Dragonball Super manga Volume 1 (Chapter 8)

 By Mark Rodriguez

The tournament between Universe 6 and 7 is about to begin. The team of Goku, Vegeta, Piccolo, Majin Buu and Monaka are ready. As they encounter the members of the opposing team, they notice that one of them looks like Freeza.

Chapter 8- The Battle Begins

As everyone is ready to take the exam, Goku, Vegeta and Piccolo notice the Freeza-lookalike but they don't get a sinister vibe from him just yet. Goku also sees a giant robot-looking fighter take his seat and wonders if he's even human. Just then a kid notices Goku and Vegeta and asks if they're also Saiyans.

Vegeta says the armor he wears is similar to what Saiyans used to wear before Freeza took over. The Saiyan comes from the planet Sadla and Vegeta says that was their original planet before it fell to a civil war. They had to go out and conquer another planet and named it Vegeta, which also fell. Vegeta asks if their Saiyans are also a warrior race, and the kid says they are but they are hired to fight bad guys, not to conquer planets. Vegeta says he wants to visit Sadla someday, but it doesn't mean he'll be easy on him if they end up fighting.

The written exams starts and as you'd expect the two people having the most trouble with this are Goku and Buu. After the written exam is over, Majin Buu is the only one disqualified. He got all the answers wrong, even his name. To be fair, Buu has never done anything like this before. Goku blames Vegeta since the test was his idea. Goku came close to being disqualified too, just barely passing the test with a score of 50. Now they only have four fighters left, and Beerus tells them to decide their fighting order, leaving Monaka for last. Goku is the first to fight.

The first fight is between Goku and Botamo. Botamo moves incredibly fast despite his size and he manages to punch Goku and knock him back. Beerus asks Goku what's wrong and he says that he ate too much and needs to do some exercises. Goku runs around the ring, ignoring and dodging all of Botamo's attacks. With the Saiyan finally ready, he hits Botamo every time he tries to lunge at him, it looks as if Botamo is knocking himself back. Krillin can't even see Goku's movements and Ten Shin Han says he must be attacking very quickly. Vados is impressed by Goku's speed, but Champa says that Botamo is just getting started.

The bonus gag page shows Auto Magetta, the big robot-looking fighter showing that he also barely passed the test with a score of 50.

My thoughts- 

The tournament gets started and two of the interesting things here are the introduction of Cabba, the first Saiyan we meet from Universe 6. Since Universes 6 and 7 are sister universes and have a lot of similarities, Cabba represents the kind of people the Saiyans would have been had they not been so violent and had Freeza never ruled over them. 

The other thing is the written exam, an idea from Vegeta to prevent the other universe from just enlisting some random feral beast. While Majin Buu failed the exam, at least he tried in the manga. In the Super anime he just fell asleep. This is particularly annoying because it started the long trend throughout the series to always have Buu fall asleep at any moment he might have been considered useful. I'm assuming this is to avoid using him so much since his regeneration abilities are insane, but there had to be a different way. I mean, Beerus proves that Buu can be flat out overpowered, so let him fight lesser foes that would be completely overwhelmed by his abilities. It's better than making him look so useless new fans would wonder why Satan even keeps him around. 

Other than that it's a decent chapter to get the actual tournament underway, and we already started with one of the fights. It was a pretty short chapter, Volume 1 of the manga crams in 9 chapters so you kinda get how short some of these are. I think a lot of it was to make it easier to breeze through what has already been seen in the movies and anime series so the readers can get to the newer stuff. We have one chapter left to go before we hit Volume 2.