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As someone who not unlike many of you, has been a fan of this franchise since longer than I could remember, believe me when I say that all I'm going to bring up here is from a place of love. I also want to say that, in spite of everything Dragon Ball Super was still at least an entertaining experience on some level but I can't use that as an excuse to ignore the disappoinment I've felt continuously with this series time and time again. 

When we look at the the first 27 episodes of Super, you can pretty much take anything nice I have to say about the series and put in the dumpster since besides the odd filler episode here or there, their's next to no fun to be had with the retread stories of Battle of Gods and Resurrection F. I understand it was done in order to bridge the gap between the new storylines for those who hadn't seen the movies as well as retcon said movies in some handy ways (like how in this version, Beerus wasn't using any where close to 1% of his power to fight SSG Goku, forget 70%). But there's really no excuse in the world that could make a bad product good and these arcs only serve to fuel the most cynical of views towards a franchise that many would argue past it's prime decades ago. These two arcs were just ugly, slow, and didn't even bother to take the opportunity to fix what issues were already present in the movies.

But enough about low hanging fruit, let's look at what happened when Dragon Ball Super set out to do something original. Yes, the Universe 6 arc, the place that myself and likely many others consider the real beginning of Dragon Ball Super, and I'll say, it certainly was an improvement at the very least. Animation-wise it was still incredibly shabby in places and as a tournament arc it didn't exactly have very high aspirations and essentially no stakes. But at the very least we managed to get some actual decent fights in if nothing else, with Goku vs Hit setting the bar far higher than anything to that point. Beyond that we got a brand new storyline featuring everyone's blue(?)-haired time traveler Trunks and his ongoing fight with a now inexplicably evil version of Goku. It's probably the most unapologetically fanfic-ish premise to ever get greenlit that I've ever seen and the way the story bends over backwards to and explain how it all happens doesn't make a lick of sense, even by Dragon Ball standards. Plot-holes and dumb choices by characters are nothing new to the series as anyone whose ever really thought about any these stories for an extended period of time can attest to, but the ones here are incredibly distracting since the arc spends more of it's focus building up a mystery then any others. The ending they opted for with this arc was no less ridiculous and only further cemented this arc as nothing but superficially cool ideas with bafflingly stupid execution.

And now we arrive at the Tournament of Power, which by my estimation, was easily the most fun story arc to follow by a country mile. The level of scale and the immediate stakes grab interest from the word "go" and the promise of seeing characters who haven't had anything to do for the longest time get some shine is something that the arc did an OK job of following up on (even if by doing so they managed to cause much confusion with anyone who at all cared about power scaling). I have no doubt that the vast majority of Super's best episodes came from this arc, but that doesn't make the overall structure of this arc good. The set-up for tournament itself was excessive for sure with nearly 20 episodes from the beginning off the arc focused on getting the gang together with not as much time spent on getting to know the other Universe's combatants as their could have been. A missed opportunity to try and get us invested in the stories of these off these other far off places. The actual event itself suffers from how the series rarely does anything interesting with the fact that this is an 80 person Royal Rumble. Sure their's no shortage of teamwork on display, but it never feels as if anything is happening besides the one or two fights that are the focus of the episode, even during many of the earlier episodes. It instead feels like an extended gauntlet match for Universe 7 to grind through. While the first few episodes manage to capture the appeal of what a fight like this could look like, it fizzles out from there. Most of the combatants may as well be sitting around picking their noses for all it matters. The endgame of the entire arc also falls flat thanks to Jiren being a strong contender for the worst antagonist in the entire series, someone who was hyped too soon only to lead to the reveal of a hollow personality/backstory and a lame moveset. Not to mention the transparent way he was made to look villainous when the spotlight was on him merely to make Goku look righteous by comparison, even though good/evil was never supposed to be a factor in a fight between entire Universe at risk of vanishing. I look at his character and see a hole poorly filled for another combatant more deserving, Hit. After all him and Goku already had a fun rivalry set-up between them and what better way to have it settled than on such a grand stage? Instead we got yet another addition in the miles long conga line of antagonists with power dwarfing the last and that's really it.

Please note that by pointing out problems here, I'm not suggesting that Z wasn't guilty any of the problems Super had. Not that it should matter either way but I've noticed that a lot fans of Super mischaracterize critics as people who "thought it was OK when Z did it". My point here isn't that Super created many wholely unique problems all on it's own since a good deal of what's wrong here was also an issue with Dragon Ball Z. The problem is nothing resembling what Z at least somewhat competent by today's standards is here beyond some good fights. There are no character arcs here that could hold a candle to what Z did with Vegeta and Gohan (they even went back and made Vegeta Goku's eternal rival again when he already put that part of himself to rest in Z), and besides Goku Black, Zamasu and I suppose Jiren towards the end, their weren't any truly detestable villains whose defeats we could come back each episode to look forward to. I respect how Super goes out of it's way to portray it's characters moreso as normal people during their downtime than Z did with how it shows characters in lifestyles that don't involve fighting for the sake of the planet/Universe but the low-key scenes and episodes only served to make me wish I was watching a chill slice-of-life spin-off than what we ended up getting.

This series frustrates me less for how bad it is, and more for how good I wanted it to be.