I’m actually watching through Kai right now with the wife since she actually got interested to watch the show after playing Kakarot. Haven’t gotten to where you are quite yet though.
Vegeta kinda did…I can’t think really of any legit damage he did to Frieza during that entire fight. He held first form Frieza’s arms and they test each other out and then Frieza said ‘time to break your hopes and dreams’. He probably would have held his own for a sec with 1st form frieza but it was too short lived and by the time he comes back in to play to believe he’d make a dif Frieza’s power is so beyond them at that point that his zenkai boost was meaningless.
You can tell by this discussion how as early as Namek Saga Z’s writing is already beginning to downgrade in quality
Even though Vegeta had twice as many Zenkai boosts since the beginning of the series (vs Goku, then Zarbon, then Recoome, and lastly 2nd form Frieza), Goku’s two (vs Vegeta and then Ginyu) were apparently enough to not only put him toe-to-toe with Final form Frieza, but to also receive such a massive boost from going to SSJ that Goku could literally just bitchslap the bastard for like a minute straight
Dude had like 9 sensu beans on him when he left the planet and by the time he got there was left with 3. Combination of training and nearly killing himself each day, dude was gaming the system hard.
That’s not the point though
The point I was making is that Goku was around something like 60k in power level (since Ginyu read his PL with a scouter after activating kaioken x2), Goku’s body gets fucked up by Vegeta, he’s put into the restoration pod after changing back from Ginyu’s body, and SOMEHOW he basically skyrockets from that to like 3 fucking million to be able to rival Frieza, and then jumps even higher after turning super saiyan.
Meanwhile Vegeta, who got fucked up pretty badly as well, could barely lay a hand on Frieza in his first form, and that’s while Frieza was just sandbagging
I’m not even gonna go into how both Piccolo and Gohan got so strong they could actually lay solid punches on Frieza post-transformation
The daizenshu states that Goku’s PL during the Ginyu battles was 90,000. 180,000 with kaioken. Vegeta was only at 30,000. After spamming zenkais he went up to 250,000 which is only half of first form Freeza’s power.
But yeah Goku took a monster zenkai after healing from the Ginyu battle. Shot up to 3 million. The gravity training was a big difference maker while he was training though. Which Vegeta took note of.
Well, and I’m sorry Vegita fans, but Goku fought a lot smarter to. That makes a huge difference. There where multiple times Goku caught Freeza off guard, or took the time to notice weaknesses like Freezes inability to sense him in the smoke. Underwater Kamehameha trap.
Vegita just RTSD without any kind of mix up and got fucked up every time.
So it’s not just the Zenkais. Goku poked HUGE holes in Freeza’ s game.
There is a moment DBZ Abridged in with Goku that comes to mind. He’s describing to Gohan in the ROSAT why SSJ Grade 3 (USSJ) was a bad form. He sounded like a damn genius when describing benefits and negatives of the form. Its an extreme characterization but it gets the point across that Goku is a genius when it comes to fighting…and not much else