Let’s get ready to rumble.
Warning: The following review contains spoilers for the episode.
It’s taken a long time to get here, but the Tournament of Power is finally ready to begin. Episode 97 was slow to start, opting for an unusually long and drawn out introduction for the tournament. Once the action gets going, however, things don’t let up as awesome new characters appear and crazy attacks blast back and forth across the battlefield.
Episode 97 opts to waste several minutes going over rules and other information. Although it makes sense for the rules to be told to all the new players who just arrived, it wasn’t done so in a way to make it interesting, which is especially annoying since we already know them. Super goes on to waste even more time afterward with a fighter montage. It’s time to get into the action, but instead were left waiting almost 10 minutes before something exciting actually began.
For being a massive 100-man brawl, Episode 97 never really made it feel as if there were that many people battling all at once. Several cuts between characters only ever showed them fighting 1v1, with explosions in the background implying more carnage was happening elsewhere. The closest we got to a good representation of a brawl scenario was the scene with Gohan and our other heroes, but it was unfortunately short and ended up amounting to nothing more than an affirmation of their opponents strength. The Tournament of Power is likely to last several episodes, so it's plausible we will see a better representation of huge battles in the future, but it seems like a missed opportunity to not have their lead-in episode feature a truly great, large-scale encounter.
Once the action does start, the episode ramps up quickly. Having a brawl allowed for Super to show off crazy new attacks and characters. With nearly 100 fighters, Super did an impressive job of making each character feel unique, even if they were only on screen for a minute. The crazy fighter who tried to take out Goku had me cracking with his wild antics and outrageous personality. All of that was conveyed through subtle animation techniques and brief yet effective lines of dialogue.
As expected, Goku had quite a lot of screentime this week. It’s good to see him fighting finally, since this tournament was primarily his doing to begin with. I was also quite pleased to see them working in things from earlier arcs. When Goku nearly got tossed out of the ring because he let his guard down, it immediately reminded me of Gohan and Piccolo and it was great to see that this story thread of Goku being careless has continued. We didn’t get to see many of our other heroes, but focusing on Goku was the right choice for the tournament’s introduction.
The Verdict
Episode 97 starts unusually slow as it spent too much time on information that is both old and delivered in an uninteresting fashion. Once things finally get rolling, the action never lets up. Some great new characters are introduced and the dialogue between the crowd left me smiling the whole time. An unfortunate focus on 1v1 combat does diminish the overall 'brawl' tone they were aiming for, but ultimately Episode 97 does a good job of kicking off the Tournament of Power.
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