On My Shelves: Dragonball Super

I have previously reviewed Dragonball and Dragonball Z (http://grandcentralarena.com/on-my-shelves-dragonballdragonball-z/), which in a nutshell I described as "the Skylark series of anime and manga. It has much of the same cheerful, full-speed-ahead energy, the same innocence of the protagonists, the same fairly simple, blunt-instrument approach to moral problems… and the same incredibly-escalating powerscale. It may not be the BEST of its kind, and perhaps many of the pieces were there beforehand, but it was the one that put them all together [ Continue reading... ]

On My Shelves: Dragonball Xenoverse

I've been a fan of Dragonball for… Holy sheep, over 26 years now. The intensity of my fandom has varied, and I am very far from blind to the various flaws of the series, but it's such a very fun over-the-top series in many ways – and its newest incarnation on TV, Dragonball Super, has done a lot of work to address some of the prior installments' flaws.   Because of this, and because I realized I only had one fighting game for the PS4 in the house, I decided to check out what the Dragonball franchise's fighting games were like now. [ Continue reading... ]

On My Shelves: Dragonball/Dragonball Z

    SAA, NEGAI O IE. DONNA NEGAI MO HITOTSU DAKE KANAETE YAROU. (COME THEN, STATE YOUR WISH. I SHALL GRANT YOU ANY ONE WISH.)        When Kathleen and I lived in Pittsburgh, I had made the acquaintance of a gentleman named Michael Collins. Mr. Collins was quite an anime enthusiast, and I often referred to him as our anime "pusher", as he had a fairly large collection and was willing to loan tapes to get us hooked into various shows. People can blame him for my having knowledge of quite a number of shows, including Sailor [ Continue reading... ]