English Dub Review: Dragon Ball Super “Signs of a Turnabout! The Autonomous Ultra Instinct Erupts!”

Cue epic music.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Goku has once again tapped into Ultra Instinct, a tremendous new power that even the gods have trouble mastering. Whis explains that this new power seems to be spurred on by being exposed to an enormous level of power. Before it was the spirit bomb, but now, it’s Kefla’s enormous power that triggered the form. Kefla unleashes her power as well and moves to take down Goku.

However, Goku’s Ultra Instinct allows him to dodge Kefla’s blasts with incredible precision. His new form gives his body an incredible natural reflex that makes him superior to almost all other forms of fighting. After dodging an incredible number of blows from Kefla, Goku starts counter-attacking to devastating effect. Kefla isn’t going to go down easily, though. She powers up once more and begins radiating powerful energy blasts all around.

Kefla’s new blasts are also insanely powerful, but Goku is able to dodge each one by a hair’s breadth. Dodging attacks all the way, he charges up a Kamehameha wave and then unleashes it on Kefla, knocking her out of the tournament. This leaves just Saolen and Pilina, the two Namekians, left in Universe 6’s roster.

With the battle done, Goku reverts back to his vanilla form. It seems that when using this form, the strain on one’s body is so intense that it causes the user to become basically useless in a fight. Goku limps forward towards the next battle, ready to fight for his universe once more.

Our Take:

I imagine most people will find this to be an excellent episode of Dragon Ball Super. Certainly, fans of the series will place up there with the Jiren fight in terms of how “awesome” it is to behold. Yet, while I didn’t have a bad time watching this episode, I can’t exactly say it’s that amazing. What was a 22-minute runtime of two people roaring at each other and shooting out energy blasts could have been structured differently to make for a better sequence?

The core issue with this episode, as is the issue with many episodes of shows in the “Dragon Ball” franchise, is that too much of what happens can be characterized by “Then they fight.” Strangely enough, too much focus is placed entirely on the battle between Goku and Kefla, and there simply isn’t too much there to keep your interest. It’s flashy, to be sure, well-animated too, but it lacks the creative panache that a good fight needs to be really interesting. Big god-tier matches are cool sometimes, but I think every battle needs to have some kind of back-and-forth in terms of technique, not just endless power-up sequences that take a long time and end up with two people just screaming at each other for a while.

This is the sort of thing that held “Dragon Ball Z” back, but that Super has been able to avoid in this tournament by focusing on minor characters who need to use their brains more when they’re fighting. However, I think that since we’re heading into the end game of the tournament, those kinds of battles are basically done with.

That’s not to say that this episode is bad. For what it is, it’s really quite enjoyable. It’s just too simple for me to really get into. Even in other shounens, fights typically have more elements at play to keep the viewer interested, or they do more fights at the same time so we can cut between them to give a sense of scale to what’s going on. As far as criticism goes, I can really only complain that this anime, which is going on forty years in age right now, is a bit dated for my tastes. It’s still enjoyable, but I’ve come to expect a lot more.