Even the big bad villain of the second arc doesn’t explain his motivations until just before his death–motivations which suddenly turn him into a tragic and highly sympathetic character right at the moment when it no longer matters. Likewise, there is no real character development for characters new or old beyond one or two lines spouted in battle.
There are no episodes of a comedic nature nor anywhere our heroes have downtime. What sets Heroes apart from the Dragon Ball anime before it is that it is focused almost completely on fighting. The third and currently running arc has Vegeta and Goku teaming up with Time Patrol Officers Trunks and Pan–along with their own Time Patrol counterparts–to fight a myriad of minor vanquished villains from their past as a demonic tree drains the life force from living beings across all 12 universes. However, things go from bad to worse as the father-son duo soon learns not only about the Tuffles’ body possession powers but also that they are part of a larger group gathering energy from across the universes to kill Zen-Oh himself. With Goku missing, Future Trunks and Vegeta travel to Universe 6 to help Hit, Kale, and Caulifla battle two Neo Machine Mutant Tuffles. The second arc continues almost immediately on from the first. Yet, the real threat is the one behind the scenes forcing our heroes to fight. But when Goku and Vegeta arrive there, they are confronted by a different Goku–one who can transform into a Super Saiyan form beyond that of even Super Saiyan Blue.
While visiting the past with Mai, Trunks is captured and locked away on a mysterious prison planet. Heroes takes place after the events of Dragon Ball Super (or at least at that time in a similar reality where Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, and Dragon Ball Super all happened along with the events of the films Tree of Might, Cooler’s Revenge, and Bojack Unbound).
But that’s far from the only way it’s different from the TV series that came before. Based on the trading card/arcade game of the same name, the anime is released monthly (give or take a week here or there) with each episode lasting about 10 minutes. But a mere three months after its end in 2018, a new Dragon Ball anime was already airing online: Super Dragon Ball Heroes. Let’s talk about the Dragon Ball anime series that people love to ignore.ĭragon Ball Super ran for three years and 131 episodes.