English Dub Review: Dragon Ball Daima “Surprise”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Gomah learns of the plans to collect the Dragon Balls and orders Degasu to seal the portals between the Demon Worlds. Meanwhile, Goku’s team crash on a planet of giant demons.

OUR TAKE

After a stretch of notable plot developments in the past few weeks, we begin a bit of a cool down period before the final battle, though that’s not to say there won’t still be some action along the way. Case in point, this episode actually gives us a pretty elaborate fight between Goku and the gang against a giant alien who turns out to actually be the child of a couple other giants. It’s a fun way of giving them something to do while other, more plot relevant things happen in the background, and it actually kinda feels like it takes a page from Dragon Ball GT, which also had its cast fight against a giant at some point. People have often noted Daima as being Toriyama’s take on GT, but while I’d like to think that, the similarities are really just a few certain elements. What those elements are…well, some are clear by now, but some are still coming, and if you have somehow managed to avoid spoilers for them, I’m not gonna be the one to spoil it now. Just know that we are on our way to something pretty surprising, even for a Dragon Ball show.

As for this episode in particular, it is perfectly fine. Glad we can see these characters getting in some wacky adventures and well animated fights, and in terms of the dub, it’s always nice to hear another strong Kamehameha scream from Stephanie Nadolny. If there’s a problem, it’s more because I have hindsight and know that this and future episodes would have probably been better spent doing other things than this, especially since we only have about a third of the series left. Even if the last few episodes were doing quite a bit in terms of plot progression, twenty episodes is not a lot of time at the end of the day, and we’re going to come up on the end of this series with so many things either being underutilized or dropped entirely. But maybe this is simply a chance for me to look at these episodes again with different expectations and just go with the flow of what is happening in them at face value, rather than focusing on how I felt somewhat disappointed by them. This was still a pretty fun side adventure and does provide some connective tissue to the next phase of the story, and it’s still by no means awful, so let’s move into the third third of the series with a more positive attitude.