Dragon Ball Daima

After saving the world from the destructive might of Majin Buu, Gokuu Son and his allies look forward to a well-earned rest. However, unbeknownst to them, their battle was recorded and observed by Gomah, an evil being who assumes the title of King in the Demon Realm, filling the void left behind with the death of former ruler Dabura.

At Gomah's side is Degesu, the younger brother of Higashi no Kaioshin, a being who lords over the universe. Jealous of his brother's power, Degesu works alongside Gomah to steal Earth's Dragon Balls and preemptively subdue any potential future enemies. Calling upon the power of the legendary dragon Shenron, Gomah wishes for Gokuu and his friends to be reverted into children, intending to rob them of the limitless power that defeated Buu. With Earth's greatest warriors shrunken down, Gomah abducts Dende, the planet's acting god.

But Gokuu refuses to be set back by his new body, working to master his younger form to fight as proficiently as he could as an adult. Joined by Kaioshin and Glorio—a mysterious but seemingly rebellious demon—Gokuu pursues Gomah to the Demon Realm in order to rescue Dende and restore his friends to their natural ages.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Son, Gokuu Main

Nozawa, Masako Japanese

Higashi no Kaioshin Main

Kobayashi, Yumiko Japanese

Glorio Main

Uchiyama, Kouki Japanese

Panzy Main

Fairouz Ai Japanese

Vegeta Supporting

Mino, Yudai Japanese

Son, Gohan Supporting

Nozawa, Masako Japanese

Piccolo Supporting

Yamaguchi, Tomohiro Japanese

Trunks Supporting

Yonaga, Tsubasa Japanese

Bulma Supporting

Nakahara, Mai Japanese

Muten-Roushi Supporting

Kanemitsu, Nobuaki Japanese

Cook, Justin Producer

Kunihiro, Mamoru Producer

Hirokawa, Taku Producer

Yashima, Yoshitaka Director

Reviews

Apr 19, 2025

Orangzer

Recommended

Dragon Ball Daima – Akira Toriyama’s Final Work!

I'm not here to defend it from critics & haters or to explore Dragon Ball's philosophy.
That's a separate topic that can be discussed on Discord with others. I'm just writing a simple and short review.



How do you even begin to review something like this? To do it justice, we need to analyze the series properly (but here I will leave a short review due to lack of time). Many people loved it, while others didn’t. But one thing is clear—Dragon Ball Daima is amazing in its own way.

Pros / Positives of Dragon Ball Daima:
...
+ The Demon Realm was finally introduced for the first time.

+ Rich lore expansion, including the reveal of Super Majin Rymus, the creator of all universes in the Dragon Ball Multiverse.

+ Confirmation that Namekians and Supreme Kais actually originate from the Demon Realm.

+ exploration and world-building of the Demon Realm.

+ Incredible fan service : Super Saiyan 3 Vegeta and Super Saiyan God Goku are now canon!!!!!

+ My theory about Gomah being the final antagonist and that funny-looking character turning out to be the main villain actually came true.

+ One of the best anime openings—amazing music and stunning animation.

+ Great fight sequences with solid choreography.


As a Dragon Ball fan, what more could you ask for?

Cons / Negatives of Dragon Ball Daima:

- No fusion, despite the Fusion Bugs being introduced early on (Toriyama-sensei really trolled us with this one).

- Shallow exploration of the Demon Realm and minimal use of magic.

- Some retcons from Dragon Ball Super, such as the Kibitoshin fusion and Goku using Super Saiyan 4.


Final Thoughts:

Overall, Dragon Ball Daima was an incredible journey. It may not be the best Dragon Ball series, but it’s certainly a fantastic anime on its own. Despite its flaws, it shines in the anime world (and yes guys, it broke the internet again!!!).

As a Dragon Ball fan, I truly appreciate this series.

Ratings:

Story & Plot Progression: 3.5/5

Animation & Music: 4.5/5

Characters: 4/5

Bonus (Fan Service): 4.5/5

Enjoyment, Impact & Personal Satisfaction: 5/5

Total Score: 21.5/25 (86%)

Overall Rating: 9/10 (A+)

Reviewer’s Rating: 9

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Mar 25, 2025

Fonsu88

Mixed Feelings

Daima feels like a heartfelt celebration of Dragon Ball, particularly in its exploration of concepts like the Demon Realm - ideas that Akira Toriyama seemingly harbored for years. There’s a distinct charm in witnessing his unfiltered creativity at play, especially in the realm’s structural design. Yet, while the Demon Realm is conceptually intriguing, it lacks the depth and vibrancy needed to feel truly alive. The societal hierarchies and political dynamics are glossed over; aside from fleeting glimpses like Degesu or Arinsu, we see little of the realm’s governance, nobility, or internal conflicts. Gomah himself feels underdeveloped - more a reactive force obsessing over Goku’s progress ... or the Third Eye than a ruler with tangible ties to his people. An expanded focus on the Demon Realm’s factions, akin to Episode 14’s richer storytelling, could have elevated the world-building from mere backdrop to a living, breathing entity.

The treatment of Super Saiyan 4 further highlights Daima’s struggle with narrative cohesion. While the form’s return was initially thrilling for me, Goku’s explanation for its attainment felt disappointingly abrupt. This speaks to a broader fatigue within the franchise: as fans, we crave continuity and meaningful development, yet Dragon Ball increasingly fractures into disparate iterations - GT, Super, the manga, and now Daima - each operating in isolation. For younger audiences, this lack of a unified vision risks diluting the series’ emotional weight, much like the Gundam franchise’s fragmented universes.

Toriyama’s genius has always shone brightest when collaborators elevate his ideas - whether Kazuhiko Torishima’s editorial guidance or the Chrono Trigger Dream Team’s synergy. But when external pressures - be it Akio Iyoku’s fan-service mandates or Shueisha/Bandai’s commercial demands - take precedence, the result feels strained. Daima embodies this tension: its core is pure Toriyama, a whimsical adventure through the Demon Realm, yet the execution is muddled by corporate urgency, as if the story’s flow were secondary to marketability.

In the end, Daima is a mix of water and oil - Toriyama’s creativity floating atop a sea of commercial imperatives. Still, amidst the unevenness, there’s joy in seeing the master’s imagination at work. Wherever he is, I hope he’s sketching away, laughing with the same boundless delight he’s given us for decades.

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Mar 6, 2025

Ultima14

Not Recommended

Let’s make this clear right from the start. Daima was a cashgrab that nobody wanted and few watched. It was made just to canonize Super Saiyan 4, the same way the Brolly movie was made to canonize the filler villain. Toriyama in general spent his last years in rehashing old ideas, making the line from the opening song “here comes a brand new story” to be deceptive.

Daima is part of Toriyama’s attempt to incorporate a lot of non-canon ideas into canon, but since he is not a good writer he did a crappy job. Not only Daima contradicts pretty much everything that has been canon ... for decades, it doesn’t even fit with the Super continuity. The way the Potara earrings work changed, the origin of the Dragonballs and Majin Buu changed, and Piccolo doesn’t even know how to speak Namekian anymore! It also has no explanation for why Goku never uses Super Saiyan 4 in Super, or why Kaioshin is not fused again. It will piss off anyone who still thinks Dragonball is consistent with its rules. Not that it ever was or it matters at this point.

Although Daima expands the lore by delving into the demon realm and the origin of the Namekians, that doesn’t mean a thing because no one gives a shit about the setting. A dozen universes were introduced in Super, they were left completely unexplored, and nobody complained when the Tournament of Power began. Because Dragonball is all about the fighting, not exploration. It is not One Piece or Tower of God; it’s Goku changing hair colors and exchanging energy beams with a villain. Plus, there have been so many fanfic stories over the decades, to the point the canon lore doesn’t matter anymore. Heck, Xenoverse and Sparkling Zero are nothing but ‘what if’ scenarios, yet nobody complains about the breaching of canon. Heck, not even Daima cares.

What matters the most is if people wanted Daima, and the answer is, they didn’t. When it was first announced everyone quickly yelled “We want Moro!” meaning they wanted the next arc of Super to be adapted. Daima, like GT, is a cashgrab, and if it had never been made, nobody would miss a thing. Not even calling it a sendoff or a passion project of Toriyama is enough to excuse its existence. No one cares about anything else the late mangaka made, from Dragon Quest to Blue Dragon, to even the very recent Sand Land. And they certainly don’t care about silly gag comedies that involve Muppet Baby-like versions of characters from the battle manga they love. Let’s be honest, people only care about Dragonball, even if Toriyama isn’t involved. Quick reminder that all he was doing with Super was giving Toyotaro, the succeeding mangaka, vague concepts and plot threads and was then letting him do as he pleased. The result was a complete mess of unbaked ideas and bad writing.

The fans didn’t wait 10 minutes before calling Daima a GT 2.0, which in many ways it is. Once again, Goku is back to being a kid through a wish from the dragon and travels to distant lands in a spaceship to undo it. Despite many others becoming babies along with him, the premise did not change. On the side of lies, the shills of this cashgrab were insisting it’s not a rehash. It’s more like a return to the style of the original series, when Goku was still a kid and there was a lot of adventure instead of constant Super Saiyan transformations and energy beams. This was quickly proven to be a lie, since not only Daima is chockfull of transformations and energy beams, it also doesn’t feel like the original series in the slightest. Back then Goku and the gang were far more violent and sexually deprived compared to the sanitized versions they had post Z. Remember how kid Goku killed and ate his enemies? When he sexually molested every girl he was coming across with his pat-pat move? That’s not here. We got the adventure aspect and the design of Goku, but not the personality he had as a kid or the type of comedy the original show was using. The jokes were in general too sanitized. Even if you liked the vulgar Dr. Slump type of comedy Dragonball used to have at first, this is not a return to that kind of humor. It’s safe and inoffensive, making it dull and unmemorable.

The shills obviously refused to admit that, and insisted you shouldn’t let your hatred of GT to get in the way (in case you didn’t know, nobody liked anything in that show aside from Super Saiyan 4, because it was boring). The shills eventually backpedaled when Super Saiyan 4 got rehashed and sang a different tune. Oh, it actually is a rehash and you should watch it because you love GT!

The rehashed transformation was nothing but memberberries, but it became an instant hook regardless. Too bad it happened in the finale. The rest of the show was a chore to watch and the idea to rehash Goku becoming a kid didn’t sit well with the audience. Narrative-wise it was done to depower him, but aesthetic-wise the Muppet Babies / Tiny Toons type of designs didn’t look nice. It’s the adult forms everyone liked, not the chibi ones. How do you switch from buffed adults who only care about punching each other to baby food without eye rolling? It’s like seeing Rambo become a My Little Pony. Your average Dragonball fan only cares about action and transformations, not a bunch of brats doing goofy things. No wonder the show lost 80% of its audience just from that. It also didn’t matter in the long-run, since the only opponent that posed a challenge was the final villain. Everyone else was a cakewalk, even with Goku being a much weaker kid.

Everyone else becoming kids didn’t matter either, since Toriyama didn’t do anything with it. It was there just as a joke for the first episodes and then didn’t play a role for the rest of the series. It could be argued that it was done to make the show more accessible to children viewers, but it didn’t work since not many were watching the show, and those who did were all 40 year old diehard fans waiting to see epic fights. They eventually got them.

Even then, though, the fights are just a hollow spectacle. They don’t have the epicness of Z, since everyone looks dumb and the threats are barely felt. Nothing is at stake in this show, since the good guys don’t mind being kids. In fact, they love it! On top of that, there is no time limit that would lead to Earth blowing up like in GT. Basically, there is no tension, pressure of time, or stakes in general.

Despite that, the vast majority of viewers/readers were pleased, even if they were aware that they were essentially being given garbage. Because none of them cares about the quality of the story, and they certainly don’t care about who wrote it. They just wanna see adult Goku changing hair colors and exchanging energy beams with a villain. They don’t want to see Rugrats versions of Goten and Trunks rolling on the floor and laughing.

If I haven’t said a single word about other characters beyond Goku so far, it’s because they were largely left underused. Daima is still the Goku show, with Vegeta being the jealous boyfriend. Despite featuring around a hundred named characters, everyone beyond those two is just there to offer exposition or gasp at how strong Goku and Vegeta are. Most of the older cast is left on Earth where you never see them again after the first episodes. Gohan in specific doesn’t even exist, further proving how much Toriyama regretted making him the new protagonist for a while. Others like Piccolo, Bulma and Shin come along for the heck of it, without offering a thing to the plot. New characters like Glorio and Panzy were initially important for taking the main characters to other places with their airship, and explaining the situation of the demon world, but once Goku began flying again he didn’t need them anymore, and he sure didn’t care about the world he was in. On the villain side, we get Gomah, who is basically Pilaf with a clown head, a completely unthreatening gag character. His two lieutenants, Arinsu and Degesu, seemed to have a hidden agenda that would complicate things, but it never went anywhere and the plot remained fairly silly and straightforward.

In fact, the plot was so silly and straightforward it became completely forgettable. There was nothing interesting going on while the gang was traveling in the demon world. The challenges were so easy to overcome, Toriyama had to artificially make some situations to seem more dangerous than they actually were. There were instances where the audience was supposed to believe Super Saiyans who can blow up planets with a finger couldn’t deal with a big child, or normal solders with laser guns. Such moments were not only insulting the audience, they were also clearly done to stretch a fairly simple mission to five times its natural duration. Just how many episodes were wasted on their airship breaking down and them having to walk? How many minutes of every episode were wasted on characters that don’t shut up and explain everything, even when something is obvious? 80% the show was a complete chore to watch. On top of that, there were plot points that were dropped entirely, such as the fusion bugs that were constantly mentioned, made everyone to expect fusion, and it never happened.

The highlights ended up being the major battles with the guardian robots and the big bad, but even those had to be artificially made to seem harder than they actually were. One of the robots was given a power up out of nowhere, just so we can have a fan service moment with Vegeta turning Super Saiyan 3. And Gomah finds this completely broken eye that instantly turns him from a nobody to someone more powerful than a Super Saiyan 3. The tradition of people gaining power ups with no effort, and devaluing the earlier arcs when training and never giving up were pivotal, continues. Basically, there is no build up to the highlights, the power ups feel unearned, and the battles end up being superficial because of it. I kept thinking all they have to do is shoot the big bad with a laser gun and be done with it.

In case it wasn’t obvious yet, I do not recommend Daima. It was a complete waste of time and an insult to old fans that care about anything other than transformations. I place it even lower than GT, which was also a cashgrab but came out when people were starving for more Dragonball. GT also came out during the 90s when options were limited to what was airing on TV. That is not the case today; you can watch anything you want, from any year, and at any time of the day you fancy. And who would turn his head towards Daima when Sparkling Zero came out at the same time, with every character of every arc and a hundred what-if stories? There is also Multiverse, the best fanfic, that has many times surpassed the official material. Do those two have the best writing? Hell, no! But that is not what fans of the series want. They are pleased with seeing Goku changing hair colors and exchanging energy beams with a villain. Therefore, who gives a dime about Daima when you have so many better alternatives? As the ratings have proved, not many.

Reviewer’s Rating: 3

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