Dragon Ball Daima Full Season Review

For years and years, the Dragon Ball fandom has been mainlining hype – for whatever power up, fusion, super-fusion, or sick moves that will take down the baddie of the moment. So if the wildly destructive battles between stupidly powerful beings have always been the indisputable best parts of Dragon Ball, then the franchise’s latest TV series does itself a disservice by stuffing its blowout fight into the back end of its run. Don’t get me wrong: The third act of Dragon Ball Daima delivers – Goku achieving Super Saiyan 4 being the highlight, obviously – but the pace of the action zooms forward so exponentially from its kickoff to the final blows that any feelings about the relatively ordinary first two-thirds of the episodes are instantly overwritten.

That’s not to say that the front chunk of Daima is bad. For one thing, Dragon Ball has probably never looked better, even with the majority of the cast chibi-fied. The animation is crisp, wisely using techniques like 3D modeling to naturally enhance spaceships and other orbs that add a fun Y3K sci-fi twist. It brings gorgeous color to its alien world that seems inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha. But it also treats this new dimension as a stage set to tear down once an area is all clear. The three Demon Realms themselves, each full of otherworldly ecology, are fascinating, and I could have happily watched several Scavengers Reign-style montages about the strange plants, creatures, food, bugs, even air that made each distinct.

But the fights, the fights! Of course they’re great; they’ve been Dragon Ball’s bread and butter for basically 40 years. Even though the first real tete-a-tete doesn’t happen until episode 8, the confident direction keeps the action in every bout crystal clear – which, shockingly, is a huge compliment in 2025 when one too many series abandon intelligible fisticuffs for a muddled VFX mess. The last few episodes especially, with Goku at full adult strength in Super Saiyan 4 form, are a dazzling spectacle, some of Dragon Ball’s coolest battle choreography and glowiest beams of energy from opening to closing credits.

A new batch of characters also brings some fresh life into a huge but largely stagnant cast whose personalities, for better or worse, are set in stone. Vegeta always has been and will be a surly wife guy and Goku a food-and-fighting-obsessed maniac. Daima still reliably wrings humor out of these kinds of truths, largely through the perspectives of new core crew members Glorio and Panzy, who both expand the scope of the adventure with their own Demon Realm connections and motivations. Daima gives every character their own brief moment of glory, but some are practically cameos within the limited screen time of a 20-episode season. (For comparison: Six of Dragon Ball Z's nine seasons ran for more than 30 episodes.)

The main big bad, the Demon King Gomah, meanwhile, is baffling to me. Many times throughout Daima, different characters warn that he’s “not to be underestimated.” But there was never any evidence that he was anything other than a twerpy screen addict, obsessed with studying the tapes of the Majin Buu fight and watching Goku and company go after the three Demon Realm Dragon Balls, until he just happens to get his hands on a legendary item that turns him into a ’roided-out, seemingly indestructible giant who can be bested by Nintendo-boss logic. Of all the Dragon Ball evil guys, Gomah ranks toward the bottom for me.

Even after the finale, there’s a lot that Daima failed to follow through on: the seeds of foreshadowing that didn’t really germinate, and the glossed-over plot points. (Take, for example, the odd employee-employer-savior relationship of Glorio and Supreme Kai’s sister Arinsu that is little show and mostly tell.) I found that, for my own joy, it was better not to focus on this while I was watching, and instead got swept up in the hype of the next Kamehameha, the tides of battle, the journey to the end. Dragon Ball Daima is like a fireworks show: The tedium of sitting around beforehand and the small morsels of flashiness at the beginning are mostly forgotten and forgiven by the time spent staring at the biggest sparkles in the sky.