Dragon Ball Super: All sagas ranked

❘ Updated: 2024-02-05T18:05:28

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No one can deny that Dragon Ball Super introduced new heights and stakes that previous entries in the series could only attempt to reach. So we’ll be looking into the story of Dragon Ball Super and ranking every Saga accordingly. Yes, including filler.

As the franchise goes on, Dragon Ball seems to move away from its roots of adventure to a theme of pure action and fighting. Dragon Ball Super cemented this thematic change with Goku and the Z Fighters only jumping into the action when needed rather than going out on a grand adventure. However, great stories still pertain in the series.

With Dragon Ball Super, the series revitalized itself and grew in popularity not seen since the era of Dragon Ball Z, introducing new characters and high stakes rarely touched upon. The story continues to contain its stories within “Sagas” as it does in all other Dragon Ball series, so we’ll be ranking all of the sagas in DB Super from worst to best.

All sagas in Dragon Ball Super ranked

We’ll be ranking all of the Sagas in the Dragon Ball Super anime; this means we will be leaving out the arcs that continued in the manga and those that have appeared in the movies, which, fortunately, some have been adapted into the series.

6. Copy-Vegeta Saga

In the aftermath of the Tournament of Destroyers, the gang takes time for some rest and relaxation, with Goku wanting to train with Monaka (Beerus in disguise), Goku losing most of his strength and needs to take it easy, and a brief adventure where Trunks and Goten go to space with Vegeta and Goku to fight a purple clone of Vegeta. It doesn’t sound great from the premise alone.

When we get to the action, there’s nothing particularly exciting besides seeing Gotenks for the first time in a long while alongside Vegeta looking silly with a pacifier in his mouth as Goku defeats his clone before he fades away, Back to the Future style. The meat of the saga just doesn’t do it and screams anime filler that’s waiting for the manga to get ahead.

Addressing the elephant in the room, this is, in fact, an anime-only filler saga with very little value regarding the overall story of Dragon Ball Super. With that said, it contains a series of surprisingly delightful slice-of-life style episodes. We see Goku and the gang hanging out as friends and him being a grandfather. It’s a calm we rarely see and could use more of in a series of fighting and screaming.

5. Universe 6 Saga – The Tournament of Destroyers

When Beerus and his brother from Universe 6, Champa, meet, they end up butting heads over whose universe is the strongest, with them organizing a tournament between their universes, much to Goku’s excitement. In true God of Destruction nature, the reward is the ownership of Earth and all of the delicious food that Beerus boasted of.

This Saga is the first case of seeing characters from another universe up close in action. With time, it’s perceived as more of a teasing setup for the later Tournament of Power, acting as a taster of who could participate in a sizeable multiverse-scale tournament. After all, there are at least seven universes we know of at this point, so that’s a lot of potential fighters.

The new faces we meet in the fighting cast of Universe 6 are a great mix of character design. Including the extremely powerful time-hopping Hit and what Saiyans from another universe may look like. Though it sounds fight-heavy, this Saga doesn’t shy away from the humor and callbacks, with the Hyperbolic Time Chamber appearing to give Vegeta and Goku a training boost before the tournament and a friendly Majin Buu falling asleep during the written test portion of the tournament. To be fair, fighting powerful warriors from another universe pales in comparison to taking an exam.

4. Golden Frieza Saga

A retelling of the film “Resurrection F,” Frieza’s comeback story is coated in that tasty vengeance that we should have felt when he arrived on Earth in Dragon Ball Z. Putting all of the heroes on the brink of losing until the big two turn up and using underhanded tactics to get the upper hand, in DBZ he turns up with his daddy saying “that’s the boy that beat me up!”

Goku and Vegeta aren’t on the scene when Frieza lands on Earth, leaving the remaining Z Warriors to deal with Frieza’s forces until they arrive. This battle gives each character a brief moment to shine, with every hero worth a thousand of Frieza’s henchmen before things take a turn for the worse and Goku and Vegeta take over.

What wins this saga over to us is that Vegeta finally gets to straight up pummel the tyrant he lived under all his life and we get a glimpse of what happens if Frieza wins, he blows up the planet. On the other hand, what lets the saga down is that Beerus is right there with Whis to clean up the mess if things go too far, which they do, resulting in a feeling that Frieza could never win, to begin with, and therefore, no real stakes were ever-present.

3. God of Destruction Beerus Saga

After sleeping for almost 40 years, the God of Destruction, Beerus, has a dream that someone could match his power and give him a genuine fight, the Super Saiyan God. He and his assistant Whis go on a journey to find it. They start their search at the top of the Saiyan food chain with Goku, wiping the floor with him, and this makes Vegeta act like a stooge who appeases the God of Destruction lest he destroy Earth because his food is cold.

When Dragon Ball Super started, we knew it’d be an adaptation of the Battle of Gods movie storyline; with that said, it’s a relatively slow start compared to the other series, and Beerus isn’t very imposing as a villain; he’s too powerful, later cementing his role as an angsty ally at worst. However, he does go through with his threats of destroying entire worlds for no reason.

This early Saga in Dragon Ball Super does give us an idea of what Goku and friends get up to in peacetime, living their average lives outside of training. Still, we can see there’s post-Dragon Ball Z fatigue, and Goku is itching for a challenge to get a bit of excitement back in his life. It’s good to see that Goku is still the same even when things are quiet.

2. Future Trunks Saga

When we left Trunks in Dragon Ball Z, everything was looking up. The Androids and Cell are gone, and Humanity seems to be getting back on its legs. That is until a Supreme Kai Apprentice of another universe, Zamasu, uses the Super Dragon Balls to swap his body with the Goku’s and commits atrocities he wouldn’t even consider. Along with the Zamasu of Universe 7, they take over Trunks’ world and hunt all mortals down with extreme prejudice.

This saga gives us an excellent premise; it’s an extremely interesting saga where the characters do not seem to have a chance against a literal immortal being, a situation only previously seen in the Dragon Ball Z movies. Plus, Trunks fans get to see him get a moment of victory since most of what we saw in DBZ was him failing.

We see Vegito return to action against the evil Goku, known as Goku Black and Zamasu, working with Trunks to take down the murderous tyrant. However, it’s useless as we discover what happens when an immortal being loses its form, leading the heroes to be bailed out of the situation by Zeno. Though interesting, the Saga’s ending lets itself down with a Deus Ex Machina ending over the ending that Trunks earned.

1. Universe Survival Saga – The Tournament of Power

The Tournament of Power is the culmination of all things Dragon Ball brought to their highest stakes possible, with the fate of the universe on the line as Goku coaxes the strongest being in the multiverse to hold a tournament so he can battle it out with the strongest beings in existence. Fans can admit that this wasn’t Goku’s finest hour when setting up the tournament.

What gives the Tournament of Power saga an edge is the setup; it’s a legitimate tournament with rules like back in Dragon Ball. Also, we need to mention everyone’s reaction to Goku even proposing this idea, even if he didn’t know the risks of suggesting it; it’s almost the fourth wall breaking with fans having the same reaction.

We can’t mention all of the fantastic moments within the Tournament itself: Goku needing to bring in Frieza as a ringer when Majin Buu can’t compete like he initially planned, the, at the time, only canon version of the Legendary Super Saiyan appearing, a wide variety of characters giving an excellent cast to fight it out with, the fight against Jiren, Goku going Ultra Instinct, all of these and more make up the Tournament of Power making it the best saga in Dragon Ball Super.

Those are our rankings of all the sagas in Dragon Ball Super. For more Dragon Ball action, why not check out our picks for the strongest characters in Dragon Ball Super, our rankings of the best Sagas in Dragon Ball Z, and, if you’ve got the stomach for it, Dragon Ball fans discussing the worst ways to die in the series.