The Dragon Ball Z Season Three DVD box set includes six DVDs that contain thirty-three episodes. The first three discs contain six episodes, discs four and five contain five episodes, and the sixth disc contains five episodes and the DVD extras.
On the main menu for the first five discs, you can choose to watch all the episodes, watch the disc with the marathon feature, choose which episode you want to watch, and set up your language and subtitle options. One of the best things about this DVD set is the marathon feature. This feature allows you to watch all of the episodes back-to-back, but you only see the opening credits once; the ending credits are not shown when watching with the marathon feature. This feature really helps when you’re trying to watch all the episodes on a single disc in one sitting. However, this feature really helps the viewer to realize just how much stretching was going on. In this season, the battle with Freeza seemed to drag on endlessly over a ridiculous amount of episodes.
In the setup menu, you can choose between the English audio from when the series originally aired on television, the English dialogue with the original Japanese music, and Japanese dialogue and music. In this menu, you can also choose to turn the subtitles on and off.
The menu on the sixth DVD adds in a link for the special features. However, there isn’t much of anything in the way of special features included with this set. All you get are the textless versions of the opening and ending credits (this feature was already included on the first two DVD box sets), and trailers. Unfortunately, these features aren’t very “special.” The trailers included on this set are for animeOnline, Dragon Ball Z Blu Ray, Tenchi Muyo Ryo Ohki, Dragon Ball Z, Yu Yu Hakusho, The Slayers, Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3, and the Z-Store.
Another problem with this set is the audio mastering levels. FUNimation’s opening splash screen and the trailer at the beginning of each DVD were mastered at a high audio level, but the menu and the actual episodes were mastered with a rather soft audio level. It’s frustrating to have to sharply turn the volume down when you put the DVD into the player, and then having to turn the volume back up considerably in order to hear the audio for the episodes.
While I was disappointed with the audio levels and the lack of special features, this set is still a “must get” for any Dragon Ball Z fan that wants all the episodes on DVD. This 33-episode set sells for anywhere between $30 and $50. It’s not too bad of a price, considering that you get 33 episodes in the set. However, it would be a little more worth the cost if FUNimation had put more effort into the special features.
In order to write this review, I checked out a copy of this DVD box set through the King County Library System.
