English Dub Review: Dragon Ball Super “Noble Pride to the End! Vegeta Falls”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

As a now shirtless Vegeta prepares for a final stand against Jiren, the battle itself is a textbook definition of courage because despite Vegeta being in stuck in such an extreme disadvantage of not being able to immediately go Super Saiyan due to exhaustion, he’s still ballsy enough to take on Jiren, even getting his left eye injured in the process. Vegeta is knocked to the brink of elimination, and he begins to think about the people in his life he cares about the most. He gets back up and continues to fight Jiren, who is impressed by Vegeta’s pride.

While a good portion of the episode is spent on Vegeta giving it his all, several close-calls happen that nearly get him ringed out, but manages to stay in the fight through sheer dumb luck. There’s even a moment when Vegeta hears Bulma’s voice urging him not to give up. And although the last episode had the misguided attempt to make Jiren a sympathetic character, Jiren comes across as a dolt when he still fails to understand why Vegeta would continue against such overwhelming odds, and as Vegeta fires off his “Final Flash” attack, it goes about as well as you’d expect…

In retaliation, Goku starts going into his SS-Blue form and begins to take-on Jiren with his remaining power, but despite that fraction of Vegeta’s energy, he doesn’t exactly have a good start, this results in Goku being pushed back to the edge of the fighting stage and helps give the proceedings the right amount of tension and suspense, until Vegeta shouts at Goku. which encourages him to think about how the rest of the Universe 7 team have all put their faith in him. Causing Goku suddenly reactivate what’s been a randomly building up towards since the tournament has started, his “Ultra Instinct” form. With his new power, Goku effortlessly delivers a wince-worthy a heavy blow on Jiren. But the episode ends when you realize that the real match is about to begin.

Our Take
A pretty powerful episode yet all the more emotional when I discovered that upon research, at the time of its original Japanese airing, this was the final performance of Hiromi Tsuru (Bulma’s Japanese voice actress) who recorded her final lines for this mere days before her untimely death. I’m also more shocked it took this long for Goku to even reactivate “Ultra Instinct” A power that rarely occurs as a side-effect from being trained by a god and it’s a power that can only be detected by gods like Beerus. And just at the nick of time since he’ll be needing it for once to be a proper match against Jiren.

While we don’t know where the hell Frieza even is at the very moment, and Android 17 disappeared in the last episode due to blowing himself up. So unless something changes in these last three episodes, the stakes for universal survival have officially been raised for this 1 on 1 Battle!