Thursday, April 12, 2018

Dragon Ball Super and Yo-Kai Watch: A Tale of Two Finales.

This is something that I've thought about doing for a while, so with the recent series finales to both Dragon Ball Super and Yo-Kai Watch, I thought I would briefly address the two episodes and discuss how I feel the former was able to make good use of its series end; and the latter was not as much.

Even though I admit that I was never a big fan of the Yo-Kai Watch anime (if my writing about it here is any indication), I was hoping that the finale would actually give the fans something to enjoy before the rebrand to Shadowside. Sadly, even people who were fans had mixed feelings towards it. After 214 episodes, I still felt little emotional connection to what was going on; and even in the end, what could have helped give a solid transition to Shadowside still fell victim to many of the things that I could never enjoy about the series. Not exactly a game of pinochle on the Enterprise. Still, with Yo-Kai Watch 4 in development for the Switch and Shadowside adopting a darker story, my plan for future content about the series is this: if the third game is given an official release in the US (no, the Blasters spinoff doesn't count), I will recap the third movie once my computer is fixed and end my coverage with a recap of the Shadowside movie. If not, nothing I have planned will change; especially with Psychic Specters having only sold 70,000 copies as of this writing the US, far less than what it sold in Japan and barely a single percentage point of the 7 million (and counting) copies of Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon.

Dragon Ball Super, on the other hand, easily is my favorite Dragon Ball finale ever. While I can understand how people feel about the show, it actually exceeded many expectations people had. It didn't just feel like a finale to Super: it felt like a finale to the past 30-odd years of the Dragon Ball story as we knew it. With a movie on the way for summer in Japan and a proposed followup called "Dragon Ball Ultra" in production, it's something that I have loved ever since I was 9 still appealing to me at age 26. Even as I'm mulling over doing a live-action recap of the infamous "Dragonball Evolution," I still am eager to see what's next.

That said, while it's clear that Yo-Kai Watch has had some sway over longtime obsessions Pokémon and Digimon; I honestly don't know how the future will look. If the Shadowside rebrand is well-received, than I will support it. However, if it flops and ends up killing the franchise, then that's that. Either way, I gotta get to my screenwriting class. I will address this further another time. See you, space cowboy.

No comments:

Post a Comment