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I'm currently watching Code Geass. An anime that's for storyline fans rather than action. It has one of the best story's in anime history imo. I loved the Lelouch character. It blends the line of villian and hero perfectly. Nobody was ever white and black; it was all grey. It takes the perfect turn of the protagonist becoming a hero than the villian and ultimately was seen as a hero again. One of my favorite anime of all time.
I recently finished watching the Imperfect Cell Saga of Dragon Ball Z .
Dragonball Z is my most favorite anime series of all time. I am currently re-watching every single episode from beginning to end. I began with Dragonball (the original) around mid-August and I am still bearly like on episode 60 something. I plan to watch all the way until GT movie "A hero's Legacy".
I have always loved the Dragonball series (DB, DBZ, DBGT) because not only was it the first anime I ever started watching, I loved all the fighting that is showed. On top of that the comedy they do is really funny (especially in Dragonball).
Goku is by far, the strongest anime character that was ever created. There is no way that someone like Ichigo or Aizen (Bleach), Naruto or Madara (Shippuden) could stand a chance against Goku SS4.
With that said, I didn't like GT so much as I think it ruined a lot of the "credibility" Dragonball and Dragonball Z built. Gohan became a nerd. Krillin got old. Piccolo was weak as fuck. Goten was too interested in girls to give a damn. Yamcha, Tien, and Chiaotzu disappeared from the face of the Earth. The only real fighters were Goku, Pan, Vegeta, Trunks, and Uub. There is nothing like the original "Z fighters" that I grew to love.
Anyways, I just wanted to put in my 2 cents in by saying I absolutely love Dragonball Z.
I feel that if they had ended the DBZ series after the cell saga it would have been a much more effective Anime and generally better all around. Watch the last episode of it again, it was practically begging to be used as the last episode and could have shown that Goku moved on from being the sole person that could stop [insert evil bad guy here] and he could have just stayed in the afterlife as he was supposed to. The resulting sagas brought us some unbelievably horrible episodes that included turning Gohan from a complete badass to a pussy, nearly ruined my image of (future) Trunks who happens to be my favorite character from DBZ aside from teen gohan, and an unbelievable amount of extremely unimportant filler high school Gohan episodes that were painfully stupid and full of some of the most useless characters, even moreso than Hercule had been at that point. Sure the Majin Buu sagas brough us the fusions that we would have otherwise never seen, Vegito and Gotenks and then later on Gogeta, nor would we have seen the higher 2 levels of Super Saiyan but it would have made the story much more compelling had it simply ended with Gohan becoming the savior of Earth. All that we got from the true ending of DBZ was a cookie cutter "Goku saves the day again" ending and then a "Goku gets a student" tie in to get people to watch GT. Sure he has become the strongest Anime character of all time but Goku is unbelievably bipolar at times. Contrary to what some people believe there is a point where a character can become too powerful and can cause people to just lose interest in the story because it becomes too predictable such as happened to me with Inuyasha (how many fucking times do yo power up one sword and still not be able to defeat your ultimate enemy? honestly).
I agree. I would have preferred it if Dragonball Z would have ended at the final episode where Future Trunks goes and defeats the Future Androids. I believe that would have been a great way to end the series. Gohan being left as the strongest character in all of Dragonball Z makes sense, since it was him that from the very first episode, Gohan always showed that he had some kind of hidden special power that would only come out when he or his friends were in "peril" Throughout the Sayian Saga, Namek Saga, Frieza Saga, Androids Saga, all the Cell Sagas, every single time he showed part of his hidden abilities forshadowed that something great were to happen about him in the future. And what was that? Super Saiyan 2. Besides that, like you said, it was the perfect time to end the series. Also, the fact that they weakend a lot of the original characters (Piccolo, Krillin, Tien) through the Buu Sagas is something I really didnt like. Im sorry I probably didnt explain what I am saying very well but I am sure you get the idea.
However, in my opinion, the series became more effective with the addition of the Buu Sagas. The reason is because with Buu, the DBZ characters reached a level of popularity that most anime characters could only dream of gaining. As the show proggressed the characters got incredibly stronger and to the same time, DBZ began to get known more and more throughout the world. Its like the Simpsons, had the show ended around lets say 1999, it wouldn't have reached the level of popularity it has gained to this day. Sure, the show isn't as good as it used to be (at least not in my opinion) but you can't deny the fact, that the more the show progressed, the more people that became aware of its presance. Dont get me wrong, I know DBZ's level of popularity was sky high by the time Cell Saga was out, but with the Buu Sagas the popularity of the show greatly increased.
I don't believe that Goku became too powerful however. I can understand what you ment about Inyuyasha but Goku was a different story. Goku was a "symbol". Goku was always the good guy and never had any negative emotions. In my honest opinion, he is the single most greatest anime character of all time. If you think about it, Goku has inspired many of the "heroes" of anime (manga) series that came after Dragonball Z. Characters such as Yusuke (Yuyuhakusho), Ichigo (Bleach), Naruto (Naruto)...I remember reading at one point or another that the Authors of these mangas had based their character on Goku and then adapted it to their own.
Though, undoubtedly, the die hard Dragonball fan in me resents what Akira did to his characters after the Cell Game Sagas (other than Goku). I also resent the creation of Dragonball GT. But in the end, it was all worth while as I still followed the show from begining to end and am starting to do it all over again as we speak.
On a sidenote, I don't like DBZKai very much...I think the voices (of the English version) suck.
enterkey said:I think the popularity that it had at the time depended on the age group that you were around when it first came on because I personally was in middle school at the time of the Buu sagas and very few people other than myself still watched it while countless others turned to mocking it. Not many people were like me, devote fan of DBZ from the very first episode til the very disappointing finale.
Akira bastardized a lot of characters after the Cell saga but some of them were already extremely weak before that and never seemed to get any stronger such as Krillin, Chiatzu (sp?), and Yamcha, they were all extremely useless in any of the fights after the Garlic Jr saga. Piccolo and Tien both had important parts throughout the Cell Saga and were portrayed as very strong up until Cell reached perfection but after that if you weren't a Saiyan then it seemed as if the writers didn't give a shit about them anymore since only the Saiyans had the super power to turn into the Aryan race and wreck house. The only non Saiyan good character that was built up to have strong power throughout the rest of the Dragonball series was Uub and even then he wasn't all that helpful and just was there to buy time until Goku came and saved the day once again. Once the writers hit the Super Saiyan 2 mark I think that they dug themselves into a hole that they couldn't build any human character up to be able to compete with them and they just became filler characters of little to no use.
While Goku has definitely paved the way for more interesting Anime heroes it was still painful to watch him become some super powerful entity that regardless of the situation always came out on top in the end by figuring out a new way of power or using the spirit bomb to do it for him. For how much King Kai hyped up the Spirit Bomb as the ultimate attack I find it funny that Goku was only able to kill 2 people with it as both Vegeta and Frieza somehow survived his ultimate test of strength.
It is easy to pick up new viewers because there is no deep plot to the whole thing, anyone that watches it can figure it out without any problem. Goku = good, guy against Goku = bad, explosions = awesome, Goku training for a dozen episodes and filler = necessary to watch to see if Goku does anything new that could be used against the said guy that is against him. This is why a majority of the new viewers are young kids that have never seen anything like it in the past and they are oblivious to the lack of story throughout the entire thing because to them all that they generally need is a basic outline of good vs evil with no curveballs thrown in. Although it may appear that DBZ Kai is gaining a lot of viewers it is extremely possible that it is because there has been a big 5-6 years since the end of GT and aside from the half assed attempt to rerun the original DBZ on Cartoon Network, which seemed to fail fairly easily, there hasn't been much of a chance to gain new viewers. This new show has a whole other generation of kids to suck into watching and loving it simply because they have no ties to the original and would have no idea how different it is such as the voices, story, cutting of the massive filler episodes (only good thing they have done with the series). These changes have caused a vast majority of the old fans to stay away from it because some of us feel it is unnecessary to retell the story, hate the changes to it because of nostalgic purposes, or were already so turned off by the way the original series went that they would not even bother watching it to begin with. This new generation is a way to skew the stats to make it seem like they truly are gaining a ton of fans when it would be inevitable for it to happen because kids will always go crazy for the same things.Well, to be fair, I was in elementary at the time, and everyone loved Dragonball Z. Even to this day, I have a good number of friends that still enjoy watching it. But still, you can't deny the fact that with the Buu Sagas, the series picked up a bunch of new viewers making it more power. If we go by what you said above, then DBZ basically "recycled" its viewers. It dropped some of its older viewers to bring in newer younger viewers kind of like WWE. And I believe DBZKai is doing the same thing.
With the inception of the Hyperbolic Time Chamber you would think that the Z Warriors would have all used it at some point to try to become stronger, to make Tien, Yamcha, Krillin, and Chiatzu much more relevant to the story instead of being turned into jobbers and comedy fodder. Piccolo did use the chamber to become quite powerful but after they wasted his fusion with Kami he didn't really have much potential left in him to compete with the upper level Super Saiyans. It is without a doubt lazy writing that was probably thrown in as a way to make sure that they could keep making insanely strong villains until the only relevant character in the entire series was Goku. Even Vegeta was turned into nothing more than a jobber during GT, sure he was turned into the first insanely strong bad guy but that was a device used to make Goku go to an even higher level of Super Saiyan and break out of his kid self for a couple of minutes an episode. After that Vegeta jobbed out to all of the other villains until he used Bulma to become Super Saiyan 4, fused with Goku, and then jobbed out again when the fusion failed to defeat Omega.This is true. Super Saiyan was already a level far beyond human capacity and Super Sayian 2...well, humans could never compare. Though, I always had the feeling that Akira could have found a way to make the humans stronger. He had so many ideas that its a wonder of how far he went with his creative ability. Just look back to the very first episode of Dragonball (the original), Goku was a boy living in the woods and was found by Bulma. Afer an introduction they went off on a quest to find the seven Dragonballs. Who would have thought that roughly 35 years later, Goku would have 2 sons and be fighting against a pink monster sharing bodies with another guy (fusion). My point being, if Akira could come up with that, he could have found a way to make the other Z-fighters (especially Piccolo) alot stronger.
Haha something tells me you don't like John Cena. I think that was fine tho...for Goku to be stronger than any other character (in DBZ or any other series) could ever reach. I rather liked it. Goku will go down in history as the "strongest" anime character that was ever created. As for the Spirit Bomb...to be fair the Spirit Bomb against Vegeta was very small and didnt have too much any energy gathered. In Namek, their wasn't much energy left around considering Frieza and his men had destroyed all life. When Goku used the Spirit Bomb agains Buu, he had the entire Earth lend their energy. For Omega Shenron, he had a good part of the entire Universe.
One of the things I absolutely loved about the Androids/Cell storyline is that Goku is only the strongest going into it. Goku starts out as the strongest, before losing that honour to Vegeta, Piccolo, Cell, Trunks &, in the end, Gohan. Sure Goku does save the Earth, but it's only by using a technique no one else knew, and of course, it was all in vein (Cell Returned). And again, Goku only helps his son in the end; he doesn't actually deliver the killing blow. It's only after Vegeta assists them that Gohan & Goku's Kamehameha wins the power struggle with Cell.
It's also fair to point out that the series was supposed to end twice prior to it's actual ending with both the Freeza Saga & The Cell Games storyline supposed to end Dragon Ball. It's obvious too. Goku takes his place as the strongest in the universe come the end of the Freeza story and at he end of the cell games, Goku is dead and his son has filled the vacancy. With Future Trunks also involved in the Android storyline, there's a fitting conclusion in the fact that Earth has a defender of the Past (in Goku), of the Present (in Gohan) and in the Future (in Trunks). Of course neither ended the series with Toriyama being forced to come back.
enterkey said:It is easy to pick up new viewers because there is no deep plot to the whole thing, anyone that watches it can figure it out without any problem. Goku = good, guy against Goku = bad, explosions = awesome, Goku training for a dozen episodes and filler = necessary to watch to see if Goku does anything new that could be used against the said guy that is against him. This is why a majority of the new viewers are young kids that have never seen anything like it in the past and they are oblivious to the lack of story throughout the entire thing because to them all that they generally need is a basic outline of good vs evil with no curveballs thrown in. Although it may appear that DBZ Kai is gaining a lot of viewers it is extremely possible that it is because there has been a big 5-6 years since the end of GT and aside from the half assed attempt to rerun the original DBZ on Cartoon Network, which seemed to fail fairly easily, there hasn't been much of a chance to gain new viewers. This new show has a whole other generation of kids to suck into watching and loving it simply because they have no ties to the original and would have no idea how different it is such as the voices, story, cutting of the massive filler episodes (only good thing they have done with the series). These changes have caused a vast majority of the old fans to stay away from it because some of us feel it is unnecessary to retell the story, hate the changes to it because of nostalgic purposes, or were already so turned off by the way the original series went that they would not even bother watching it to begin with. This new generation is a way to skew the stats to make it seem like they truly are gaining a ton of fans when it would be inevitable for it to happen because kids will always go crazy for the same things.
With the inception of the Hyperbolic Time Chamber you would think that the Z Warriors would have all used it at some point to try to become stronger, to make Tien, Yamcha, Krillin, and Chiatzu much more relevant to the story instead of being turned into jobbers and comedy fodder. Piccolo did use the chamber to become quite powerful but after they wasted his fusion with Kami he didn't really have much potential left in him to compete with the upper level Super Saiyans. It is without a doubt lazy writing that was probably thrown in as a way to make sure that they could keep making insanely strong villains until the only relevant character in the entire series was Goku. Even Vegeta was turned into nothing more than a jobber during GT, sure he was turned into the first insanely strong bad guy but that was a device used to make Goku go to an even higher level of Super Saiyan and break out of his kid self for a couple of minutes an episode. After that Vegeta jobbed out to all of the other villains until he used Bulma to become Super Saiyan 4, fused with Goku, and then jobbed out again when the fusion failed to defeat Omega.
Sure I liked Goku becoming the strongest Anime character at the time but in the past 6 years I have done a lot of growing with Animes and watched several dozen of them and the Dragonball series just doesn't cut it anymore. The ultimate character feel of Goku just destroyed any sort of drama that was going on throughout them and there was never a time when you could really feel like he wouldn't come out on top in the end. I used to be a John Cena fan but he fell the way of Goku in my eyes and is no longer able to entertain me while the much more interesting characters get shat on and reduced to next to thing. I understand that both of them lost a great deal of energy, I am just saying that I find it funny that an attack of such ultimate levels to only kill 2 characters since it was taught to the ultimate good guy in the series and even then it took Goku transforming into a Super Saiyan again and using an energy blast on top of the SB to take Buu down though I don't remember exactly how Omega got taken down as I only saw that episode once.
enterkey said:Funkay said:It's also fair to point out that the series was supposed to end twice prior to it's actual ending with both the Freeza Saga & The Cell Games storyline supposed to end Dragon Ball. It's obvious too. Goku takes his place as the strongest in the universe come the end of the Freeza story and at he end of the cell games, Goku is dead and his son has filled the vacancy. With Future Trunks also involved in the Android storyline, there's a fitting conclusion in the fact that Earth has a defender of the Past (in Goku), of the Present (in Gohan) and in the Future (in Trunks). Of course neither ended the series with Toriyama being forced to come back.
While the Freeza ending could have worked I don't think it would have been as much of a phenomenon if it had ended with Goku dead or alive drifting throughout space while his friends and loved ones are forced to live without him, sure it would have been a bittersweet ending with Goku defeating Freeza but at that point Earth wasn't ready for Goku to be gone and didn't have a viable protector left since Vegeta was still a bad guy/borderline tweener, Piccolo had Kami as a weakness, and Gohan's inner power hadn't been realized. The Cell finish was much more worthy of being the end as it concluded the story about Gohan's inner power, gave a heroic end to Goku without the need to have him come out on top, finally brought humanity to the character of Vegeta, Piccolo was whole once again, Trunks was now strong enough to defeat his androids and become the protector of his time, and Gohan was appointed the new savior of Earth to follow in his father's footsteps. If that had happened a vast majority of the fans would still be fans of it and probably support Kai and there would have been much less bastardization of the characters.
For the most part, I agree with enterkey. The "end" during the Cell games Saga was much more worthy than the ending created after the Frieza Saga. The main reason I feel this way (other than what enterkey said) is because Gohan's hidden ability hadn't been revealed yet. Throughout the entire Dragonball Z series until the ned of the Cell Saga, there was always "hype" to the forthcoming of the release of Gohan's hidden potential. When he fought against Cell, it turned out his hidden abilities reached him to the level of Super Saiyan 2. In the end of the Cell Saga, Goku died peacefully, Gohan had the torch passed down to him, Trunks was able to defeat his Androids, Piccolo had re-fused with Kami, Krillin finally had a girlfriend, Yamcha was still a dumb bitch. Basically, all built up storylines had been completed.
To me, its as if, the Buu Sagas should have been a different series as it started new storylines and new hypes.
However, I don't really think the "cutting Dragonball Z short" would have worked well for Kai. Like I stated before, Dragonball Z's popularity grew much more bigger with the addition of the Buu Sagas. Thus, it inspired the addition of Dragonball Z Kai--the redun series. You see enkey, nothing against you man--I think your "legit"(you know your DBZ stuff and you deserve a "rep" for that), but what you fail to understand is that while in the US, everything was done a small peiod of time...
Throughout the entire world (especially in Japan) the gap between Kai and the original story is a lot longer. Dragonball Z ended in Japan around 1990. Dragonball Z Kai wasn't introduced until 2009. Now when the question "Why was Kai made in the first place?" is asked, the simple answer is the level of popularity it achieved throughout the number of years including the 2008 OVA, Dragonball Z was practically begging to be re-done. The only problem is, in my opinion, they aren't doing a good job about it.
enterkey said:You have a compelling argument that the Buu saga helped to gain a lot of fans but at the same time there are a vast amount of animes out there such as Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, etc. that have become ridiculously popular with a show that relied on a compelling story that was able to get told in roughly 25-26 eps without becoming stale or selling out. If the series had ended at the point in time that I've been talking about then it would have kept that compelling feel that it had without falling into the sell out "lets just add on another storyline to this because it's a giant cash cow and the little kids need their Goku fix" and that compelling feel to it could have thrust it into the area of all of the other anime series that hardcore anime fans would most likely call the "legit" animes. They could have easily turned the Buu storyline into a set of movies that would have extended the story and would not have necessarily needed to be canon with the rest of the story, a majority of the original movies that they created for DBZ have been. There is a bit of a balance that all animes have to work on between the amount of story that they are willing to put into their show and how many episodes that they want to throw it out in. Most of them decide to make it short and sweet and that generally works and after time their popularity can shoot through the roof. I believe it is why every Gundam series aside from the original is around 50 episodes or less and a majority of the others tend to follow that trend as well while some of the giant shows such as Pokemon or the Dragonball franchise tends to just shell out whatever they think up while giving more emphasis on the action aspect of things and meaningless filler that somehow the audience will sit through without becoming tired of it.
Oone of the problems I have with Bleach is that although they have an amazing story that is somehow a bit of a cross between DBZ and Yu Yu Hakusho it relies too heavily on the use of filler episodes to fill the gaps between stories as I found myself skipping over almost everything in the filler episodes when I watched all the episodes of Bleach up to this point earlier in the year and those episodes nearly derailed me from watching the series.
Барбоса;2401070 said:The Buu saga was a curious mix of adding to the DBZ story but still ending up in the same place.
There was an enemy that seemingly could not be beaten by some single Z fighter breaking through the next power barrier. SSJ3 Goku might have been stronger than Fat Buu and maybe even Kid Buu but did not have the longevity to defeat either and by the time Mystic Gohan appeared Super Buu was able to surpass him. Even the fusion of SSJ3 Gotenks was not enough. Only the advent of Vegito, the strongest base fighter to ever appear in DB, surpassed Buu.
Vegeta accepted that Goku was better than him and always would be (despite winning their two encounters and surpassing him at the beginning of the Android and Cell sagas), enabling him to play a large part in the saving of the galaxy from Buu. But in the end, he was still always looking for a chance to prove himself against his great rival.
Gohan was still the strongest Z fighter (before being ruined in DBGT) but played no role in the final defeat of Buu and in a predictable return to form, it was Goku that finished the job (with a little help from Vegeta, Fat Buu and Hercule).
AK also seems to have had little clue as to how to end the DBZ saga. This is one of the few things that DBGT did better than DBZ. The Evil Shenrons and the removal of the Dragonballs was a good way to finish off. The introduction of Uub was a teaser rather than a conclusion.
Furyof5 said:So am I the only one who loved the Buu saga, liked everything they did with Gohan in Otherworld, and his fight with Buu, and thought that the ending being different for once, with Goku, even though hes not the strongest this time, still beating Buu?
