Looking back to 2024 it was an eventful year for Dragon ball Franchise – Akira Toriyama died on march, very hyped Dragon Ball Sparking! Zero came out and new Dragon Ball series known as Daima started airing on latter part of the year. Daima ended last week and its time to look into this short spin-off series and give fair shake what went right and wrong.
Premise – After defeating Majin Buu, Goku and his allies look forward to a well-deserved rest. However, they are unaware that their battle was observed by Gomah, an evil being from the Demon Realm who seeks to fill the power vacuum left by Dabura’s death. Gomah, aided by Degesu, wishes for Goku and his friends to be turned into children using Shenron’s power, aiming to neutralize their strength. Despite being reverted to a younger form, Goku continues to fight and, with new allies, pursues Gomah to the Demon Realm to rescue Dende and restore his friends to their adult forms.
I Guess before we start yapping about this series its important to understand that this is not a prequel to Dragon Ball Super, this is is a separate universe just like super which acts as its own sequel story to the original Dragon Ball Z series just like GT, Super Dragon Ball heroes or Dragon Ball Super does. So you only need to watch DBZ before starting Daima, or if you are out of time just watch the Majin Buu Saga.
I do want to also add that there are members of the grander community who believe that Daima will be eventually retconned in Dragon Ball Super manga, but I don’t actually see that happening. There are some rumour stuff regarding Capsule Corporation Tokyo being in feud with Shueisha regarding ownership of Dragon Ball Super Anime, which one of the reasons we haven’t seen the Super anime continue and we got new IP instead which was Daima. These legal complexities aren’t super clear by the looks of it and until that it solved we probably aren’t seeing new season of Super or potential retcon to Daima (Which i still believe won’t happen even if legal stuff is out of the way).
<Minor Spoilers Ahead>
Daima Plays into Nostalgia
Daima’s creative direction is borrowed from the Original Dragon Ball and GT mostly – the concept of turning the Z Fighters into kids is playing homage both to GT and early adventures of Goku, while bringing stuff like Super Saiyan 4 is definitely just playing into GT fanbase. The vibe is lot more comedic and child esque compared to Super, which is also in my opinion toned down version of DBZ and honestly I’ve been waiting for proper DBZ sequel that would be as edgy and violent as the original with high stakes.
While we are seeing bunch of classic characters like Vegeta, Bulma, Piccolo and Supreme Kai we’re also getting a drop of new characters that are native to Demon World (Makai) such as Glorio and Pantsy who are Goku’s new sidekicks in this series and play focus around exploring the lore and setting of the Demon World. The early episodes give fantastic exposition and frankly its one of the better lore that has been produced around the franchise in long time and easily tops anything we have seen in GT, Heroes or Super for instance.
Due to early demise of Akira Toriyama there is also bit of a belief that there was perhaps more story and world to explore beyond these 20 episodes, but we can’t know until statements regarding that are made. The Demon World is actually kinda big and there were places that weren’t actually very explored and the lore takes heavy dive in the latter half of the show, which just mostly turns into mindless fighting that feels unimportant. Yes you get some fanservice in terms of seeing Vegeta SS3 and Goku SS4, but honestly these weren’t frankly that great fights, best one being Goku vs. Tamagami One in my opinion and technically some of the latter fights in any Shonen should be best ones.
Writing Mistakes or Absence of Toriyama?
Going back to my earlier point about Toriyama dying last year around March (he went to surgery in February 2024) makes me wonder how much input and story involvement Toriyama had on the latter part of the series or is this just classical Toriyama inconsistency. Just to explore couple of things that really didn’t make much sense to me through the series
- Piccolo’s role in Demon World was very minimal, he had no 1v1 fights and everything that he did story wise could’ve been easily replaced by other character like Krillin or Tien. The interactions with Neva could’ve bee exchanged with Dende technically, but it was perhaps good to hear lore exchange between Neva and Piccolo.
- The Demon World shop was selling fusion bugs, but we actually didn’t end up seeing a single fusion in the series was this idea just a troll/bait or was there originally idea to use them by Toriyama, but he didn’t have the time to write it in? People obviously were speculating Vegito and possible fusion with Kuu and Duu.
- Glorio’s motives sucked and were executed horrendously, as we see on last episodes Glorio was working for Arinsu, but it wasn’t a blackmail situation which would have forced him to work with her – but instead it was metaphorical debt and he felt about “almost” betraying Goku, which was very poorly written exchange and didn’t make sense. He had no proper backstory or flashbacks which would have supported better this subplot
- Neva helping both sides was also kinda random and ultimately didn’t make any sense
- Degesu is another character that serves secondary antagonist that ends up being extremely useless and has no proper character development nor backstory
These are just few examples of certain inconsistencies or should I say poor writing choices, there are lots more but these are probably most focal ones. While I wasn’t greatest fan of the second half of Daima the finale did have some wholesome parts about it that really embodied the adventure feel that Dragon Ball has.
Final Thoughts & Rating
I’ve pointed lot of critical stuff about Daima in this review, but there are things I want to address briefly such as how great the Opening theme is whilst rest of OST being lackluster and also the fact how Daima is hands down best looking Dragon Ball series made as the animation and art is extremely consistent and high quality through the series. Plus the backgrounds and how the Demon World looks is just great, there has been lot of effort and emphasis on that part which keeps building up lot of appreciation.
Yes I probably would have swapped around some of the cast members here to more interesting options and spend more time building villains and Glorio, but then again we only got 20 episodes here to do all that (which still could’ve been possible just saying..)
Some people also have discussed about Season 2 happening and frankly this is not going to go down, I think most likely we would see another web series which is cross promoting a game release or something like that. It’s totally possible however that they could do another revisit to Daima in terms of a movie or just doing a movie recap version out of this saga? But that would be cheap in my opinion as I would rather see a new Super Movie since last two were really premiere products.
Given how this IP has become such a corporate showdown between different Japanese companies its unfortunate how this will effect release schedule of any new Dragon Ball material. As a caveat however it’s cool to see how new types of spin-offs can truly work without being canonical to other stories and still make it fun and refreshing.
