English Dub Review: Dragon Ball Daima “Conspiracy; Glorio; Daima”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

A year after the defeat of Majin Buu, a demon named Gomah takes Dabura’s place as king of the Demon Realm and comes to Earth to use the Dragon Balls in order to turn everyone who fought Majin Buu into children. This forces a now child like Goku to work with the Supreme Kai and a demon named Glorio to travel into the Demon Realm so they can stop Gomah.

OUR TAKE

It’s been six and a half years since the end of Dragon Ball Super, the franchise’s big return to TV that was kicked off by 2013’s Battle of Gods, which introduced a whole slew of new characters and concepts that brought new life into the story. Since then Dragon Ball as a series has enjoyed a second golden age of movies, games, manga, and merch, even after Super ended. That was made a bit more bittersweet when original creator Akira Toriyama passed away in March of this year, leaving behind a truly great legacy not just in manga, but on pop culture overall. Toriyama had, for whatever reason, decided to become more active on the newly announced installment, Dragon Ball Daima, which makes it now one of the last Dragon Ball things with input from the mind that made the world possible in the first place. They’ve now released the first three episodes of the dub in theaters, and as for how these first episodes go…well, that’s a bit of a different story, as these may be the slowest first three episodes of a Dragon Ball show in the franchise’s history. I honestly think the first few of Super may have been more eventful, and those were mostly just set up for a lesser adaptation of a movie.

As this series takes place a year after the fight with Kid Buu but a few years before Super, it therefore doesn’t need to worry about juggling all of the newer characters and elements introduced there, though it does hint at some. Instead, the first episode is a bit odd in that it is essentially about the new antagonists, Gomah and Degesu, watching clips from the Buu Saga and commenting on them like they reactors on Youtube. This would be a bit neat if this had been the first new Dragon Ball content in years, as was the case when we had a similar scene between Beerus and Whis in Battle of Gods that covered much more of the story, but this method of introducing two new opponents who have technically been around the whole time but need to catch up is kinda been there, done that, and not made better by the fact that they’re not that interesting as characters, at least for now. And of course, there’s plenty of comparison made of the idea of turning characters into little kids to Dragon Ball GT, which also started off its ill-fated series by making Goku a child again. In terms of the English Dub, it’s a pleasant surprise to at least get Stephanie Nadolny, Kid Goku/Gohan’s original English voice (from Funimation), so there’s that to look forward to more of at least.

Currently, a lot of Daima’s appeal seems to come from things outside of the story on its own, namely that it’s more Dragon Ball content that’s always going to attract a certain amount of people, and that it’s the last show that Toriyama had his hands in working on. But Daima itself, at least to me, hasn’t really found itself quite yet. To be fair, Super also took awhile to really get its first good moments, especially since it spent its first six months doing worse adaptations of the then-newer Z movies, but we also don’t know how long Daima will be running. To be clear, I WANT this to be good. If we’re going to be exploring the Demon Realm, a world only ever hinted at before, I hope we can make it as iconic as all the other locations we’ve seen across this franchise. Currently, we’ve met one new major character from there, Glorio, and he’s not all that impressive at the moment. And despite me saying all of this…I can’t NOT watch it. It’s Dragon Ball, for all it’s faults, and kind of BECAUSE of those faults. While we don’t know when the dub will start get regular streaming releases, here’s hoping the remainder of this series runs smoothly and caps off a truly amazing career like Toriyama’s.