Introduction

After five long years of owning the Japanese Dragon Boxes, I've decided to give FUNimation's one a chance. This will most likely be the only set I'll pick up because we only go to America [for our college study trip] once a year, but since I own both now this comparison should enlighten you.

Box Art Design

The North American release of the Dragon Box is a lot smaller than the R2 one, and the box isn't as durable as the Japanese set either. The box is covered with separate pieces of wrapping all in a shiny neat package compared to the R2 one. It sort of looks good with the Japanese Dragon Box which is also shiny.

Due to size issues, the spine art of the DVD books has been cropped resulting in seeing only the beginning part of Son Goku's arm. The writing is squished at the bottom going over his hand!

Picture

This box set has a regular 4:3 transfer that is clear and sharp throughout. As with my R2 set there are some minor compression artifacts that are only really noticeable during freeze frame due to the grain. As you would expect from compression the quality of the episodes seems slightly brighter than my R2's, but doesen't make any colours bleed or stand out but is noticable alot sometimes. Dragon Ball Z was and always will be is certainly more sophisticated than most anime released today, the character designs are simpler drawn using Cels and looked good in their day, and backgrounds are nicely hand drawn without any CGI treatment. Though animes now-a-days may be better animated than this, in terms of quality, the animation is very effective, and certainly goes a step beyond newer long running shows like Naruto or Bleach and even One Piece.

Sound & Playback

The 5.1 English and 96kb/s Japanese stereo is more than adequate in recreating the original experience, which isn't as good as my R2 set mostly due to the compression of the disks. The start up of the disks of this season offers some new theme tunes, unlike my R2 set they are memorable and suit the menus well, while the incidental music is a little more generic, it gives Dragon Ball Z its own musical identity. The North American release of the Dragonbox also has a very closly done menu system like my own with just the images being non moving unlike my R2 set which had them... it's a really nice feature indeed.

The disks seem to have different designs on them as well but only a few do. All episodes have the Openings, Closings and EP Previews that my R2 set did and there is grain in them... pleases me just fine.

They also are defaulted to Japanese with subs so if I needed to change it to english I have to do it from the menu, but since I am a Japanese fan it pleases me just fine the way it is.

I sampled the English dub and found it acceptable if unspectacular. It certainly isnt the worst I have heard, but some of the actors dont seem particularly suited to the characters and would have been better if they made a accurate script from the Tenkaichi or Burstlimit games in it. As with all releaces the Diamo translated subtitles are provided, which I expected and it's really a good point to me.

Extras

My North American release Dragon Book is almost a complete translation of pages from my
R2 Dragon Book but is cut in half with proper name descriptions such as Kuririn, Freeza, Yamucha, Genki-dama and Kienzan. There are some dub translations used such as World Tournament otherwise always written as Tenkaichi Tournament instead of Tenkaichi Budokai and one Vegeta Saga otherwise written as Saiyan Saga instead of Saiya-jin Saga.

And my North American release of Dragon Book has a few typos. They spelt Raditz's name wrong in one of the paragraphs as well as a few other things, also the pictures are entirely different than my R2 Dragonbook especially the "Profile Of Goku Family" section and the "Early Days" which has had some screen caps changed around and the layout is different aswell.

As for the disks extras there is no extras on them unlike my R2 set which had lots of them on them, maybe it's because my NA DBox set only has 42 episodes?

With great features comes great responsibility but even with great features such as there there must be flaws too it... well I found some real bad ones and one which I can't understand read below to see what's wrong with this set...

Problems

I do have a few problems with my North American release of the Dragonbox and one very unusual one that I hope someone can tell me if it's just my imagination or not.

Ok firstly the scene selection doesn't separate the recap from part one of the actual episodes like my R2 set did. Those are aspects that I was used to that now hinder my enjoyment, and are thus flaws in my mind.

Secondly as I mentioned before it seems that due to the conversion the images seem slightly brighter than my R2 set, but doesen't make any colours bleed or stand out but is noticable alot sometimes especially in the Son Goku VS Vegeta beam battle.

And lastly due to some sort of conversion process in the NA releace it seems that Funi's masters seem to be lower down in the screen than my R2's are...

As you can see there is a small black line in the NA releace causing the image to go down more than it should causing the lower part to be cut off but gives the viewer the ability to see the top of the film which the R2's did not cause they were fixated in the centre, I dunno if this happens on your set if you own it now but you should let others who own this set to find out. It's noticable since my TV isn't black it's silver and the line really gets on my nerves.

Conclusion

Okay, that's it. This box set is roughly based on the manga storyline and goes through the entire Saiyan arc (with quite a bit of filler in between) and then all the way to the fake Namek episodes. The last few discs of this set do offer both the best and the worst of Dragon Ball Z, even if the anime creators weren't frantically making up stories to fill a schedule before arriving on Namek just yet. I wouldn't call it bad filler, but you get the most of Son Gohan's training, the battle with the Saiyans, and eventually when the Namek arc releases, a long and bumpy ride!

Overall Score 8/10