u/Le_Faveau

It's a vibe at this point with no actual basis, similar to people saying mechas are all about the robots and toys, or that magical girls were all pink sweet stories until Madoka happened.

I have the notion that DBZ gets treated as not that good, a product of its time, and that you typically outgrow it by finding better shonen which built from what DBZ created, which I originally believed with the Big 3 and stuff...

But now decades later I realize, beyond making some tropes popular, mostly combat things (golden forms, rage boosts, energy beams, tournament arcs...) there's not much reason to think DBZ is generic or basic.

I'll count from Z, because that's what 80% of people outside of Japan stated with.

And okay, I'll admit, the characters do tend to be pretty simple and straightforward most of the time, they don't have backstories like modern anime do, and the plot tends to be easy to follow.

And that's it. The narratives Toriyama cooked are anything but cookie cutter stories.

Our protagonist starts the series as a family man presenting his son to his friends (how many shonen with a married man with kids as the MC?), his alien brother randomly arrives and they fight to death, literally, the protagonist fucking died by episode 5 and now it's about the green alien training his 4 yo kid in the desert. And his human friends over the world receiving the news and training for 20 episodes because aliens will invade.

AND THEY ALL FUCKING DIE. The aliens were too strong, all those power ups were for nothing.

So Goku revives and saves the day? Half and half. His own power ups and learned techniques end up being insufficient, Vegeta crushes every single bone in his body by the end. The 5 yo kid, the midget friend, and the fat coward end up saving the day.

Have you seen Ichigo losing and Chad, Tatsuki and Rukia or something finishing off the villain? Naruto losing and Konohamaru, Sakura and Choji stepping up? Hell, Luffy losing but his crew picking up the battle against the weakened boss.

That's what happens a lot in DBZ, Goku pretty much never wins, and when he does, it's a legit team effort in which seemingly useless characters end up contributing a lot. For all the "Goku always saves the day" feel the show has, he doesn't do it alone.

Anyway. Goku is away over half the series I'm sure : dead, recovering or training. Dude spends the entire android saga having a heart attack, wakes up to train, and DIES.

A lot of actual protagonism is given to other characters such as Krillin, Gohan, Piccolo, Vegeta, Trunks, Satan and Bulma. They tend to move the story forward while Goku just swoops in for the big fights.

He never really "gets angry and overpowers the enemy with a new transformation" besides creating the trope when going Super Saiyan, but honestly Frieza was cheating so it's fine. In any other series, the Spirit Bomb would have been the end of the fight, him returning with a Diabolus Ex Machina is rightfully opposed by a Deus Ex Machina, which was actually foreshadowed by Vegeta for the last 50 episodes and it was the culmination of the legend Frieza feared, so it's not really "random angry power up" like most series do.

Cell kicks his ass and he doesn't go ssj2. He arrives to the Buu saga with ssj3 already acquired (and never wins with it).

Also the passage of time. Time FLIES in DBZ. We go from Goku being a 21 yo guy at the start or so with a little toddler, to him being a 40 yo martial arts master and his son pulling ladies in college, and we even get some epilogue episodes with Goku being a grandpa (and the entirety of GT which I love).

Other series do little timeskips of months or 2 years, but in Dragon ball that's just normal and happens frequently. Toriyama didn't artificially make the entire story happen over the span of a year like modern authors would.

Vegeta, "the rival", is barely on Goku's radar after their initial battle. Vegeta is mostly a weird kind of villain just staying allied with the humans and forming a family, but still, he's the reason the planet would have ended by helping create Perfect Cell and Buu.

Everyone gets jobs, families, kids. All within the series, not just some final episode.

Dialogue might be simple, combat system might be simple, the plot is easy to follow. But I struggle to think DBZ is generic or the baseline for shonen when you look at the actual writing of the sagas.

Namek is pretty much a HxH arc, with the weak MCs (Gon and Killua, Krillin and Gohan) playing stealth in enemy territory, and Vegeta/Hisoka just doing his own thing as a third party.

I can't even describe the android / cell saga besides it starting as a nod to Terminator. Goku is dying most of it, an Android gets the hots for Krillin, Cell is drinking people, Vegeta ruins everything, Goku passes the torch.

And the Buu saga starts like some fun high school slice of life / superhero series, only to get a full episode of Spopovich abusing Gohan'a girl friend on the ring as he watches like it's Berserk, Vegeta getting a mid life crisis and selling his soul to the devil, Babidi and Buu murdering entire cities trying to make the Z fighters reveal their location, Satan beating Buu with friendship after everyone else failed, Goku passing the torch to the new generation the new generation utterly failing even with their new powers (fusion / awakened potential)..

Nothing really happens like you'd see anywhere else, DBS is very unique.

Bluntly put, that's it. What's the point? East Blue wasn't badly adapted, you can check One Pace and see it barely cuts chapters. If it remains around that, this just looks like another early OP adaptation with movie budget, like Toei has already done a dozen times.

Even doing the absolute best job in pacing, a faithful full OP anime would still end up being absurdly long with like 700 episodes I reckon, we're talking 1186 manga chapters to adapt SO FAR (final arc still pending), in which the post timeskip chapters can be extremely dense with dialogue so cramming 2 chapters in 1 episode can be a bit impossible. And the story feeling extremely bloated.

And the East blue fights barely deserve the budget, it's mostly Luffy dabbing on weak villains with sakuga, unless they change the story a little to make them more threatening.

And that's what Netflix got right. By being respectful to the actors and not treating them as just fodder, the villains are far more effective at fighting the Straw hats and killing people. Alvida manages to beat Luffy in the rematch for example. Buggy is shown as a competent fighter and not just a gimmick. That kind of thing.

But most importantly, the story changes are what they should do by having the hindsight of about 30 years of serialization. The details like having Garp show up early to kickstart the Koby and Helmeppo side plot, Smoker and Tashigi participating way more in the story Luffy singing the motherfucking Binks' Sake to Laboon. These are things you can do because you know what happens later in the story and what will be important (or in Smoker & Tashigi's case, correcting Oda's mistakes in which he pretty much abandoned characters meant to be relevant, giving them a role) . The Giants even namedropped the Sun God Nika in Little Garden for fucks sake, that's how things should be, but it's obviously impossible to time travel and foreskin everything... A remake can get pretty close to that, however.

Instead of Oda planting seeds that may be relevant hundreds of episodes later, a proper remake could just include them or not be so mysterious about it. Imagine a full Joyboy / Nika / 4 Elemental Gods flashback and explanation during Skypea instead of "LE DANCING SHADOW", only possible because of the manga having explained it by then. At least, show a flashback of Roger when he arrived there, to contrast his journey with Luffy's. ​

Also cut out about 300 tertiary characters and subplots, and kill Pell if he carries the bomb, etc.. I'll be baffled if Studio WIT really just adapts the manga without fixing its most vocal mistakes.

I'm baffled. I was loving this film with my family. We were like "Oh yeah this is like those Van Damme or Rambo movies". I saw nice popcorn flick with a big tournament in the jungle and some funny characters in both Johnny Cage and Kano. Several different subplots seemed to be cooking.

They have exactly ONE official fight in the tournament, and it all goes to shit by the next one. It's like the director decided "making a movie is easy, fire the writers and we'll just film these people kicking each other".

Romantic subplots, villains betraying each other, plot twists, adventuring, rivalries, escalating tensions as other participants are winning their matches and showing off their strength, the revenge 2 of our protagonists want to achieve. None of that happens.

After the 2nd match in which they decided to off the secondary main antagonist, no more tournament battles happen. We just randomly jump into fights with no rhyme or reason, enemies just show up out of nowhere, at any place, and start dueling the protagonists with zero words exchanged.

It's like taking the worst part of a Power Rangers episode, the moment in which they're fighting filler grunts and you wait for it to be over so you move to the actual plot, but Mortal Kombat 95 is entirely that section extended for an hour. The sweet release of the filler fighting finishing never comes. No dialogue, no plot, no opposing goals, just dudes kicking each other.

I was ready to love this film and I wanted to run away from it once it ended. And even the way it ends it's a mockery. It ends with the characters getting jumped out of nowhere by a new enemy and they take a stance to fight BAM then the credits drop. I literally never escaped from the fights.

There's a hundreds martial arts movies that show you can do a tournament full of fights and still have a semblance of a character arc and plot, MK 95 might genuinely be the absolute worst of all.

And yet, I love those first 30 minutes. Everything before the tournament was nicely set up. Even the first fight was promising.

Any other movies like this that showed promise at the start and then you hated? This is like the Reverse Click. The Adam Sandler movie. I hate its first half, then it becomes amazing.

I'm looking to upgrade Bichigo, Yoruichi and SR Grimmjow's sets and then realized...

Could Zaraki's 20% base attack and 50% crit damage be bigger than their type bonuses? These sets tend to stack a lot of "...every X you do, increase your special / technique / ultimate damage" but I'm unsure if that's better than the sheer weight of the Kenpachi set. ​

It would be a bit disappointing but maybe that's simply the best for damage. I think I got perfect stamps for them but who knows, they might not beat 50% crit bonus (and my Zaraki pieces have overdrive as the 6* effect, that's 9% flat damage, 12 for full assault on the third piece)

I feel like we might be buying into Aizen's own hype, and he's not capable of doing anything he wants with KS. As with most powers, they tend to have limits. Like Toshiro's Zanpakuto controls weather, but that doesn't mean he can make it rain in the entire planet. It how Gremmy's constructs need so much raw brain power he can't make a meteor by himself. Aizen 99% for sure has this same braincells limitation, ​but even worse because his ability comes from merely a Shikai base, it's not a Bankai or a Schrift given by the son of God himself. Aizen might already be pushing KS to its very limits with the abilities he's shown, yet people tend to imagine he could do a lot more.

Technically, creating any of his illusions already requires making you see, hear, smell, touch and even sense something different from reality, and with good enough skill that the victim can't differentiate it from reality.. THAT'S PART OF AIZEN'S TRAINED SKILLSET / MASSIVE REIATSU, as he seemed to have put effort into making the fake corpse for example so that not even Unohana would notice it wasn't real, meaning that if his technique lacked or someone weaker used KS, his plan would have been found out much earlier (or him claiming Shinji could have realized his body double during TBTP wasn't him, if he got closer. Obviously Aizen tried to make the body double as perfect as possible and to give him the right commands, but he has limits​).

Kyoka Suigetsu doesn't come with free perfect hypnosis, making it accurate and believable seems to be something Aizen puts effort into / his massive reiatsu allows it, just like how Ichigo has to train and get stronger to fire sharper Getsuga Tenshous.

So what we've seen might be the extent of his powers, and it's not anything outrageous. By TYBW, this got expanded into the sense of time itself, that's what he messed up Yhwach with. I guess he could have extended it into the sense of space or direction similar to Shinji's sakanade, but these extra perks happened thanks to him becoming Transcendent.

So don't fall for the no-limits fallacy of his power or believe applications he's never shown in the series to claim he'd win a Vs., like I've seen people say he'd just disable Zaraki or Unohana's sense of pain to freely stab them without the Kenpachis being able to counter it. But that's not something Aizen has ever shown. It might be beyond his paygrade to deactivate someone's sense of touch to the point he's slashing or stabbing them without them realizing (not to mention, touching the blade lets you see reality, by default they'd have a small windows to feel the pain and sharply counterattack).

If he could create ANY illusion with Kyoka Suigetsu, he'd be pretty much Gremmy or Rose. He could create a fire engulfing a person and have them feel the burns as if they were real to the point they're KO'd by the pain or at least it severely lowers their combat ability, or he'd be able to create a gigantic meteor while simulating the complete destruction of the Gotei 13, making Yamamoto feel crushed, see himself as bloody and all the other Captains dead on the ground.

If Kyoka Suigetsu is absolute and with no limits, he'd be able to just make those mental images. But no, it probably consumes a lot of raw brain power to generate illusions (same weakness as Gremmy's imagination) to a point they're believable, and also an unknown amount of reiatsu consumption.

And thus, we've never seen Aizen using his power for anything more than just switching places. That might be the furthest his Shikai can go. Most of the time it would be better to just deactivate the opponent's sense of sight and hearing like Tosen's bankai does. ​Or go full Virgo no Shaka from saint seiya and rob the opponent of all senses, they can no longer see, hear, touch or even detect your energy. Not even Yamamoto is doing anything against that.

The reason this doesn't happen is because he can't, Aizen's ability is far far more limited than that, he can't move like Itachi with the Mangekyo Sharingan

I just had a realization from a Sanji post from yesterday, in which a poster said Sanji spent 2 years learning food that boosts the body.

But even without that, Sanji's whole thing is being a cook. What more perfect opportunity to showcase his role in the crew than having a Captain that NEEDS food in battle?

Now that I've seen this I can't stop being mad. ​​Being a battle-cook making food pills or something (maybe with Chopper's help?) or just super-empowering Bentos should be Sanji's role and completely nullify Gear 5 weakness, if not outright give Luffy much more stamina so he doesn't gas out during fights.