'Dragon Ball Heroes' Reveals a New Super Saiyan Blue

The latest trailer for the Super Dragon Ball Heroes digital card game has revealed some great new character power-up concepts - the kind that have occupied fan chat thread discussions for years. Take a watch above and see for yourself!

UPDATE: As Fans point out - the character going SSB in the trailer above is "Beat" the Saiyan Avatar of the game, and NOT Gohan. Please forgive our error.

The particular image we want to highlight is young Gohan in his Super Saiyan Blue form! It's a striking image despite being pretty much what you'd imagine (Cell-era Gohan with blue spikey hair), and raises some interesting discussion points.

In the official series canon, Gohan was the big powerhouse hope of Dragon Ball Z's "Cell Games Saga" and "Fusion Saga," both instances in which his deep-seeded power was unlocked, making him formidable enough to stand against evil like Perfect Cell and Evil Buu. Dragon Ball Super has largely side-stepped the question of just how powerful Gohan potentially is, but continuously dropping the caveat that adult Gohan is an intellectual who prefers studying to fighting or training. That's saved the series the trouble of actually keeping up with the power level ratios of Gohan, Goku, and Vegeta, as first established by Dragon Ball Z.

However, seeing Gohan in SSB form, we have to wonder: if the young Z-Fighter started with so much potential, and was the first to unlock SSJ2, he arguably should've been the first to broach SSB - or at the very least, should unlock it with much greater ease after witnessing his father and Vegeta do it, given that he's starting from a point of greater base power than either of them.

...But these are the usual hangups of the Dragon Ball series, which only get more complicated with the addition of non-canon (but still very popular) concepts like the one above. You won't find many fans who would argue that Gohan got proper treatment in DBS, but maybe he can move back center stage in whatever the franchise's next series?

Dragon Ball Heroes continues to unfold with new missions. Dragon Ball Super's "Universal Survival" arc is part of the recent simulcast agreement that sites like Crunchyroll and Funimation have scored. Dragon Ball Super airs on Crunchyroll Saturday evenings at 7:15 p.m. CST. Adult Swim airs the English dub during its Toonami block Saturday evenings at 9:30 p.m, and is now available to stream on FunimationNOW and Amazon Video.