How The Series Is Wasting One of its Most Interesting Aspects

Key Takeaways

• Dragon Ball Super introduced the concept of a multiverse with limitless potential for new characters and story arcs.
• Despite the buildup in the Tournament of Power, the series largely ignored the multiverse concept in recent arcs.
• Exploring the multiverse further could lead to incredible storylines, power scaling, and collaborations against greater threats.

Dragon Ball made a triumphant return to the anime world with the release of the Battle of Gods film in 2013, which essentially started as the kick-off point for the Dragon Ball Super series. This new series showed the Z-Fighters attaining levels of power far greater than anything that they had shown before, as well as introducing new characters who were far stronger than anyone else had been in the past.

This series culminated in the Tournament of Power; a multiversal contest for survival where the strongest fighters from 8 of the 12 universes competed to see who would continue to exist. However, since the end of the tournament, the concept of the multiverse has largely been forgotten about in the series, so let’s take a look at how its potential is being squandered and how it can be used to give the series amazing story arcs in the future.

Wasted Potential Of The Multiverse

How Dragon Ball is Ignoring One of Its Best Aspects

First mentioned fairly early in the Dragon Ball Super anime, the concept of the multiverse is still relatively new to the franchise. When Champa and Vados visit Universe 7, it is stated that there are a grand total of 12 universes which are all essentially made in pairs that, when their corresponding universe designation is added together, add up to 13. For example, Universes 1 and 12 are a pair, 2 and 11 are a pair, 6 and 7 are a pair, etc.

When this revelation was made, the entire Dragon Ball community was taken aback, as the options for where the series could go in the future were limitless, as well as the fact that there were likely very many powerful characters awaiting the heroes in each universe. For the most part, this was true, as was seen in the Tournament of Power, where the strongest fighters from 8 of the 12 universes fought against one another for survival.

The multiverse also played a role before the final arc of the Super anime, where Universes 6 and 7 held an exhibition match to see which of them would get Earth. After this, it was also shown in the Goku Black arc, since Zamasu was originally a Kai from Universe 10. All this build-up paid off in the Tournament of Power, which showed the true potential of the multiverse in all its glory.

However, after the anime ended, the franchise continued the story but had very little, if anything at all, to do with the concept of the multiverse. This is because the first arc after the Tournament was the official introduction of Broly into the series, followed by the Moro arc, then the Granolah arc, and finally, the Super Hero arc, none of which showed anything about the multiverse and stuck solely to events inside of Universe 7. While this isn’t at all a bad thing, especially when considering all of these arcs were great, it’s preventing the story from being far wider-arching and having grander stakes.

Why The Multiverse Should Be Explored

Potentially Amazing Arcs Await

The concept of the multiverse was one of the most beloved aspects of all of Dragon Ball Super and was met with a lot of praise. The main reason for this is that the potential for incredible arcs and far greater power scaling is increased if there are many new characters and plot points that the protagonists aren’t used to due to only staying in their native universes.

An example of this is Jiren himself. Before his official reveal, there was an incredible build-up of there potentially being a mortal in one of the universes who surpassed his God of Destruction in terms of strength. So, if there are more build-ups similar to this in any regard, fans of the series would absolutely love it because it would greatly increase the world-building of the series.

There is a universe where there’s a mortal even a God of Destruction can’t defeat.

This can be done with Universes 1, 5, 8, and 12 since they were already exempt from the Tournament of Power due to their incredibly high mortal level, which means that the average mortal in these universes is far more developed than in the other universes. This could mean that there are even more characters at the level of, or even stronger than, Jiren and the means of facing such characters could come from the Z-Fighters traveling to any one of these universes.

The possibilities are endless, especially when considering that the final arc of the series could contain a greater villainous force that could potentially pose a threat to the entire multiverse, which would have the Z-Fighters team up with their former foes from the Tournament of Power to bring the character down. At this stage, Dragon Ball really needs to flesh out the concept of the multiverse even more to make the most out of the rich and vibrant world that Akira Toriyama created.

Dragon Ball can be streamed on Crunchyroll.