Dragonball Z Season Six (Digitally Remastered)   Starring (voice): Masako Nozawa, Ryo Horikawa and Hiromi Tsuru Manga Entertainment RRP: £34.99 Certificate: 12 Available 04 March 2013

Hot on the heels of season five of Dragon Ball Z, we get season six, which was the last based on the original manga. This season continues the time trotting time saga of the Cell arc, which is a nice way of saying you’re looking at twenty-nine episodes of training and fighting with no discernible character development or engaging narrative...

With Cell bent on world domination, he challenges the planet's strongest fighters to test their skills against him. The show is positively anal about discussing who is stronger than who and how the various participants will get stronger so that they can take Cell on. If this had been the last series there may have been a chance for real tension with the possibility of seeing some of the central characters slaughtered for challenging Cell, but of course this will not happen.

It would seem that most long running anime tends to fall into the trap of pretty much rehashing a formula of a weak central plot which only exists to provide a forum for endless fights. The show is old enough to have started this trend.

Now, given the popularity of this and other shows, there is certainly a large audience out there. Watched over a twenty-nine week period, where you can forget some of what you have seen probably works to the show's strengths, but watched all together the show quickly becomes repetitious.

This is not to take away from the show's place in history, without which you may not be enjoying all those other Shonen shows. Once again we are presented with an improved but cropped picture, which works well to give the print a more cinematic feel. There are only a couple of occasions when it is obvious that part of the shot is missing. On the whole the cropping enhances the show.

So, you get episodes 166-194, spread across six DVDs. For extras you get textless opening and closing songs on disc six. From the menu, you can choose to watch either single episodes, or the marathon option will play the whole disc in one go. Once again, as there were various audio versions created for the show, all three have been included on the disc including a 5.1 surround Sound English dub, with the Japanese music, the Stereo American track and the original mono Japanese track, with subtitles.

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Charles Packer