Dragon Ball Super – Volume 5 Review
We rejoin the story at a rather crucial point: Goku and Vegeta are pretty much out of power, Future Trunks has revealed that he has a certain amount of healing powers he gained from becoming his timeline’s Supreme Kai’s apprentice (something exclusive to the manga adaptation) and the two different versions of the God Zamasau have fused into one being using the Portara Earrings, gaining greater power and a mostly immortal body. Sounds crazy right? Well, it has been. Goku soon has no other choice but to accept that he is facing an opponent he can’t beat, and all hope seems lost…
SPOILERS ABOUT THE ENDING OF THE FUTURE TRUNKS ARC BELOW
What was funny is how the anime and the manga adapted the same bullet point in different ways. In the end the immortal Zamasau is literally that, immortal, and becomes a threat to the entire universe and beyond, leading to Goku summoning Zeno, the Lord of all Universes, to destroy him (and the entire universe of Future Trunks’ timeline). In the anime, Zamasu’s body was destroyed but multiple copies of his face filled in the sky showing that he had become something more than a physical body and was still more than able to destroy the universe. In the manga here, his body is destroyed but the various blobs of Zamasu form into multiple copies of the fallen God, all walking around and talking. So I guess the bullet point in Toriyama’s brief was something along the lines of “Looks like he’s been destroyed but instead he multiplies” and the two different adaptations took it in similar, yet different, directions. It’s these little things that make reading the manga and watching the anime a fun and very different experience to the usual manga/anime combination…
SPOILERS ABOUT THE ENDING OF THE FUTURE TRUNKS ARC ARE OVER
We then enter the Universe Survival Arc, which infamously ends in a battle royal style “tournament” between eight universes, but the two chapters at the end of this manga volume see Goku get restless and visit Zeno, ruler of all universes and… Zeno, ruler of all universes from another timeline (don’t ask…) to remind him of the promise he made about an inter-universe tournament, which the Zeno of this timeline had apparently forgot. It’s soon set in motion, but what is interesting about the manga is that it has a greater focus on the Gods of Destruction from other universes. Most of them get several panels’ long introductions, and the evil-clown-looking Belmod from Universe 11 gets quite the detailed intro setting him up as a more villainous one (which is weird when they’re all called “Gods of Destruction” but there you go). It ends with a battle royal involving the good majority of Destructive Gods, and most of them target Beerus, due to an incident many millennia ago. In the anime it was a fight between just three of the new ones, so it’s quite the different scene, really…
The artwork by Toyotarou is, as always, on point and very close to Akira Toriyama’s original style. There is a short, funny bonus chapter at the end of the volume called “Extra Edition 2”, originally appearing in a Jump! Guide Book, which is always nice for completionists.
So overall the volume contains the final chapters of one story arc and the beginnings of the next, so you get your big action spreads at the start, but then it’s mostly talking to end a story, and then talking to set up the next, which is rare for a manga series that normally only focuses on action and very little else. For fans only, though, I feel, as the two story lines featured are rather bizarre and just exist mostly to get to more fights and transformations…
