I really miss is the narrator, something essential that all anime had until Daima removed it and it looks like future productions will continue to do so. To me, it was like another character in the series.

[SupremeKai25]

Daima is a self-contained bubble made to celebrate GT (hence why it is very similar to GT in the story). I never felt the need to connect Super to Daima, because in the end, Daima is a self-contained story that is irrelevant to Super. The point of this project is to streamline Super and cut down the filler. You don't do that by inserting fan-service references to an irrelevant show.

Also, apparently the remaster crashed Crunchyroll servers. It's genuinely crazy how popular Super continues to be, even years after the last movie (Super Hero was in 2022!) and the horrible cards it was dealt with in 2015 (awful deadlines).

[Mr Baggins]

I see they cut out the dumb filler and added some bits from the manga. That's cool. Definitely enhances the story over whatever the hell Super 1.0 was trying to do. I also like the opening more than Chouzetsu Dynamic, but that's an extremely low bar.

Didn't much care for anything else. These "enhanced" visuals still pale in comparison to Daima's, which also had better Buu flashback sequences.

I don't think I'll be keeping up with this show on a weekly basis, but I admire the effort to produce something closer to Toriyama's vision.

Kibitoshin is still fused which shows that they consider Daima to be its own thing and not connected to Super.

That should never have been in doubt. This is one of those things that's so obvious on its face that it doesn't need to be said.

[M16U3L2015]

Does anyone know if they reused the 2015 translation from subs or did a new one?

[The Dark Knight]

Also, apparently the remaster crashed Crunchyroll servers.

If this is what a glorified remaster is doing, just how big is the Moro arc's first episode going to be when it airs next year ? Considering how lukewarm the reception to Daima was, maybe it was a good idea to distance Super away from it.

[PhantomSaiyan]

This is hardly the only example. Toyotaro loves to reference events that only happened in either the TV version or the movies, even though they're either absent or entirely different in the manga version. They're all connected. There is nothing stopping either Toei or Toyotaro from trying to shoehorn Daima into continuity later on.

There was nothing stopping them from doing it this time either.

And yet they didn't do it.

[FiReFTW]

I enjoyed the episode a lot, I also like the into a lot, I don't know why so many people don't like it.

They removed a lot of things that I didn't really care for and only kept the most important things and added some nice new things.

For a episode 1 it was good, I'm looking forward to more.

What did some of you people here expect that are so critical? It was never going to be like a crazy remaster and way different and better, its like Kai was but better, Kai just cut some parts, here they actually add some things to make it better.

Compared to original Super its without a doubt a good improvement.

[Zinnia]

just how big is the Moro arc's first episode going to be when it airs next year

It's not airing next year. There's not even a trailer yet and DB is not at Jump Festa so we're not getting a Moro trailer and then release in the same year.

[Kenji]

There was nothing stopping them from doing it this time either.

And yet they didn't do it.

I don't particularly care for Daima either way.
I have no horse in this race, I'm just reminding you guys of the level of care (or lack thereof) that is put into modern Dragon Ball's continuity.

[SupremeKai25]

Also, apparently the remaster crashed Crunchyroll servers.

If this is what a glorified remaster is doing, just how big is the Moro arc's first episode going to be when it airs next year ? Considering how lukewarm the reception to Daima was, maybe it was a good idea to distance Super away from it.

It will probably do better than the ToP.

After all, the Moro saga is a fairly classic hero's journey with an old school villain and many plot twists, vs. the ToP saga which was a simpler (and in many ways, weirder) narrative.

People were going to stadiums to watch Goku vs. Jiren even though Jiren had all the personality of a rock, so I feel like Moro will be even more popular, because unlike Jiren he has a cool design and cool powers, and it's an actual heroes vs. villains saga where our heroes could die at any moment vs. a professional game where killing isn't allowed.

[DestructoDisc]

It's genuinely crazy how popular Super continues to be, even years after the last movie (Super Hero was in 2022!) and the horrible cards it was dealt with in 2015 (awful deadlines).

It's not Super that's popular, it's Dragon Ball in general. Fans would've crashed that server even if it was a GT first episode remake instead.

[Zinnia]

People were going to stadiums to watch Goku vs. Jiren even though Jiren had all the personality of a rock, so I feel like Moro will be even more popular, because unlike Jiren he has a cool design and cool powers, and it's an actual heroes vs. villains saga where our heroes could die at any moment vs. a professional game where killing isn't allowed.

But with Moro we already know what happens..
Jiren's case was unique, DBS part 1 was unique in that regard that it was the primary source.

[The Dark Knight]

Can we take a moment to appreciate Goku's transformation into Ssj1 ? It looked so good. I can't emphasize enough how much better this show looks compared to its 2015 counterpart. Here's an opinion that will likely be unpopular: I think the colors of this remake look far better than the actual movie, as well as Resurreciton F.

But with Moro we already know what happens..

We're on our third animated telling of Battle of Gods, yet it still crashed the servers.