Dragon Ball Super

ドラゴンボール超（スーパー）

7.5(593,184)

MAL Score

Ranked #2294

Popularity #224

Action
Adventure
Comedy
Fantasy
Martial Arts

Episodes: 131
Duration: 23 min per ep
Aired: Jul 5, 2015 to Mar 25, 2018
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

Seven years after Majin Buu’s defeat, life on Earth has settled into a rare stretch of calm, with Gokuu Son and the others enjoying peace without looming cosmic threats. That quiet doesn’t last long, as a powerful being stirs far out in space: Beerus, the formidable God of Destruction.

Troubled by a prophecy foretelling his loss to a “Super Saiyan God,” Beerus—accompanied by his attendant, Whis—sets out to find the warrior of legend. Their search eventually leads them to Earth, where they come face-to-face with Gokuu and his strongest allies, setting the stage for battles that reach beyond the planet.

Otaku Consensus

Dragon Ball Super lands as a lively but uneven continuation: its comedy, adult-cast banter, martial-arts spectacle, and late-series battle-royale energy explain why it remains highly popular despite a middling 7.47 MAL score and 73/100 AniList score. The strongest reception clusters around the material after the early movie-retelling stretch, especially the Future Trunks era and the Tatsuya Nagamine-directed final run, while the recurring criticism is that the series often leans on formulaic escalation and padded pacing before it finds momentum.

Why You Should Watch

Watch Dragon Ball Super if you want shounen excess in its purest form: transformations, rival pride, gods, aliens, space arenas, comic detours, and martial-arts logic pushed until it becomes cosmic mythology. It scratches the same power-scaling itch as Naruto Shippuden or Bleach, but with less melodrama and more “training-room argument becomes universal incident” energy. The ideal viewer is someone who enjoys long-running franchise comfort without needing a reinvention every arc: you come for Gokuu and Vegeta’s competitive rhythm, stay for the increasingly absurd rule sets, and accept that the series is at its best when it treats fighting as sport, comedy, and metaphysics at once. Skip the expectation of tight seasonal pacing; embrace the weekly battle-anime sprawl.

Key Characters

G
Gokuu Son(VA: Masako Nozawa)
Gokuu remains fascinating because his innocence and battle obsession blur the line between heroic purity and reckless competitive instinct, a tension fans debate as much as they celebrate.
V
Vegeta(VA: Ryo Horikawa)
Vegeta’s appeal in Super comes from watching a former villain operate as a pride-driven family man whose rivalry with Gokuu is less hatred than a permanent personal measuring stick.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
Toei Animation produced a full 131-episode television run from July 2015 to March 2018, giving Super the room to function as a weekly franchise event rather than a compact sequel project.
2
The series is structurally unusual because its early arcs expand and retell recent Dragon Ball film material before moving into more original television arcs, a choice frequently cited as the source of its slowest pacing.
3
Direction changed hands across the run: Masatoshi Chioka is credited as director for episodes 1-46, while Tatsuya Nagamine directed episodes 77-131, the stretch most associated with the show’s late surge in fan enthusiasm.
4
Norihito Sumitomo handled the music, with Akira Kushida credited for insert song performance, keeping the series tied to Dragon Ball’s tradition of operatic hype cues and performance-driven battle peaks.
5
AniList’s tag profile captures the show’s specific flavor: super powers, henshin forms, aliens, gods, space, time manipulation, and battle royale structure all sit alongside its martial-arts core.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: Akira Toriyama is credited as the original creator, while Toyotarou is listed for original character design assistance, reflecting Super’s position between the classic manga legacy and the modern Dragon Ball publishing era.
Fun fact 2: Tatsuya Nagamine is not only credited as director for episodes 77-131 but also as episode director for episode 95, a production detail tied to the more discussed final portion of the series.
Fun fact 3: The show’s eleventh ending theme was performed by ONEPIXCEL, one of several examples of Super using contemporary music acts alongside veteran franchise-associated performers such as Akira Kushida.
Fun fact 4: On database metrics, Super sits in an unusual spot: a MAL popularity rank of #224 and 593,184 votes show enormous reach, while its MAL rank of #2294 reflects a more divided critical average.
Fun fact 5: The critical pattern around the show is consistent across fan reviews and web commentary: many recommend pushing past the early retelling arcs, with the Universe 6 material often viewed as weaker and the Future Trunks arc commonly named as the point where the series becomes more compelling.