Dragon Ball Kai (2014)

If you've never seen Dragon Ball Z, this is the version to watch. Asides from a preference to American dubbing, Kai's better focus by cutting out filler does wonders. The hand drawn and remastered animation without a doubt still hold up, the fight scenes still feel visceral and impactful. There's not much to say, it's Dragon Ball Z without filler and without that crappy Funimation music job. There's nothing here that's going to blow your mind, but there are many moments engraved into anime culture that's worth watching it for.

While it's better than the Z version for the filler that was removed, Dragon Ball Z Kai: The Final Chapters is a poor sequel to the original Dragon Ball Z Kai that we received a few years ago.

After the end of DBZ Kai with its lower than expected ratings, Toei did not plan to make a Kai for the Majin Boo arc of the series. Investors wanted it for the overseas audience, thus they went ahead with it after all. But since this was never planned to air in Japan and the first Kai got low ratings, Toei half-assed this as much as they possibly ... could. The filler removal is less than I would have hoped for. If I remember correctly, Kanzenshuu said that the international cut only removed 25% of the filler from the series while the cut that actually did air in Japan removed only 33% (it got 9 less episodes than the rest of the world did). Right off that bat, the biggest point of a Kai version for the Boo arc is mostly gone. For reference, the Majin Boo arc for DBZ began at episode 200 and lasted to 291--91 episodes total. Here, the arc begins at episode 99 and goes to 167--69 episodes total (international version, not Japan version that aired on Fuji TV). The first Kai took episodes 001 to 194 of Z and turned it into 98 episodes. This arc could've had much much much more filler removed than it did.

The remastering process was gimped as well. Whereas Toei paid QTEC to remaster the footage for the first 98 episodes of DBZ Kai, this version's remastering was done internally at Toei. The quality has a HUGE drop with a crop to 16:9, haloing, poor framing in certain scenes, bad DNR that removes detail, and for reasons unknown to this day a green tint over the video excluding the OP, ED, and eyecatches. So now the two biggest points of a Kai version for the Boo arc are gone: less filler removal and a remaster that hurts the eyes and dishonors the vision originally intended by the people who worked on the original version of the show.

While the audio for the characters was re-recorded and a new score composed by Norihito Sumitomo (who scored Battle of Gods, Resurrection 'F', and now Super) was done, this version of the show isn't something you truly need to watch. The Funimation dub is VERY similar to the original dub they did for Z, as by the time they reached the Majin Boo arc originally they had gotten more accurate in their translations. If you liked Kikuchi or Faulconer's scores, you could simply save money by buying the Blu-ray remasters and skipping filler content to save some money.

In the end, this is a negligible version of the series and you are better off watching the original Z version and simply skipping the filler scenes. Most of them were not removed for this release anyway. All in all, I think everyone would've been better off had this not been made the way it was. It's simply not worth it in any form.

Dragon Ball Z Kai is an inferior version to Dragon Ball Z lacking what made it so great to begin with. The selling point over the original DBZ is that it is closer to the manga as Z has too much filler and suppose to have awful pacing. This has been all addressed in the a review of Dragon Ball Kai.
Dragon Ball Kai (2014) is adapting the Boo Saga which comes with two problems already. For many who liked Kai, the selling point was the lack of the Boo Saga adaptation as many wanted Dragon Ball to end with Cell's defeat. Now that the Boo ... saga is adapted, that positive is out of the window. Even with the faster pacing, the Boo Saga is the longest and most tedious Dragon Ball Saga moving at a snails pace meaning despite being a shorter watch, it still suffers from the same problem as its predecessor.

Another thing is the massive amount of censorship which is the cause of events happening during the run of Kai. So many scenes that were amazingly build up and show a display of power were cut down making them automatically inferior.
In addition the censorship removes other things like an entire scene from the manga building up the guys who wanted to kill Boo with guns. Thus rendering the point of a faithful adaptation pointless as not all manga content is viewable in animation form.

Overall, Dragon Ball Kai is already just a soulless cashgrab and barely worth calling decent, but the Boo Saga adaptation is in every way a lesser version of its manga counterpart.