English Dub Review: Dragon Ball Super “Let’s Do It, Grand Zeno! The Universes’ Best Tournament!!

Goku’s impatience with god yields great results.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

It’s a relatively mundane life for Goku and the gang as they manage the ins and outs of their daily lives. Goku’s life as a farmer is bearing fruit, and not even an ambush by some bandits can take him down; I expect nothing less from our favorite Super Saiyan.

It turns out that Bulma is pregnant once again, who’s getting ready to have her second child with the forever salty prince of all saiyans, Vegeta. This is a bit of a problem for Goku, since he wants Vegeta to come train with him on Beerus’s planet, but Vegeta wants to be a good dad and stay with his wife.

Regardless, Goku meets up with Beerus along with Whis, and the three of them enjoy a nice meal together, followed by some god-tier martial arts training. While they train, Goku wonders why the “All-universes” martial arts tournament with Zeno is taking so long to get started. Goku asks Beerus about it, to see if they could go see Zeno. Beerus is not on board, and tries to warn Goku that he wants nothing to do with Zeno, and even threatens to stop Goku from going to see Zeno with force if necessary.

As you might imagine, this doesn’t stop Goku from taking matters into his own hands and going to see Zeno. Once there, he reminds the lord of the universe about the tournament, and they decide to finalize the date of the tournament.

Goku heads back to meet up with the kais, and soon the High Priest arrives and fills them in on the tournament’s date and details. The tournament will begin soon, with ten fighters selected from each universe to participate in the tournament to end all tournaments.

Our Take:

This is a bit of a weird episode for Dragon Ball Super, one that brings a lot of cute and a lot of comfy, but not really one that gets a whole lot done. While its not a bad episode by any means, this one is certainly an “In-between”, an episode necessary to push put the plot forward, but not one that’s terribly interesting to behold. Though it picks up near the end for sure when the ball finally gets moving, don’t expect the kind of action-packed fighting fun time you can usually expect from the series.

A good 2/3 of the episode is spent just on watching the mundane peaceful lives of the main cast as they go about their day. Goku’s got his vegetables, Chi Chi is mad at Goku, Vegeta is being a salty princess, you know this drill by now. But even though it’s not too interesting to watch, this section does serve an important purpose for the episode and, I imagine, the arc as a whole. Basically, having scenes like this reduces the need for flashbacks to explain to viewers what’s going on with our characters; its a setup so everyone knows where we stand. I was also really quite happy with how Vegeta’s character development is coming along. Seeing him be a good dad and not a prideful ass is a nice milestone for how far he’s come since we first met him. No doubt he’ll still be the Vegeta we know and love, but one that’s a little more distant from the comically abusive stepfather that “DBZ Abridged” makes him out to be.

So after the “boring” stuff is through, the episode really gets into the juicy bits, and they are quite a bit juicy. The episode does a great job of building up hype for the tournament, both by showing Beerus’s reluctance to participate and by announcing that it will be ten fighters in total who are to enter the tournament from this universe. We get a nice little montage at the end to show us who these fighters will be, which sets up to see what everyone can do as the best this universe has to offer.

Overall, I had a good time. Dragon Ball Super rarely lets us down and it certainly didn’t here, it just had to take a little time to get itself all stretched out for the fighting to come. We’ve got ourselves a big arc coming in the next few weeks, the mainstage hype contest that has been in the pipeline for some time, certain to delight fans who are eager to see it in its English dub. Needless to say, I’m excited to see how it turns out, and I imagine most everyone who likes DBZ is as well.