Dragon Ball Super Hero:

This was a surprisingly good movie.  Better than Broly I'd say.  It doesn't immediately turn into a brawl, there's a lot of thought and scheming put into what goes down.  Pan's adorable acting, actually Piccolo's adorable acting as a Red Ribbon soldier, really was the highlight of the film.  Piccolo has always used his wits alongside his strength to solve problems, and he was true to form this time as well.

A funny spar fight between Goku and Vegeta, which keeps them away from the Earth's crisis, gives Piccolo and Gohan the chance to shine as they handle everything themselves.  Norio Wakamoto's voice acting as a berserk subsentient new version of Cell was perfect.  I'm glad he's still voice acting these classic roles, though I wonder how long he can really do so at his age.  The art was good enough I barely noticed it was full CG.  I guess with a big enough budget you can pull that off.

You could really tell in this movie that at its heart, Dragon Ball is a gag series for kids, but that's okay.  It means there's some softhearted, nice, happy scenes mixed in between all the explosions.  The blu-ray can now be downloaded over at nyaa.si.  This is the last great new anime franchise represented in 2022, now everything I'd already predicted as coming out by the end of the year and already included in my anime chronology permapost has actually legitimately come out.  I jumped the gun a bit this year because Ken Tensei and Eminence in Shadow were already in my rankings despite not coming out yet, so my chronology had to include them ahead of time too for everything to line up.  Now I can go back to only adding to the chronology at the same time series actually become available for 2023.  Thank goodness Ken Tensei and Eminence in Shadow were great as expected.  I recently found out that the first episode of Shadow, which had been so confusing, was also canon and correct, so my last worry has been laid to rest.

I'm about 2/3 of the way through the 2-star instrumental songs, correcting the mislabeled ones into vocals as I go.  But man, 2-star songs aren't to be underestimated.  These songs are still by the same famous composers, they're still from the same famous albums, as my 5-star songs.  It's still full of Final Fantasy, Tales, Ogre Battle/Tactics Ogre, Lunar/2, Chrono Trigger/Cross, Xenosaga/blade/gears, Final Fantasy Tactics, Mega Man, it's got everything.  The main difference is the 2-star songs are shorter than their more famous 5-star cousins, which is why this tier is only 2.1 days in total length when the previous ones were 2.6 or 2.7 days.  Shorter songs are less epic and inevitably can't compete, but it's not because they're actually bad to hear while they're playing.  I'm really enjoying listening to this tier for the first time in a while too.  Maybe the 1-star instrumentals will finally let me down? (Though of course the 5-star songs are better than the 2-star songs even on a per second basis, it's just not as big a gap as you'd assume).