Manga/Dragon Ball

You mean just Trunks...I'm quite certain the Final Flash left Veggie mostly tapped.

I used to not like Final Flash because I felt it was overhyped. It's a big straightforward beam attack that fails to kill Cell.

I do still think it's overrated, but my feelings have softened towards it. There's an undeveloped current to Vegeta's fighting style, where he specializes in pouring raw power into attacks and blasting enemies as hard as he can. Vegeta is an Unskilled, but Strong bruiser, which could make for an effective foil to the Weak, but Skilled Kakarot had it been written that way, but it wasn't and Goku is actually Strong and Skilled.

In that regard, Final Flash is the epitome of Vegeta. It's a blunt instrument that he uses to wail on Cell as hard as he can, and it's a testament to Vegeta's raw power that he nearly succeeds by doing so. Vegeta's beams are Boring, but Practical displays of raw power that can sometimes outstrip even Goku's.

Goku, mind you, would go on to mimic Final Flash's near-effectiveness with his Warp Kamehameha, but he's also supposed to be stronger than Vegeta at that point.

The problem is, Dragon Ball doesn't really play up that Strong, but Unskilled (but wow is he Strong) dynamic for Vegeta very much. I feel like Toriyama could have done a lot more with dichotomy between Vegeta's brute force and Goku's martial arts.

Wow we're straight up calling attacks overrated now.

Personally, i feel Final Explosion is pretty overrated /s

Nothing can compare to cooler's YEAAAAAAAAH! I mean, Death beam

Yes. I've been thinking this for a while now.

This is why I think they should have kept the Kaioken and have Goku use it with Super Saiyan. Goku does stuff like improve his ability as a martial artist: he refines his technique, he trains, he learns to take what he has and mix them together to get better results.

Full Power Super Saiyan is the epitome of this: rather than trying to power up further, he works on instead mastering what he has so he can use it better, and as a result he has greater energy stores and better control of his power so as to avoid wasting it. Goku is a Martial Artist and he thinks that way.

Vegeta is a soldier. He wasn't really taught that much beyond the basics and then he went to the battlefield and honed his craft. He learned that force works. Apply enough of it and you can do anything. He doesn't bother with technique. Just hit the other dude hard enough. Even when he does straight training, he never really moves away from this, but due to his raw power and years of experience in life or death situations, he doesn't need to.

Super Saiyan Grade 2 is the epitome of this: he powers himself up as far as he can without it being a detriment, reaching the height of his strength until Super Saiyan 2 becomes a thing.

It's kinda right there in their methodologies already, and Toriyama could have focused on it if he wasn't just giving them all the same abilities.

Hell, this is why Super Saiyan 3 is a kinda a downgrade for Goku despite it's power. He pulled a Vegeta and focused on getting out more power, but never mastered it (and it seems the flaws are too great for any type of usefulness out of the technique).

Also, Gohan could have theoretically been the union of their concepts of technique (with his training from Piccolo and Goku) and power (through his Ascended / SSJ 2 state)....but we all know where that went.

I also think that, since it's implied the Z Warriors rely a lot on their Ki sensing not just to tell an enemy's strength, but also to track their movements in a fight (like they sense how their foe will attack and block or act accordingly), he should have had Vegeta not be able to sense Ki at all (he learns how to raise and lower his power, but isn't as good at it as even the others) to emphasize his Unskilled, but Strong status.

Grade 2/3 being the Beam Spam form in Xenoverse really makes Trunks look even more inexperienced since he never quite bothers using Ki attacks which don't exactly depend on his speed.

I feel the Unskilled, but Strong angle for Vegeta doesn't work.

He's naturally gifted, that's why he gets all his power-ups off screen.

Vegeta is noted in-universe as being a fighting genius; just because he's an arrogant asshole doesn't mean that he's Unskilled, but Strong. He successfully bluffed Dr. Gero into a retreat despite having his energy being drained and completely skipped Super Saiyan Grade 3 because he already knew the drawbacks that Trunks glossed over.

Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on Feb 18th 2020 at 1:23:01 PM

I suppose Unskilled, but Strong doesn’t suit Vegeta.

I mean it’s not really a thing in DB. Frieza has one of the widest move pools in the series, but had no control over his full power and zero ability to sense ki.

Everyone in this series is Strong and Skilled to differing levels.

I've always supposed that Vegeta's easier to think up new techniques for than Goku, because Vegeta has a clear theme and character trend in the kind of moves he likes to do, whereas Goku has slowly become "the Kamehameha guy."

That said, it's probably still tricky in Vegeta's case simply because his "raw application of power" theme means there isn't much room to be too experimental (is your new big blast a beam, a ball or a boom) so finding new stuff takes some thinking.

Super barely ever giving anyone anything new nonwithstanding, of course.

I'd probably call (original) Freeza Brilliant, but Lazy instead. You could maybe finagle 17 and 18 that way - they fight like a pair of bruisers - but we don't know a lot about why they fight the way they fight.

You're mostly going to see Unskilled, but Strong enemies in the tournament arcs. Guys who are tricky in how tough they are, but get beaten like everyone else cause the protags are smarter - like Botamo.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Feb 18th 2020 at 11:15:47 AM

alekos: Grade 2/3 aren't really in Xenoverse. Super Vegeta 1 and Super Vegeta 2 are, but those are almost identical to Super Saiyan 1 and Super Saiyan 2, but with more focus on ki blasts instead of physical attacks. It's more than Xenoverse made up two completely original Super Saiyan forms just for Vegeta, and didn't include Grade 2 and 3. Hell, Super Vegeta 2 doesn't even have a speed debuff like Grade 3 should.

Xenoverse also made Future Super Saiyan as a form exclusive to Future Trunks, which is no different than Super Saiyan 1, except it has better energy conservation (which you'd think would make more sense as Grade 4).

Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Feb 18th 2020 at 12:38:33 PM

Broly, particularly the new version, is a pretty clear case of Unskilled, but Strong.

He's got nowhere near as much experience as Goku or Vegeta do, but he eventually outpaces them due to his mutation giving him an absurd Zenkai boosts.

Future Gohan also gets it.

The Super Vegeta 1, 2 and Future Super Saiyan skills are just gameplay variants of the regular Super Saiyan 1 & 2 in order to give the characters their own niches.

Would it be iffy to say that...Dragon Ball really doesn't know how to handle threats?

Using the last 3 movies as an example (or all the movies really) isn't it just weird how the plot just stops in its tracks once the heroes are fighting the big bad of the movie>>>

Beers, Freeza, and Broli only ever came with the intention of fighting, so there's nothing really letting the action stop at all.

Beers wants to fight a SSJG and that's the natural end to the conflict of his deal anyway, that's...fine.

Freeza wants to fight Karrot, so once he gets there, he does just that. But what breaks that up, a short thing where he cheats and Veggie tags in...nothing can stop the action because even in a losing situation he won't leave and they wouldn't just let him leave.

Broli is commissioned by Freeza to fight the SSJBSSJ twins, that's fine...but it's the same problem as last time except with the added condition that Broli just becomes a mindless beast that even if Freeza cared about saving him and refining his power (which he obviously didn't considering he made Broli worse), he Can't do that. They use the IT to break from the action and that could've lead to something, but they just come back after fusing.

Is there an easy fix to this? In the "Z" portion of the story, after the Saiya-jin Saga, they did this by making it so the heroes tended to have to avoid (Freeza & Androids) or give chase to the villains (Cell & Boo)...instead of working up to the Big Bad like prior stuff.

(This was not posted by randomness4)

Edited by randomness4 on Feb 19th 2020 at 1:03:06 AM

Zamasu hates Goku because he steals the spotlight and Goku Black was an attempt to weaponize his Plot Armor

I mean, it's kind of a Dragon Ball thing since fighting is literally the end as opposed to simply the means. Character motivations mostly revolve around fighting and winning and not much else.

Compare Cell before and after he transforms; before, he avoided fighting as much as possible and only engaged when he was confident enough that he could win and his goal wasn't simply to get into fights. After he transformed though, he pretty much lost his main motivation and just opened a tournament for the hell of it.

Buu was mainly just stalling the plot until the Heroes could pull a new power up out and win.

In order for the fighting to not stall the plot, the plot needs to be about something more than simply fighting for the sake of it.

Time to start another tournament arc.

I made more or less the same point in a discussion thread about future Xenoverse 3 villains. One guy started complaining about the Serial Escalation and wanted future Dragon Ball content to use lower stakes plots. That simply isn't possible with the series centered around defeating the next biggest guy over and over again.

The series did have a plot besides defeating the next biggest guy: they're the title of the series.

But that didn't last past the first chapter really. Toriyama rushed through it and then jumped onto a tournament plot, then another DB quest plot, then another tournament.

King Piccolo was something different, with the Dragon balls becoming the potential means to stop him as opposed to a goal in and of themselves, but then he won completely, and ultimately it boiled down to just be stronger and beat him up.

In another world, fighting in the World tournaments wouldn't have been a separate story arc for the series: it would have been part of the overall DB arc, with the prize being one of them. It would have been a good chance to introduce competing adventurers for the Balls, some of whom would go on to continue to oppose the heroes.

The Red Ribbon would have been the ones looking for the balls from the start instead of Pilaf (or he was running them instead of Commander Red, or he was a minor member who went rogue), thus tying things together a bit better.

But that's hindsight, and Toriyama is a foresight kind of guy....a few inches of foresight, but still.

It is a thing in Super that the stories have been fixated around big battles with the villains rather than arcs, though. Pretty much every arc in Super is essentially one fight stretched out over X amount of episodes, which is why it tends to have a padding problem.

You don’t get changed in story direction, complications that create reasonable new lines for the plot to explore, or progressions or villains in a single arc any more, which imo is to the stories’ detriment as it imo contributes to the weakening of the series’ ability to establish stakes. Even Zamasu was basically one fight with round breaks: leaving it unclear how much time was even passing.

The Moro arc is the first major exception / return to more of an arc format in a while, which is one of the reasons it’s caught my attention so strongly.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Feb 19th 2020 at 1:16:41 AM

It's a shame that they have to be X amount of episodes...

Since they don't need to do that anymore, they've got free-dom.

Most fights these days are usually consigned to a single episode.

Very few shows still do the whole “10 episodes to showcase a single fight” like DB did & One Piece is still doing.

I agree. Finding new bad guys that Goku and Vegeta can fight has pretty much been Super's entire M.O.

That's not to say that "New bad guy, let's fight him" wasn't a thing in the old Dragon Ball. It totally was. But there was usually more going on alongside it. Even Cell, who literally ran out of plot and had to make up an apocalypse tournament just to give our heroes a reason to still be fighting him, had the whole "Hunt down and absorb the Androids, who are at the same time hunting our heroes, who are in turn hunting Cell" triangle chase thing going for him. Three factions spiraling in on each other until they all collided on an archipelago near Kame House.

I think the closest to a Super-style "New boss fight, who dis?" dynamic that the original Dragon Ball ever got was the Saiyan arc, which was literally three consecutive boss battles with a one-year training montage between the first and second.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 19th 2020 at 4:00:27 AM

I’ve heard it said elsewhere that Toriyama is a gag manga writer stuck with a shounen fighting series

Which honestly feels very appropriate.