Dragon Ball Daima

ドラゴンボールダイマ

7.5(67,920)

MAL Score

Ranked #1973

Popularity #1878

Action
Adventure
Comedy
Fantasy
Martial Arts

Episodes: 20
Duration: 23 min per ep
Aired: Oct 11, 2024 to Feb 28, 2025
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

With Majin Buu defeated, Son Gokuu and his friends finally expect some peace—until their last battle is watched from afar by Gomah, a sinister figure who crowns himself King of the Demon Realm after Dabura’s death. At his side is Degesu, the younger brother of Higashi no Kaioshin, whose envy pushes him to plot against the universe’s defenders.

Together they seize Earth’s Dragon Balls and use Shenron to turn Gokuu and the other warriors into children, hoping to strip them of the strength that overcame Buu. As the chaos unfolds, Gomah kidnaps Dende, Earth’s current god, forcing the shrunken heroes into action. Refusing to be held back by his new body, Gokuu sets out with Kaioshin and Glorio—a demon with an unexpectedly rebellious streak—journeying to the Demon Realm to rescue Dende and return everyone to their proper ages.

Otaku Consensus

Dragon Ball Daima lands as a polished but divisive late-franchise experiment: critics and fans repeatedly single out Toei Animation’s fight animation and art direction as some of Dragon Ball’s strongest TV work, and its return to compact adventure pleased viewers hungry for original Dragon Ball energy. The verdict turns on structure: the 20-episode run often feels rushed or under-set up, with pacing complaints and thin narrative connective tissue showing up even in otherwise positive reviews.

Why You Should Watch

Watch Dragon Ball Daima if you want Dragon Ball to feel like a road-trip martial-arts fantasy again rather than another escalation ladder of multiverse stakes. Its appeal is specific: demons, gods, magic, travel, compact party dynamics, and physical comedy take priority over tournament brackets and long explanations of power systems. It scratches the same itch as early Dragon Ball’s playful questing, while using the cleaner modern action polish associated with Toei’s recent Dragon Ball productions. Viewers who disliked Dragon Ball Super’s exposition-heavy detours may appreciate how Daima lets movement and choreography carry scenes, though anyone who needs airtight setup and dense plotting will feel the seams. This is strongest as a visually energized franchise side-quest for fans who value atmosphere, transformations, and Toriyama-flavored weirdness.

Key Characters

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Gokuu Son(VA: Masako Nozawa)
Masako Nozawa’s continued presence gives Daima an unusual continuity charge, letting the series play with a younger physical version of Gokuu without severing him from decades of familiar performance instincts.
G
Glorio(VA: Kouki Uchiyama)
Glorio gives the traveling party its sharpest outsider energy, and Kouki Uchiyama’s casting fits a demon character designed to read as cooler and less transparent than the franchise’s usual comic companions.
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Higashi no Kaioshin(VA: Yumiko Kobayashi)
Higashi no Kaioshin gains rare centrality here, shifting from cosmic functionary to active companion and giving longtime fans more time with a character often sidelined after the Buu era.
P
Panzy(VA: Fairouz Ai)
Panzy represents Daima’s emphasis on new side-character texture, with Fairouz Ai adding youthful comic force to a cast built around travel, demons, and culture-clash banter.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
Toei Animation’s production is the most consistently praised element across reviews, with multiple critics calling it the best-looking Dragon Ball TV entry and even comparing its visual highs favorably to Dragon Ball Super: Broly.
2
The series is structurally compact at 20 episodes, which gives it momentum but also fuels the most common criticism: minimal setup, abrupt transitions, and battles that sometimes move so quickly they leave little room for dialogue or dramatic breathing space.
3
Daima foregrounds fantasy taxonomy more than many recent Dragon Ball installments, with AniList tags placing Demons and Super Power at 100%, Magic at 80%, Gods at 76%, and Travel at 79%.
4
Its age-regression setup is not incidental branding; AniList tags it at 90% Age Regression and 88% Primarily Child Cast, making the altered bodies a core formal choice rather than a one-episode gag.
5
The show’s reception is sharply polarized for a franchise title: its MAL score sits at 7.55 and AniList at 75/100, while sampled user reviews range from 1/10 accusations of corporate cash-grab to 9/10 praise for recapturing original Dragon Ball’s adventure spirit.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: Dragon Ball Daima aired as a finished 20-episode run from October 11, 2024 to February 28, 2025, making it far shorter and more self-contained than the franchise’s long-running TV predecessors.
Fun fact 2: The key creative credits pair franchise originator Akira Toriyama with Chief Director Aya Komaki, Director Yoshitaka Yashima, and Series Composition writer Yuuko Kakihara, giving the project a defined TV-series leadership structure rather than a film-style one-off team.
Fun fact 3: Katsuyoshi Nakatsuru handled character design, while Takashi Kurahashi and Maya Kasai are both credited for art design, a division of labor reflected in how often reviews separate the show’s visual craft from its story complaints.
Fun fact 4: The post-production and image pipeline credits include Rumiko Nagai for color design, Naoyuki Wada as director of photography, and Honami Yamagishi for editing, three roles that matter heavily in the series’ praised clean action readability.
Fun fact 5: On AniList, Daima accumulated 1,632 favourites alongside a 75/100 score, suggesting a dedicated fan subset even while broader review discourse remained mixed.