Romars202129
Member
I'm going to get a lot of flack for this but I think I've settled on this opinion:
The Recruitment arc is one of, it not THE best TOEI original story ever in Dragon Ball history.
Maybe not as good as the Bardock special (History of Trunks is great too, but doesn't count cause it's an adaptation of Toriyama's story), but I seriously feel it's up there.
For one, this is arguably the most character development ANY character has gotten in Dragon Ball in both canon and non-canon material ever. So much emphasis was placed on characters overcoming problems, and resolving them logically in some fantastic character interactions. There's some dopey episode here-and-there, like when Android 17 and Goku teamed up to beat space poachers, but even that two-parter had some genuine great moments in it through-and-through.
People complain about power scaling, but to be honest the series at it's height of popularity ALWAYS had BS power ups out of nowhere with a lot of the side characters. Just the side characters stopped getting a lot of the focus in the Boo arc, which was one of the arc's biggest flaws imo. Though keep in a mind a lot of things is probably just TOEI weirdness above all else, but regardless I think keeping characters "in line" with the others is a tradition that should've been kept despite being abandoned by Toriyama himself until this recent arc.
Also the insight into the other universes was some great stuff as well. The interactions between Cabba, Kale, and Caulifla. Hit and Frost having their own encounter. The Pride Troopers doing their thing. A Sailor Moon parody. All of it was genuinely fun in their own right and had their own character moments as well.
It also helps that this arc also excelled greatly at worldbuilding. The fact we even got insight into freaking poaching in the Dragon Ball world is astonishing in of itself relative to the lack of insight we got with even the original manga. That's one thing that Super has undeniably done over the original manga in how expansive the world of Dragon Ball is setup to be. The Recruitment arc does this in spades, and then some. It's not quite as crazy as the worldbuilding in One Piece in comparison, but you have to start somewhere I guess.
I'm not 100% how much of the arc was TOEi and how much was Toriyama, but regardless it was a fantastic arc through-and-through with some genuinely great character arcs with some really nicely animated fights and sequences spliced in there as well.
It fucked up my boy Tien too much. I'm still not over how shit that episode was. Rape Roshi and even Yurin over Launch, it was the perfect time to bring back launch smh.
Also Caulifla and Kale was a fumble imo. Other than that, yeah it was pretty good. 17 stuff, Krillin and Frieza was all done wonderfully.