YMMV / Super Dragon Ball Heroes

• Awesome Art: Overall, it's agreed the animation of Heroes is nothing special. Not as bad as Super at its worst, but nowhere close to Super when it was in high gear. Until Episode 13, which featured this amazing fight sequence with Goku and Hearts, animated by Naotoshi Shida. It's easily the best-animated sequence in Heroes.
• Awesome Music: While the show is considered nothing special by many, there is one thing that is consistently praised: the music done by Yuuya Mori. An otherwise not impressive frame will be praised thanks to the music chosen for the scene.
• Badass Decay: The poor storyboarding and the lackluster showcase of characters has made people think the popular characters from Super and fan-favorite transformations like Super Saiyan 4 and Ultra Instinct became lamer, with Hit and Zamasu suffering the worst case. This is especially true for Ultra Instinct where due to overexposure and a poor understanding of the transformation from the part of the scriptwriter and director (episode 15 being the worst offender), many people think it's not as good as it should be.
• Better on DVD: Due to the episodes being less than 10 minutes long, the episodes moving at a breakneck pace, the episodes releasing with big time gaps in between them, and the series being very serialized, to the point of every episode thus far playing like a cutscene from a video game (which, funny enough, is what they essentially are, due to this being a promo anime for the Dragon Ball Heroes game), it's going to be much better to wait for a bunch of the episodes to be out then binging them than watching them as they all come out.
• Canon Defilement: It's Heroes, so there will be things that break continuity and annoy some people. Specifically, part of the fanbase reacted negatively when Hit started to launch Ki blasts, something he never has done (and is not capable of in videogames like FighterZ and Xenoverse 2).
• Common Knowledge: Supposedly, Heroes reveals that Jiren considers Gogeta to be stronger than him, and this should be taken as a fact that Gogeta is the strongest ever. Right? Except that the scene in question only has Jiren asking Goku and Vegeta why they didn't fuse in the Tournament of Power if they had such a powerful technique. This is just the character asking a question, not stating or implying some fact.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Continuity Lockout: The promo anime suffers from this. While is not hard to know why Goku and Vegeta are there, a lot of people will end up questioning why Trunks and Mai are in the present again unless you read the manga or play the game, and unless you played Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, you will have no idea who Fu is.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • A meta example, but fans speculate Cumber was created since at the time of his creation Super characters couldn't be used for story reasons beyond promotion in Heroes, and with Broly becoming part of the Super continuity, Cumber was created to be a Suspiciously Similar Substitute but not an exact clone.
  • For that matter, Broly becoming a Canon Immigrant in Super and Cooler, the second most popular villain, getting a role here has fans speculating that Toei Animation is "testing the water" to see if Cooler could also be given Canon Immigrant status.
• Franchise Original Sin:
  • One of the biggest criticism with the Anime is how the characters like Cooler or Future Trunks ends up doing nothing or getting beaten up only to do something when the plot demands it. This also leads to some people calling it the Goku and Vegeta Show due to the heavy focus on them. This problem dates back to the Buu Arc however as characters like Tien does nothing in that arc and only watch the battle as Vegito and Super Buu fights. However, for many they don't mind it as Tien is not a strong character by that point as stronger characters like Gohan or Gotenks takes the spotlight. In Dragon Ball GT, characters that are strong in the last arc like Gohan Goten and later on Trunks ends up getting weaker as they end up going from getting taking over by Baby to only watching the fight as Goku and Vegeta fights Omega Shenron. This problem which is more noticeable in Dragon Ball Super, plagues Super Dragon Ball Heroes as characters who are strong and well know like Hit or Jiren ends up getting nerfed just to show how strong the new characters like the Tuffle twins or Heart is.
• Heartwarming Moments: Yamcha being confessed to by Vidro, all because he tried to protect her from Hit. It's one of the best Throw the Dog a Bone moments the writers have done for Yamcha, who has been the franchise's resident Memetic Loser for a long time. Even Vidro's clone and the normally stoic Hit were surprised by this.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: Not a dealbreaker seeing how it's only meant to be a promotional anime, but even so the fact that Super Saiyan 4 Goku and Super Saiyan Blue Goku only had a brief scuffle rather than a real fight is a serious downer for people expecting more.
• Just Here for Godzilla:
  • Some people just watch the show for Xeno Goku, missing the Super Saiyan 4 transformation from Dragon Ball GT.
  • Ditto with Cooler and his new Golden Form.
  • Some watch the episodes with Hearts just to hear Takehito Koyasu voice acting.
  • Some just watch because it's the only new Dragon Ball animated content being released post-Super Broly. Even a mediocre fix is better than none for some. The fact new episodes are only released once every month or so, are usually only around eight minutes long and are easily found to watch for free, means there's little reason not to, even for those who are just morbidly curious.
  • A number of viewers stuck around for the Supreme Kai of Time arc just to see Yamcha actually be involved in the plot for once.
• Magnificent Bastard: Hearts is the leader of the Core Area Warrior, a group who have the shared goal of eliminating all the gods, especially Zeno, by using the Universe Seed which he charges with energy from battle. Hearts successfully coerces Zamasu for his cause, and then snatches Cumber right after his defeat at the hands of the heroes. Hearts then coordinates the attack of multiple universes, strategically sending in specific fighters so they will hold advantages, while at times stepping in to assist them. Hearts is able to extract information by reading the minds of his enemies, while also making sure they are never able to get near him until he has enough power to fight them. Upon attaining enough energy for the Universe Seed, Hearts uses it to transform into his Ultimate God Slayer form, where he proceeds to kill Zamasu. Coming very close to killing the heroes, when he is finally defeated, Hearts dies gracefully expressing his desire was simply to free mortals from the gods, as well as his newfound respect towards mortals.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Just like in Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, calling Fu a fan-fiction writer, and Cumber being his edgy Original Character (Do not steal).
  • Mocking how close the series is to the infamous Latin American theories during the Tournament of Power.
    Goken: I swear they just Google fan art to make each episode's story and characters
  • Many people have joked about being more interested in Yamaha's relationship with the Female Warrior in Black than any of the crazy what-if scenarios the show is known for.
• Pandering to the Base: Just like the source material (that sells cards for kids to play in the arcade), the anime is basically an excuse to have fan-favorite characters fight each other, especially ones who never met each other in any canon and in forms they never had. Examples include Cooler becoming Golden in his Fifth and Metal forms and fighting Cumber in them, Super Saiyan 4 Xeno Goku vs Super Saiyan Blue Goku, Jiren vs a Fused Zamasu with Complete Immortality, and Vegeta being possessed by Oren so the anime can have the closest thing to Baby Vegeta and fighting the heroes.
• Rooting for the Empire: Yeah, Hearts is a bastard... but his goal still makes it hard for many fans to blame him, given Super's countless moments of Jerkass Gods tormenting mortals. And it helps that his first target is none other than Zamasu.
• Signature Scene: Episode 13 has the fight between Super Saiyan Blue Goku and Super Hearts as animated by Naotoshi Shida.
• So Okay, It's Average: While Super was infamous for frequent instances of Off-Model animation being followed by one episode of gorgeous animation and then so on and so forth due to its Troubled Production, Heroes on the other hand has a more consistent art style, but the storyboards and fight scenes are nothing spectacular compared with Super due to Tadayoshi Yamamuro's quite repetitive frames.
• Tear Jerker: Trunks learning that the one-armed Warrior in Black is actually an alternate Future Gohan who crossed the Despair Event Horizon after losing his Trunks and Bulma. The poor guy was already one of the biggest woobies in the series and now he's forced to fight a corrupted version of his best friend and mentor.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Cooler and Trunks don't really do much in the anime version, being Advertised Extras at best, as the anime doesn't adapt any of the Prison Planet villains from the games besides Cumber.
  • Caulifla and Kale don't fuse into Kefla in the anime.
  • Cabba is not used at all in either version despite appearing in both. If instead of Oren taking control of Vegeta it was Vegeta having to fight an Oren possessed Cabba, the option would at least bring some decent story idea for the three characters. Alternatively, have Oren possess Cabba and Kamin Kefla, that way the three Saiyans get to share the spotlight.

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