Dragon Ball Super Beerus Episode 1 Review: A Tighter Recut With a Beautiful Opening

Dragon Ball Super Beerus has begun. Episode one of a planned 19 episodes has aired. I've seen it, and the opening sequence is beautiful and the pacing of the series will be faster. It isn't a complete overhaul, though, and I still felt like they could have cut more.

The project was announced back in January at an event, and since then we've been discussing this so-called enhanced edition of Dragon Ball Super. The people behind it are claiming to fix a lot of the original issues and tighten up the story to make it better. This is my immediate reaction to the first episode. A more in-depth look with comparisons and lore will follow in the next couple of days.

Dragon Ball Super Beerus is a hybrid recut, not a manga adaptation

One of the things we've been talking about all year is that this series takes assets from the 2015 Dragon Ball Super anime and adds new scenes to connect everything together. That's necessary because they're taking 47 episodes and cutting them down to about 19. The new scenes are based on elements of the manga.

This is not going to be a one to one adaptation of the Dragon Ball Super manga. That's not what you're getting here. You're getting a hybrid version of the first three arcs of Super, recut into a more continuous narrative, with a much better visual presentation. It also has new opening and ending themes and animations, with music composed by Norihito Sumitomo, who also did the original Dragon Ball Super as well as the movies Battle of Gods, Resurrection F and Broly.

The new Dragon Ball Super Beerus opening sequence is beautiful

Let me tell you, this opening is beautiful. It's energetic. Some of you saw the leaked clips of it that popped up on TikTok and other social media outlets from the New York Comic Con panel. I talked about it a month later: a legendary animator who worked on Dragon Ball Z, GT and a tiny bit of Super helped out with this opening.

The scene of Goku transitioning from a little kid growing up, through his various battles, transformations and evolutions, is so beautiful. It feels like a modern, uptempo anime. I really wish the original Dragon Ball Super had been given this much care. In case you don't remember, the original Super had a two month preproduction window. Because of that, you had problems like animation errors, really bad pacing issues early on, and all types of filler written by the Toei executives.

The way they're looking at this project is: let's give the people the definitive version of the first three arcs. To me, Dragon Ball Z Battle of Gods is the version of that story Akira Toriyama worked on the most. He helped Toyotarou a little here and there early on and gave him advice, and they became kind of partners on the manga. But for the movie, he worked right with Yusuke Watanabe to write the script. So they're trying to give us that with a little more sizzle and pace it out in episodes. Because of the nature of that era and the project at the time, the original Super didn't get this kind of care. The intro has to be seen to be believed. I hope Dragon Ball gets this kind of energy from every project going forward, because it's a nice feeling.

Episode 1 sets Beerus up as a serious and dangerous threat

This episode seeks to establish Beerus as a very serious and dangerous threat, a real problem. I think a lot of folks have to remember just how scary Beerus was hyped up to be back in the day. I think we've gotten used to him being one of Goku's trainers and friends. Really, Whis does the training, but Beerus is there, and he's sort of an ally of Goku.

When he first showed up, though, they did a huge service in getting the audience to understand that this guy is leagues above anybody Goku had faced before. This episode sought to establish that.

The first two episodes of Super have been cut together into one

The original idea behind this project, the way it was first told to me, was that it was a Kai version of Super. Going all the way back to my coverage of the first announcement, we talked about how even the files for the poster pointed to that. So internally at Toei Animation, it was being referred to as Dragon Ball Super Kai. It's not exactly that, because they are doing more touch ups and enhancements.

Essentially, what they did here was take the first two episodes of Dragon Ball Super and cut them together into one episode. With later episodes they're going to be moving more stuff around, but even in this one, they've started building the more focused narrative I discussed. What I meant by that is moving scenes to different places. For example, the material of Vegeta training and trying to surpass Kakarot has been moved somewhere else. The whole plot line from the first episode where Mr. Satan comes and gives Goku the money he felt he owed him is still there, right around the middle. Then they go to Beerus waking up and visiting a couple of planets where the food is bad. It's very similar to the first two episodes, just cut together.

They also did some touch ups. Take the guy Beerus fights and kills, who was yellow originally and then transformed into a giant red guy. Some people pointed out that in my earlier breakdown I'd said I thought he was red, but he was yellow first and went red when he fought Beerus, which is why I vividly remembered the red part. That's still in here, but they cut a lot of the surrounding material and put that fight near the end of the episode. When he powered up and when Beerus blew him up, there were more effects. To hide some of the choppier looking animation, they added aura effects and things like that.

The episode titles have also been simplified. There's no old Dragon Ball Z style double title. This episode is just called God of Destruction. That's it: very simple, very basic, to the point.

New image training animation from the manga, and the Goten and Trunks subplot is gone

The wholesome stuff with Goku and Goten is still in the episode, but not all of it. It's been cut down. The subplot with Goten and Trunks getting water for Videl isn't in here at all, nor was it really necessary to the original narrative. It didn't add anything to the original story of Battle of Gods.

Goku does image training here. In fact, the first thing we really see of Goku is him by himself, farming, and then he starts to literally fantasize about fighting previous enemies: Majin Buu, Cell and Frieza. All of this is new animation made for Dragon Ball Super Beerus. There's not too much of it and it's relatively quick, but it's something they took right from the manga. We talked back in January about them taking some elements from the manga, and this is the one they chose for this episode.

So this episode can kind of serve as a sampler of what to expect from Dragon Ball Super Beerus, although there are way bigger cuts coming. For example, a lot of the Pilaf gang material from around episode 4 is getting shaved down or taken out completely. I was genuinely surprised they kept Mr. Satan giving Goku the money. They could realistically have cut that too, and I think it wouldn't have been a total loss.

If you still like the original 14 episode version of the Battle of Gods arc as opposed to this roughly five episode version, that's fine. It's always going to exist. It's on Blu-ray and it's online, and it's never going to disappear. I think they want this to be the preferred version because they did do touch ups.

Don't expect anything groundbreaking from this first episode

Yes, some stuff was added and there were some changes, but there wasn't that much new material. It isn't a complete overhaul. That's not what this is.

I thought the Sumitomo music was fine, but there was no theme that really grabbed me. I look forward to hearing what he does with some of the battle themes, and especially how they handle the Super Saiyan God ritual, because there's supposed to be some new material in that scene in particular. I'm curious to see what the final version looks like. We're probably a couple of weeks away from that.

The pacing of the series will be faster, but I still felt they could have cut more.

The Battle of Gods movie is still my favorite introduction of Beerus

After this episode, my preferred version of this opening stretch, meaning the awakening of Beerus and everything covered in episode 1, is still the Battle of Gods movie. There he's waking up groggy with his pajamas on, then having breakfast, and then Whis does the thing with the wand where he shows scenes of Goku and Frieza on Namek. That's still my favorite introduction of Beerus, more than even this recut of the first two episodes of Super.

That said, they did a pretty decent job changing the contrast and making Beerus seem like a big threat, because it feels more impactful seeing him do all these things in one episode as opposed to spread across two.

The last thing I want to comment on is the outro credits. I thought it was decent, and the song is decent, but there isn't much to it visually. It's just a sort of CGI Eternal Dragon, Shenron, and that's it. I like the original Dragon Ball Super ending way more, the one that showed Goku as a kid walking and then growing up, which ran for, I think, the first 12 or 14 episodes after Super premiered in 2015.

So there are things I like about all three versions, or five if you really want to get technical, counting the manga and the extended version of the movie.

Which introduction of Beerus do you prefer: the Battle of Gods movie, the original Super episodes, or this new recut?