Stepping back into Akira Toriyama’s world of Dragon Ball Z, this time in HD so far has been interesting. While the English dubbed version still has a ways to go to catch up to the Japanese version so far fan’s of the series will notice quite a few differences than the original. Kai cuts out all the filler episodes and goes straight to the main classic battles.
Z has nearly 300 episodes while Kai will have around 100, some new scenes have been added, dialog has changed, and most noticably voices to Gohan and Frieza have been changed. To the long time fans this may seem annoying.

The thing that’s lacking in Kai, although a good way to pick up new fans, misses out on the character development. It takes a lot of time to watch through Z, yet the Toriyama’s world is captivating enough to keep fans entertained. In Kai the relationship between Picollo and Gohan gets missed out on and fan’s don’t get to see Gohan’s journey before
the fight with the sayians.

For an audience that wants to see something conclude as fast as possible Kai serves that purpose, but the original series still holds more value. As a long time fan of Dragon ball I’ll still watch Kai and hope other fans will also. There is still a lot more the Dragon ball world can offer, hopefully with more background stories to characters and future development. Around next year Dragon Ball Online MMORPG is supposed to come out in North America, another thing that can keep fans captivated. I’m surely excited for that to come out.