Transformations are a staple of dragon ball. They reverse
the course of fights and sell lots of merchandise. But there is a right way to
do them and a wrong way, and if you are about to watch this episode you are
about to see the wrong way.
Dragon Ball Super 123: Power and Soul, Full Power Release!
Goku and Vegeta!! This is an episode I was personally looking forward to; I
should have kept my expectations low.
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| Gee, Thanks for spelling it out for me. Heaven forbid I have to figure it out on my own. |
We rejoin the story with Vegeta down and the animation also
seems to have gone down. Back with Freeza, he’s gotten out of Dyspo’s attack
with little damage and is gloating like usual. Seventeen and Gohan are still
doing nothing against Toppo, who keeps showing “Justice!” and we are about to
get another Goku fight, yay. . .
Seventeen explains to Gohan since they never fought before
they can’t really work together well, but says they can at least handle simple
roles. Seventeen engages Jiren and stops his movements while Gohan blasts him.
They nearly ring him out but in this poorly animated universe nothing is so
easy.
Meanwhile Goku attacks Jiren but even with instant
transmission he can’t get close, but that was not his intention.
Goku planted small balls of ki around Jiren that serve as
land minds to confine his movement. Jiren goes to the air and Goku bombards him
with kienzan attacks, which of course does not work. Jiren beats Goku to an
inch of losing but at the last moment the kienzan circle back around and save Goku by separating the
fighters. This gives Goku the opening he needs and he takes Jiren from behind.
Jiren is knocked out of the area but he hops back up on stone fragments they
fell with him and makes it back.
Jiren seems unstoppable, and while Goku buts on a good show,
Jiren actually shocks him into dropping his transformation, with a simple
punch. Jiren is so strong his punches
are like ki blasts, which pummel Goku.
But neither Vegeta nor Goku are done. They are determined to
win and both power back up. Goku releases super Saiyan Blue kaioken, and
Vegeta, remembering his promise to Cabba, starts surpassing his limit and . . .
sparkling.
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| Come with me, Bella. |
The two come at Jiren but the pride trooper is not overwhelmed.
However he is discombobulated. The two Saiyans have trouble cooperating, and ironically
this makes them hard to read when fighting together. This is actually somewhat
interesting, they are not working together but not getting in each other’s way
either, making them unpredictable. It’s here that the episode ends.
The choices the Dragon ball made in this episode are incredible.
They’re not good choices but they are incredible. First off the drop in animation quality versus
last week isn’t just noticeable, it’s distracting at its best it is flat and
uninteresting, at its worst it’s noticeably distorted. It’s an incredibly odd
choice to use some of their best animation last week but not this week for
Vegeta’s new transformation.
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| Jiren's new transformation harnesses the power of budget animation on a tight schedule to make his movements unreadable. |
And let’s talk about Vegeta’s new transformation which for
now I am referring to as Super Saiyan sparkly vampire. SSSV appears with about ten seconds of foreshadowing.
The only reason we know it made Vegeta stronger is because everyone says
so. We don’t get say a super impressive
fight sequence to demonstrate that his power has skyrocketed but he is still
beneath Jiren, we are simply told. Show,
don’t tell is basically storytelling 101. It’s especially jarring for a visual
medium to make this mistake.
This is where the bad animation comes in. I am somewhat confident
last week’s animation would have made this transformation look amazing, but in
the hands of this week’s team, SSSV looks flat and off putting. I have no idea
if this transformation is sticking around but I find myself not really caring.
I realize I haven’t talked a lot about Jiren in my reviews.
There is a reason for that, at this point Jiren isn’t a character, he’s a foil.
He is a big mountain that Goku and maybe Vegeta have to overcome. I hope we
learn more about him later, but at this point he is not a fully realized character,
and being that he is the antagonist of this arc, that speaks poorly of the
writing.
Finally, I think they should have ended the episode on the
new transformation, or with Vegeta knocking Jiren down, but not out with his
new power. Instead it was just Goku and Vegeta fighting evenly and pushing
Jiren back a little.
The next episode seems to refocus on Gohan and Freeza. After
this episode I am certainly tired of the Vegeta Goku and Jiren three-way, but
on the other hand this episode ended at such a transition point I kind of feel
they need to do something more with their fight.
We’ll see what they manage.
-Gedaemon
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