Anime Half-great, half-terrible
Dragon Ball GT has a weird place in the franchise. The fandom hates it with a merciless passion, while Akira Toriyama himself seems to view the series in a positive light, and me... I kind of dig it, but even I have to admit it has a huge load of problems that stop it from being anything more than just "okay with some great moments."
Right off the bat, as soon as the series starts, the first thing I noticed is that Goku's character seemed to regrade in mental age as much as he regraded in physical age. Goku was suddenly much more hunger-prone and stupid than he usually was, no matter how many times he tried to convince everyone around him he was an adult.
The tone was also straight-up Adventure and Comedy, rather than Sci-Fi, Drama and Action. And I don't know why and I don't know who decided it, but some character designs like Bra's made me feel extremely uncomfortable, along with all the unnecessary shots of Pan's rear and the moments where they kept showing Goku's kid body fully naked. All the "funny" goes out the window when you remember this isn't a naive little kid with no social skills, this is an adult trapped in a child's body, who's already given birth to two children. It's so, so disturbing.
But for my part, I really liked the initial 8 or so episodes. They really reminded me of the original Dragon Ball, being pretty funny and entertaining in their own right. Even if some of their choices for jokes were a bit... questionable.
Sadly, the anime dips in quality hard after these initial 8 episodes. I feel like the writers noticed that the audience wasn't really interested in a return to Classic Dragon Ball, so around the Luud arc, the genre slowly shifted straight back into Sci-Fi, Drama and Action. It didn't quite work, because enemies were still largely silly and nonthreatening.
Thankfully, the series goes from mediocre to excellent as soon as Baby is introduced. And I have to say, I really, really like the Baby arc. The Saiyans' and Vegeta's genocidal tendencies finally having some well-deserved consequences and acknowledgement is a concept I very well welcome with open arms. Baby was a great villain with a great motivation.
But while excellent, the Baby saga isn't perfect. I really wish Vegeta got some kind of character redemption arc where he's forced to look back into his past race's sins and reflect on how much they were terrible back then. I also feel like while Baby's motivations were pretty grounded, he still somewhat acted like a generic bad guy at times, talking about conquering the whole universe. It's a concept that wasn't really explored to its full extent, but I still enjoyed every minute of it.
Not thankfully, as soon as the Super 17 arc kicks in, whatever good qualities GT had go straight down the drain. The Super 17 arc is atrocious, it has all of these good ideas, like past villains escaping from Hell and launching an all-out attack on Earth, but executes them like shit. All the characters that come back hardly have a single line of dialogue before being killed again in less than 5 seconds.
Freeza and Cell teaming up against Goku in Hell is also a great concept that wasn't given a lot of weight and was executed like shit, their fight being treated entirely as comic relief. Super 17 was also pretty lame and felt like a walking plot device, in a series where villains rarely have any personality beyond For the Evulz. It was all pretty poorly written and I hated every single second.
Then, the also pretty rushed and poorly written Shadow Dragons arc happens and I lose all my faith in this anime. This one also has a pretty great concept behind it, but is executed in the most painfully annoying and time-wasting way possible. Not a single one of the Dragons they have to hunt down is remotely threatening, competent or interesting. The entire arc is just Goku and Pan going places and beating the hell out of them.
Why just Goku and Pan? Why not involve the other characters? And what about Trunks? Wasn't he the third main character, what happened to that? As if it wasn't bad enough, Pan's character suddenly forgets all the development she took during the M-2 arc, takes several levels of jerkass and becomes a whiny, unbearable damsel in distress. Oh, and for some crazy reason, there's a recap episode, in a series that's already 100% filler.
Things kinda become watchable again towards the ending, but while I did enjoy it, I still felt like something was missing. I don't know, it was pretty emotional and it was a great way to end the franchise, I'm not gonna lie. But still, I didn't feel that certain punch that comes when a season of something comes to an end. Also, did we really need that pointless epilogue with Goku and Vegeta having grand-grandsons that were essentially carbon-copies of them? Bra, Trunks, Gohan and Pan weren't carbon-copies of Goku and Vegeta, just... why?
All in all, GT is... something. The first half is great, and even at its lowest, it's still pretty enjoyable. The second half can be best described as "Great concept, painfully terrible execution."
There's still other great things about GT. The soundtrack, for example. The opening and ending themes are also some of the best I've ever heard in an anime. I'd say its reputation of being a terrible, directionless, poorly-written and boring mess is half-deserved, but the show isn't all that bad.
And hey, if Akira can enjoy it, why can't we?
Rating: 7/10
Anime Flawed but interesting sequel to Toriyama's original story
A lot of people hate GT, but I've always thought that was somewhat unjust. However, it is certainly deeply flawed.
So... How does GT hold up? Well... It starts off slow. Episodes 2, 6-8, and parts of 10-12, are outright BAD, and episodes 1, and 9-14 are weird... All clearly show signs of a show that really doesn't know what it is yet. They're trying to feel like Toriyama's early run on Dragon Ball, and it just... Doesn't work. There are moments when it does, notably episode 15, but where it really shines in the early run is episodes like 3-5, and 16-22, where it fully dives into the weird '90s feverdream this show tends to be at its best. Sadly, the fight choreography is often rather dull, but the beautiful animation and excellent score helps it along. The show really comes into its own at episode 15 or 16, I'd say. Episode 15 is a character-orientated episode, primarily about Pan, and about the group properly forming into... A Group. Episode 16 kicks off the Baby arc, and that's where things really heat up. Toei gave up trying to be like Toriyama's early style, and went with what they know from the majority of the DB/Z run, and from their work on the movies; they went with a more villain-centric approach, with big stakes, and an anything-goes attitude. The show is still not a patch on Toriyama's Dragon Ball, but understanding that this is an anime-only epilogue of only 64 episodes in length (the shortest Dragon Ball series by a long shot), it does the job of carrying us to a satisfying conclusion, which you especially feel right at the end... I genuinely believe Dragon Ball will never have a more satisfying conclusion than GT's final episode.
GT is by no means perfect. In fact, at times, it's outright bad. But it doesn't deserve the reputation it has in the English fandom. Especially nowadays when we have Super so obviously trying to recapture the golden age, but Toriyama so clearly doesn't have it in him anymore... GT is a far more adventurous alternative. While Super is pure fanservice with zero substance, GT is a unique, weird, experimental attempt at following up on, and concluding, Toriyama's original story, and I'd say every fan should check it out.
But check it out in Japanese, preferably with the stereo broadcast audio. The Funimation English dub outright sucks (they clearly hated what they were doing, and made no effort to actually make an English version of GT. Unfortunately, what they turned it into was significantly worse. They replaced the opening with a fucking RAP), and Blue Water's is only okay (solid dub, solid translation, but the cast is inexperienced). The Japanese original, with the glorious stereo audio is THE way to watch this show. Though if you MUST watch dubbed, just seek out the Blue Water dub, and thank me later.
Anime Not (quite) as bad as it's made out to be
DBGT is of that special breed that frustrates me, that breed being a series that had good, even great ideas, but didn't implement that well.
Many of the ideas of DBGT are actually very good and in the hands of skilled writers, it is my opinion that DBGT's ideas could make for a show as beloved as DBZ, a legitimate continuation.
SSJ 4 was an idea that after DBZ I dreaded. Super Saiyajins was a concept by itself not altogether too well explained and then adding more and more levels seemed well frankly like plot devices. But SSJ 4's concept is actually logical given the rules of the series. Super Saiyajin and Oozaru are both transformations a Saiyajin can attain under certain conditions and it makes sense one do both at once. Bebi was an interesting villain concept as a member of the Tuffles, which could have made for a very compelling villain with good reason to do what he does and analysis the series star alien species and their warlike tendencies more, and his powers worked very differently then the powers of previous villains. And the Shadow Dragons were just brilliant in concept, seven dark reflections of wishes made throughout the series harkening back throughout the series, paying homage to the nomenclature of the series which got increasingly less relevance, it worked so well....in theory.
However the writing was sub-par. The early villains were jokes, Goku being turned into a child did not make for an enjoyable series, many of the great ideas just weren't utilized well, the very fighting just didn't feel as epic, and their was an extremely poor usage of cast (the only two Dragon Ball characters to get any real usage most of the series were Goku, who was a child alot of the time, and Pan who....I don't hate like alot of people do...but she's too similar to Goku (especially Child Goku) to provide an interesting charater dynamic).
It wasn't all bad though. Some of the villains were cool enough (about on the level of Good DBZ Movie Villains) like Super 17, San Xing Long (Eis Shenron) and Si Xing Long (Nova) Shenron, and Yi Xing Long (Omega Shenron). The fights against all the people and Bebi were good...not great by DBZ standards but good. Held your attention. I also actually liked the SSJ 4 design....it was at least different from the previous SS Js and wasn't reskinned Kaioken (*ahem*). But for most of the part it was just passable.
3/5