Saturday, October 14, 2017

Dragon Ball Super Ep. 111: Hit Gets Hit Alot



To the surprise of Goku, and none of us, Freeza shared his energy with Goku. He also tells Goku the gods call his power ultra-instinct

Meanwhile Hit has begun his match with Jiren. We know going in he won’t win, the question is how will he lose?

Standing off, they do paint quite a picture. A picture which breaks by Jiren easily beating Hit down.

At the same time Goku watches the match from a hidden place, when two Namekians attack him from behind. Gohan and Piccolo stop them. Simultaneously Vegeta fights Ribrianne, because it’s too much to focus on one thing at a time. At least this segment is short and we go back to Hit. He’s getting hit a lot but that’s part of the plan.  He has been memorizing Jiren’s timing, so he can use his time skip effectively. It works and Hit freezes Jiren in time at the edge of the arena.  Hit orders the other members of team 6 to leave Hit to him, preparing to sacrifice himself to take out Jiren.

Of course this is Dragon Ball, where raw power is far more important than special powers. Somehow Jiren starts to resist being frozen in time. Before he can, Hit goes to deliver the final attack. Of course it’s futile, Jiren breaks out of Hit’s time power and defends himself. Hit futilely goes on an all-out attack and Jiren beats him down. It’s all incredibly formulaic. Jiren sends Hit flying, taking him out of the tournament.

The grand priest declares half the time has passed, and for some reason the sky turns green. Jiren meets back up with his teammates and declares the warriors he needed to fight are gone; He leaves the rest to Toppo and Dyspo as he starts meditating. Two scrubs attack him but are beaten back b Jiren’s energy alone.

Super’s writing has been letting me down lately. I think the problem is the show is giving me too much time to think. I’ve been watching shounen fighting shows long enough to know the standard tropes and can figure a lot of stuff out.

But Super knows large parts of its audience are longtime fans, so they should try to keep us guessing. If I can guess the general lay out of the episode after the first few minutes, that’s lazy writing.

Perhaps things would be different if I was marathoning the show, or I didn’t hear the occasional spoiler on twitter, though I try to avoid those. Perhaps if I had less time to think there would be more of an impact. But this is a weekly show, and I am reviewing it as such, so I can’t give it a pass.

I will admit parts of the episode were fun. Hit pushed Jiren to his limits, used a good strategy and revealed a new finisher. Jiren overpowering time control was kind of cool but it’s predictable by this point. And Hit standing around and talking before trying to finish the fight seemed not very much like what an assassin would do. Being a professional rather than a fighter or a sadistic nutjob is kind of what set Him apart. His talking during battle should be kept at a bare minimum.

I hope the next episode, which appears to feature a lot of Cabba and Vegeta will be less predictable.

-Gedaemon

No comments:

Post a Comment

Popular Posts