Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai ep.26: Popp seems more impressive than ever. The Dragon Masters...less so. Looks really nice, yet again. 3.75/5 #DragonQuest #ep26 
The opening has been revamped a bit, with added images of stuff we’ll see in this new phase of the series. Which means it’s also a lot of stuff that wasn’t in the 90s anime at all.
Remember that chess set from last episode? It’s moving up in the world!
This episode leaves out two parts from the manga: one is a short scene where Popp tries and fails to find Matoriv, to get his master’s help...
...And the second is a sequence where Galdandy goes off and attacks Bengarna with his pet dragon Ruud, as a warm-up before Baran gets back. I assume this was cut for reasons of both time and content. It’s not especially graphic, but does entail a lot of civilian causalities.
The Popp/Matoriv scene helps drive home that they’ve got nobody else to turn to, but I think the Galdandy scene is the major loss, since it really shows off his character. Also, Ruud looks almost exactly like Shenlong, so as a DB fan it’s real fun seeing him mow people down.
Also left out: Teran’s king saying how he banned weapons and most of the country’s population left (something already mentioned by Nabara in ep.23). Remember, this guy is “king” of approximately 50 people.
This “psychic signal” discussion isn’t in the manga...or at least not this part of it. It seems vaguely familiar so maybe it’s moved from another part of the manga, but I can’t find it. Seems like an odd thing to bother adding otherwise.
This episode pretty much hinges on Popp’s fake-out heel turn. I don’t think it’s too hard to figure out that he’s up to something, but I think knowing he’s making himself look ignoble in order to be noble just makes the scene better.
This composition was apparently deemed too silly-looking to use in the anime.
Near as I can figure, ルード/Ruud is an anagram of ドル/doru, which is...almost but not quite the first half of ドラゴン/dragon. We’ll soon see a case of ドル/doru being used to name something dragon-y, so it seems like an association did Sanjo make, for whatever reason.
Apart from Galdandy/Ruud, they really don’t do a good job selling the notion that these three are the “greatest Dragon Riders”, as opposed to just three strong guys who happen to be riding on dragons at the moment. Borahorn in particular couldn’t care less about his dragon.
As you might expect, Ruud’s death is more graphic in the manga. It’s also notably more graphic than when Piccolo blows up Shenlong.
And of course, without the scene earlier of Galdandy and Ruud happily killing people together, his huge reaction to Ruud’s death seems a bit out of nowhere, as does Popp’s complaint that he’s killed tons of humans
(I guess even in the manga Popp doesn’t know Galdandy attacked Bengarna and is just assuming he’s killed humans because he’s allied with the Dark Army. But still, the line has more weight since we the readers have seen Galdandy kill humans)
Kind of so-so on the new ending theme, but I do like the sneak peak of...well, I guess I won’t say what exactly.
Next week: the might of Borahorn!
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