Dragon Ball Z
Our Review
The show that put anime on the map in the West. Goku is grown, his son Gohan is the audience’s surrogate, and the villains arrive in escalating order of apocalypse: Saiyans, then Frieza, then the androids and Cell, then Majin Buu. Every kid who ran home after school in the 90s has the Faulconer soundtrack welded into their brain.
The honest criticism is real: the pacing is notorious. Namek explodes in five minutes for roughly ten episodes, and power up scenes eat whole afternoons. That is exactly why we built a full skip guide for this show: cut the filler and you lose nothing but dead air.
What people forget underneath the memes is that Z earns its legendary status. The Gohan and Cell moment at the end of the Cell Games is one of the great payoffs in anime history, set up across literal years of television. The Frieza fight invented modern shonen escalation. Vegeta is one of the best redemption arcs in the genre.
Our take: 9/10. Essential. Use our filler list, watch the sagas, thank us later.
The pacing meme is real, so we built a complete Dragon Ball Z filler list: every skippable episode, spoiler free. It saves you about 24 hours.
