English Dub Review: Dragon Ball Super “A Chance Appears in a Tight Spot! Launch a Counter-Attack, Goku!”

In this episode, everyone passes around the Stupid Ball until somebody gets it in the face.

Spoilers Below

Courtesy: Adult Swim

Well, Goku is in a nasty spot. In Freiza’s own words, the tyrant is using the Sayajin as a wrecking ball to rearrange the landscape. The golden terror picks Goku up using his tail. Knowing what it’s like to have a tail, Goku exploits the weakness inherent in this strategy: Tails are sensitive. He bites down hard and manages to escape the grapple. The battle continues, while Beerus and Whis continue eating and making commentary… The subject of which dawns on Vegeta. He demands that Goku switches out. He’s taking too long, and still hasn’t figured out Freiza’s weak point. After a moment of thinking, the monkey demigod muddles through it. He tells Freiza that this is his last chance to leave Earth. The two power up, drawing on their reserves to go all out. At first, it seems that Freiza still has the upper hand. He lays out punishing hit after punishing hit, but Goku keeps on going. After shooting Goku through the cliffside and out to the surface, Freiza jumps in with a devastating punch… that does nothing. Goku is completely unfazed. This was Golden Freiza’s great weakness. While the form’s power output makes it a force to be reckoned with, it chews through energy like a stretch Humvee limo does gas. Since Freiza’s body couldn’t keep up with the drain, he eventually ran out of power. Goku offers the tyrant clemency one more time… and gets a laser beam through the chest for his efforts. Sorbet, who has been lurking at the battlefield the whole time, sniped the Sayajin out from hiding. While Freiza is content to rub his feet in the wound, he forgets about something. Vegeta is here, too.

This was supposed to be the apex of the battle, the part where everything crescendo-ed to knock-down, drag-out glory. Unfortunately, I was underwhelmed by the action in this episode. It’s just more of the same of what we’ve seen: Freiza pounding the crap out of Goku until he can’t anymore. Really, this Freiza is nowhere near as menacing as he was when he first showed up all those years ago. Back then, he went from a mysterious and creepy dude in a hoverchair to transforming into a monstrous form, then back into a lean machine that ooze confidence and danger. Now, he’s just a whining baby with a big ego and a gold suit. His minions were meaningless, and even the most powerful of them just flopped. It almost feels like this is just a filler arc… except this is based off a canon movie! As this arc of the series is straight from Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection F, which was reviewed so favorably by the fans, I’m left to assume the problem is the additional scenes they’ve added in the anime to pad the movie out into a thirteen episode season. It is interesting to see Freiza use his tail as a fighting limb. He didn’t do that very much in Z. Now, he actually uses it as if it were a part of his body, using it to grapple his enemies. But, that’s where my interest in this episode ends.

Courtesy: Adult Swim

The art and animation in this episode are dreadful. It is loaded full of errors, and places where the character model was thrown out the window. Almost every time we look at Freiza, his face is different. Many times, he doesn’t even look like Freiza at all! Goku’s face gets screwed up almost constantly. The action was loaded with cycled animation frames, and they were plainly obvious that they were cycled. I know animation houses have an A-team and a B-team, but did you have to use the C-team for this one? I mean, it’s plain to see that it is better in quality than an amateur, but it certainly isn’t professional, and definitely not work worthy of a series with a history as long and storied as this one. The voice acting was Dragon Ball quality -lots of faux shouting- but nothing that spectacular. I did chuckle a bit about Freiza’s yelp when Goku bites his tail. So, when you get down to it, between anemic action, lazy animation, and “ho-hum” voice acting, I have to rank this episode a bit lower. Enjoy your five cheap shots out of ten.

SCORE
5.0/10