English Dub Review: Dragon Ball Super “A Full-Throttle Battle! The Vengeful Golden Freiza!”

What happens when Golden Freiza suddenly melts while flying? Golden Showah.

Spoilers Below

Well, Goku’s done it now. He turned his hair blue. After a little pushing, prodding and posturing, Freiza is finally going to show off his new power up form… He turns to gold. That’s right everyone, when you need a hidden transformation that makes you ever so much more powerful than you were before, just turn gold. It worked for Goku. Granted, that was in the early nineties, and a lot of things in that era were bad fashion choices. Oh well. This Golden Freiza form is strong enough to take on Goku’s Super Sayajin Blue form. The two launch into an epic battle, one that has Jaco wanting to take pictures for his report. That report, however, would end up with the Galactic Police nuking earth into oblivion, so Bulma smashes his camera.

Right about then, Bulma receives a psychic message from Whis. He and Lord Beerus are on their way for that giant sundae she promised them. Along the way, the deities run into an interesting pair. Champa, god of destruction from Universe 6, and Vados, his assistant. The two growl and talk smack about each other but ultimately go their separate ways. Champa, apparently, is searching for something important. We don’t really get to see what… Yet. He’s hiding it from Beerus. Beerus and Whis arrive on earth and promptly begin gushing over the partially melted ice cream. Still, they love the flavors and dig in greedily. The fight with Freiza has taken a turn for the worse. Goku takes a pounding and is thrown to the ground. He admits freely that he is actually having trouble with Freiza’s new power now. The golden tyrant continues to threaten Goku with promises to kill everyone here. This promise is cut short when he discovers Beerus in the gang. After a bit of groveling, Freiza discovers that the god of destruction is really only there for snack time, and won’t stop this fight. He does promise, however, that anyone standing close to him is safe, if only so that he can obtain more ice cream in the future. Freiza returns to his fight with Goku.

This is a little different from an episode. For one, the main story of the fight is rather… boring. While it is well animated and shirks the easily repeatable fight loops that DBZ was famous for, it replaces them for a while with energy blast fights that require little more than effects to do. There isn’t much in the fight that feels as epic as this should. I mean, this is the emperor of the galaxy returned from the dead after four months of training, for his grudge match against THE GOD OF SAYAJINS! This should be a legendary fight. I should be going “Oh! Ah! Ow!” The whole time. No. Instead, I was more like “Uh-huh. Yep. Moving along.” The original Super Sayajin fight was more interesting than this! It doesn’t matter if the battle is well animated, and lacking in any drawing errors. It isn’t interesting.

On the other hand, the little tidbits of plot being revealed by Beerus and Co. were far more intriguing. This episode confirms that Dragon Ball exists not in a multi-layered universe, but a multi-layered multiverse. This was a concept played with by recent video games, such as Dragon Ball Online and Xenoverse. Champa and Vados come from one universe over and have shady reasons for being here. They seem to need to collect seven of something, which seems like it may be a form of Dragon Balls. I remember Black Star Dragon Balls from GT being a thing, but there is no guarantee that that concept will be carried over because that timeline has been erased. What Champa is going to use these mysterious items for is anyone’s guess, but given that he’s a god of destruction, it probably has to do with a ton of stuff blowing up. We also learn that Champa and Beerus have a long-standing hatred for each other, and I bet that’s going to show up more in the next story arc.

So, in short: Good animation, a bit of plot set up next season, but a bit boring for such a long-awaited battle. I give the episode seven hypothetical Dragon Balls of Destruction out of ten.