Mid-Week Review: Super Dragon Ball Heroes – Episode 3

The last time I spoke about Super Dragon Ball Heroes, I was pretty dismissive of it. My thoughts, summed up, were that the series seemed largely irreverent in the end. It was made to expand upon a series of high concept shorts, which in turn were made to promote a video game. Heroes goes onto stretch out these concepts without actually adding anything to them.

The first part presented the idea of a Super Saiyan Blue and a Super Saiyan 4 Goku fighting one another, but doesn’t actually come close to taking a stand regarding the strength of either form. It gives as much attention to the concept as the brief snippet of the commercial did before it.

Episode 3 is probably the best of the episodes I’ve seen thus far. The mysterious Saiyan with the silly name (Cumber) has been pounding our heroes without even transforming and begins his fight with Vegito. The entire episode is dedicated to this fight, and for the first time ever, we see an opponent that Vegito can’t outclass.

The two have a pretty impressive looking battle, with Vegito even using the Kaioken. And Cumber still doesn’t turn Super Saiyan, that is until he uses the fake moon ball from the original Saiyan Saga of Z and becomes a golden oozaru. Despite the fact that he seemed to be doing pretty well without it beforehand. His rampage quickly overpowers and defuses Vegito, leaving Goku and Vegeta to stare down this incredibly overpowered foe as this episode ends.

All the while, Golden Cooler stands by and watches. I’m surpised he’s still around. I was half expecting him to just vanish like Xeno Goku did after the first epsiode.

I can’t really throw any genuine criticism in Heroes direction because it’s only nine minutes long, and only six of those are new content after you take away the credits and the advertisements for the game.

Also, my main basis for comparison at the moment is Dragon Ball Super Classic, which was hardly a deep and complex piece of storytelling. It had some character development, sure, but it felt secondary and half baked to the immediate threat of Zamasu/universal erasure.

I’m getting off-topic though, which is understandable considering how little there really is to discuss when it comes to an episode of this show. Really, there’s no reason not to search this show out, they’re less than ten minutes apiece and pretty fun for what they are.

I’d just like to see Xeno Gohan show up and get to be a badass, or see him join the other fighters and do a five way fusion or something. The “what if”s presented so far have been pretty mundane all things considered. My hope going forward is things just get crazier and make less sense.

I just hope they don’t bring UItra Instinct back to save the day. And I mean ever, I enjoy the idea of that being some golden goose that Goku struggles to reattain for years to come.