dragonballk

STORY: 

 The story was clearly meant as an attempt to capitalize on Dragon balls past success and earn toriyama and funimation more money. They took an interesting idea (Multiverse) and used it simply as an excuse to bring back the old fighting tournament's that were a huge part of Dragon balls original rise to fame. Back in the day when Toriyama was trying to establish Goku as an out of this world fighting prodigy, the tournament idea was cool. In adult hood, with the fate of the entire Multiverse on the line, it just seems lazy and contrived. 

 There were some good times though. Seeing the entire old crew kick ads in the return of frieza arc was awesome, and the future trunks arc was actually pretty good, despite everything I'm going to say in the rest of my review. And the winner of the universal survival arc was actually very surprising and enjoyable. But then again everybody watching the series knows that one of the good guys will win, and wish for everybody to be wished Back, so ... yeah, that's not even a spoiler it's so blatantly obvious. 

 But honestly, this anime was good enough that I would tune into it when I knew the new arc had been going for a while, and would reach its climax soon, but not good enough to keep me watching every single episode. It relied too much on old tropes and nostalgia and not enough on coming up with an intriguing storyline. 

ANIMATION:

When the series wanted to, it brought in the big guns and had animation as good as any other series in the industry at the time, however it can't be denied ghat there was many times when it seemed as though they had the "fresh out of college" animators on payroll. 

On top of that they lacked any new interesting character designs. Hit looked like a mash between picollo and final form frieza, or frost. Zumasu looked like a re-coloring of Tapion and then transformed into.... Goku. Frost was a re coloring of Frieza, the two female saiyans fused into a female version of broly, and nobody else looked good. I think the best looking original character was Jiren, and he was boring as grass. 

SOUND:

I have never been a fan of the music in Dragon Ball Japanese dubs. 

CHARACTERS: 

The only positives for the character department in this series were Zumasu and Vegeta. Zumasu had an interesting back story that was un explored in the past by the dragonball writers, and Vegeta's character development picked up right where it left off at the end of Z and really solidified him as a reborn character. 

 But aside from that it was mostly boring characters (Hit, Jiren,) wasted characters (Goten, Trunks, Buu), and poor attempts to squeeze in little to know back stories in too short a time, to try and make us question our views of a character (Toppo, Jiren).