The Fall 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Dragon Ball Daima

Following the death of Dabura and the end of Majin Buu's rampage, a new ruler named King Gomah emerged to take over the Demon Realm. However, after learning about how Goku and the others managed to defeat Buu and fearing that they could someday be a threat to his rule, he decides to use the Dragon Balls to turn them into children and defeat them while they're weak and helpless. It's the start of a new adventure for Goku and the gang, and this one will take them deeper into the unknown as they prepare to travel through the Demon Realm and all the new encounters and foes that await them there.

Dragon Ball Daima is a spin-off of the Dragon Ball franchise by Akira Toriyama. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Fridays.

OK, so I didn't cry watching the first episode of Dragon Ball Daima but I did get close—especially when the first half of this episode is basically a highlight reel of some of the more iconic moments in the original Dragon Ball Z anime. The first half of this episode is meant to serve three purposes. The first is that it is meant to act as a recap for the Buu saga which leads into the second purpose being that we are establishing where this show fits in the larger chronology of the Dragon Ball franchise. Dragon Ball Diama takes place sometime between the end of the Majin Buu saga but before Battle of Gods. That means we're not getting any super Saiyan God or Super Saiyan Blue transformations during the series.

Finally, the first half of this episode is meant to establish who our main antagonists are going to be. As a longtime Dragon Ball fan, I appreciate all of the references and nods to the larger canon. One thing that Toriyama was prone to doing was adding onto preestablished canon. Sometimes this didn't always work out, like how he would sometimes retcon or over complicate his own mythos such as the segment dedicated to talking about the Potara Fusion (this is the second time this has been retconned, right?). But other times, Toriyama will make connections and expand upon things in creative ways. A huge element of wasted potential in the Majin Buu saga was the introduction of the Demon King Dabura. This character was set up to be this big threat, only to get horribly sidelined to make a place for the real villain of that arc.

Dragon Ball Daima takes this opportunity and arguably makes it the basis for this entire season as it looks like this show is going to take place in the demon realm, an underexplored area of the larger Dragon Ball canon. The actual story doesn't technically start until we get to the final third of the episode but I'm already liking what I'm seeing. I enjoy the new characters from their designs to their attitude, striking a good balance between mysterious and goofy. I like the callbacks to the original Dragon Ball Z series—and while I'm still not sold on turning the main cast into children, I'm open to being won over by that idea in the future.

I was a certified Dragon Ball Freak™ back in the early aughts when Toonami's afternoon cable block was essentially a religion feverishly proselytized by a generation of young weebs-in-the-making like myself. Unfortunately, I have fallen off the franchise ever since the Buu Saga came to a close; I actually liked GT okay, too, but I never followed it seriously, and the only thing I've seen of the recent stuff outside of a stray Super episode here and there was the (admittedly quite fun) Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero movie. However, with the recent untimely passing of Akira Toriyama, I have become very interested in checking out his final project in the legendary multi-media empire he created. Plus, Dragon Ball Daima seemed to be a kind of soft-reboot/jumping-on point for newcomers and lapsed Kakarotholics like me, which makes the series feel so much more welcoming than the prospect of diving into Dragon Ball Super and figuring out what in the hell is going on with Goku's umpteenth Super Saiyan upgrade.

The good news is, I think Dragon Ball Daima does indeed serve as a functional entry into the story for folks who are only passingly familiar with the extensive lore of the series. Granted, if you literally know nothing about the adventures of Goku and Co., then I reckon this premiere will still come across as a fever dream of insane gibberish, but so much of the Daima premiere is devoted to table setting that I have to imagine that just about anyone could follow the upcoming story if they really wanted to. You don't even have to be too well-worn in the events of Super since Daima is an interquel that takes place after DBZ's Buu Saga but before the arrival of Beerus and Frieza's return at the start of DBS. In short, the new King of the Demon Realm has a couple of Evil Kai henchmen to spare and a plan to keep The Z Fighters off his back as he plans to expand his empire in the wake of Kid Buu's defeat. The brilliant scheme? Use the Dragon Balls to turn all of our heroes into kids because “something something something Shenron's Rules something something.”

Let's be real here: Turning Goku and Friends into children is basically just a chance for the franchise to get a redo of its most infamous gimmick from Dragon Ball GT, except this time with a story planned by Toriyama himself and a tone that seems a bit more in line with the freewheeling adventure of the original Dragon Ball stories from the '80s. And you know what? It's a great gimmick! What better way to sidestep all the ridiculous power-scaling and exponentially threatening villains than to just shrink everyone down to a less threatening size and send them on a new adventure?

Really, given how excellent the production values of this premiere is, and how fun the tone is, my only real complaint is just how much time the episode devotes to setting everything up. King Goma, Degesu, and Arinsu are a lot of fun as B-Tier villains with S-Tier ambitions, and their shtick would feel right at home if it was set in the lair of any Super Sentai goons, but we have to follow them for over twenty minutes, and this episode is only a shade over thirty minutes long. When you combine that with the massive DBZ recap at the start of the episode, we probably only spend five minutes getting reacquainted with Goku and the gang at Trunks' birthday party. It's all still good fun, but it's one of those first episodes where you just know that the good stuff is waiting on the horizon. That said, I'll be more than happy to wait another week and check back in on Dragon Ball Daima to see if Toriyama was able to recapture the magic of the series' glory days one final time.

If there are two things in this life that are known for certain, it's that we're all gonna bite it someday, and there will always be more Dragon Ball. While I've had mixed feelings about a lot of the modern Dragon Ball entries, I've got enough of an attachment to the franchise that I'll probably be here for every new entry between now and the inevitable heat death of the universe, but I've been anticipating this one a lot for a couple of reasons. The first, of course being, was that this was the last piece of Dragon Ball media that Akira Toriyama worked on before his untimely passing, and given how monumentally influential and iconic of a creator he was, there was no way I wasn't going to check out his final project. The second is that rather than continuing the never-ending uptick in escalation that's defined Dragon Ball since its return; this seems like it's going to dial back on the power levels and multiverse stuff in favor of a return to adventures and gags, which I'm 100% on board for, and has helped make this the most genuinely excited I've been about a new Dragon Ball anime in quite a while.

Having said all that, it's hard to say whether this will be a return to the action-comedy days of yore or if it'll be another Dragon Ball GT, and this premiere doesn't give much indication of which way the pendulum will swing as it's mostly just set up. The first few minutes are mostly just there to recap the events of the Buu Saga (and establish that it seems to take place directly after it, for anyone wondering where this was going to fit in Dragon Ball canon), while the rest of the episode is dedicated to introducing our new sets of villains in the form of King Gomah, who has taken Dabura's place as the ruler of the Demon Realm after Buu made him into an afternoon snack, and Degusu and Dr. Arinsu who are apparently siblings of the Supreme Kai, but work with the Demon Realm for reasons we don't quite know yet.

While it's not the most exciting way to kick things off, it is at least pretty funny, and King Gomah and Degusu, in particular, make for a pretty good comedic duo, so I'm looking forward to seeing more of them since I'm always of the mindset that the franchise could use more silly bad guys on the regular rather than less. It is also pretty funny learning that King Gomah's reasoning for wanting to turn Goku and the gang into children is that the prospect of them invading his realm at full strength is a risk he's not willing to take, and that's probably the most forward-thinking we've seen from any Dragon Ball villain who isn't Frieza, so he's probably got the right idea there. Of course, since the episode ends with him doing that, time will tell whether or not that pans out, but it does make for a pretty fun way to kick-start the plot. It's always possible that this will fail to recapture the magic of early DB in the same way that GT did. Still, for now, I'm feeling pretty optimistic about it, and while I'm sure the more comedic tone won't vibe with every Dragon Ball fan, this feels like could be plenty charming enough that it'll be hard not to have a good time.

I don't know what I expected from Daima, but it certainly wasn't a direct sequel to the Majin Buu Saga of Dragon Ball Z. In all honesty, however, this makes a lot of sense on both a metatextual and narrative level.

On the one hand, setting it just after the defeat of Buu puts our heroes at a very specific level of strength—as does turning them into kids. The maximum power level we will likely see is Super Saiyan 2 (though I suppose a “Kid Vegetto” fusion wouldn't be out of the question, given the mention of how to easily undo Potara earrings in this episode). There will be no Super Saiyan God, Super Saiyan Blue, or Ultra Instinct like in Dragon Ball Super nor Super Saiyan 4 like in Dragon Ball GT. And with our knowledge of how a similar de-aging event happens in Dragon Ball GT, we know that while Goku can likely turn Super Saiyan 3, it would only work for a few seconds.

All this effectively locks our heroes down at a power level where they could conceivably face a challenge in the Demon World—especially when you consider that the Tamagami must be more powerful than Dabura (or else he would have defeated them and used the Demon World Dragon Balls himself). And while we know our heroes will come out on top in the end (or Super/GT wouldn't exist), there should be at least some tension and drama as we don't know the fate of the Demon Realm and those who reside there.

The other reason setting Daima immediately post-Buu is a good choice is because it fills a long-overlooked dangling plot thread. Dabura was the king of an entire world. What happens when the king suddenly disappears? A power struggle, of course.

This brings us to the villains of the season. We have Gomah, our typical Toriyama pint-sized evil guy with more ambition than sense. But then we have his hyper-competent underlings Dagesu and Dr. Arinsu—who turn out to be the siblings of the Universe 7 Supreme Kai. While both are ostensibly working for Gomah, it's clear that Dr. Arinsu at least has her own goals and plans. Then there is the old Namekian who created the Demon World's Dragon Balls. While we're used to Namekians being good these days, who's to say that this old man couldn't be just as evil as old King Piccolo was? I mean, he lives in the Demon World, after all.

This all brings us to the episode's subtle cliffhanger. While Gomah's wish to turn our heroes into children has been fulfilled, two other wishes remain. Something tells me Gomah just might not be the one who gets to make them.

So, in the end, the point of this episode is two-fold: 1) To remind us what happened in the early parts of the Buu Saga and 2) introduce us to our new villains. However, this is also a double-edged sword. Dragon Ball Daima is incredibly unfriendly to newbies—or anyone who hasn't watched the Buu Saga, really. This is a show for hardcore Dragon Ball fans alone. And while this may not be a bad thing inherently, it absolutely limits who will enjoy this show.