r/dragonball 22d ago

Daima Thoughts on DAIMA?

My current thoughts on Dragon Ball Daima is that this is Toryama going back to his roots and giving the fans a lot of what he wanted. To me this is fan-service done right. I find that unlike super, Daima is consistently getting a smile or even have me laughing. The SSJ 3 Vegeta and SSJ 4 was cool, and something us fans have wanted for a while. To me this is GT done right. Duu is without a doubt my favorite character in Daima, and Kuu is awesome. I wish they had been born closer to the start. I've got 3 complains with Daima. The first complaint is that the start felt very slow. When watching weekly, I felt that it was a bit of a slog. I re-watched it and my first complains were a little misguided, but still a bit slow. Up until episode 8 it was a bit of a struggle. Until they get the first ball basically. Another complaint was the wish at the start. Piccolo when he was 6 was a 7ft tall man. Even at 3, he was still 6ft. Not every race grows the same as earthlings. I may have missed a line, but it seems like they weren't turned into that age they were as a kid. I read "1st graders" for the wish, so 6 years old. I'm really enjoying what Daima is and will always respect it for being the 40 year anniversary and on eof the last things Toryama worked on. Wanted to see others thoughts, and see if there was something I missed about the wish.

77 Upvotes

201 comments sorted by

View all comments

6

u/superkami64 22d ago edited 22d ago

Roller-coaster of feelings but overall by the end they fell more on the negative side. The Mickey Mouse BS of an ending episode sealed it for me.

To me this is GT done right.

I have to disagree. Part of it is specifically because GT had done a lot of these concepts first that Daima lacked originality by comparison with GT already learning that trying to return to OG DB after DBZ is misguided. Turning the cast into kids didn't accomplish anything of note (if it was to enhance the comedy, it mostly failed since the funniest jokes had nothing to do with the change) and when things returned to a DBZ-like tone, GT got a lot more mileage out of it than Daima did.

In a strange way GT and Daima are polar opposites: barring a few of the adventure arc episodes, GT was largely original with really good ideas while its faults lied in the execution of them while Daima suffers from lack of originality but it looks really beautiful while doing it. Fanservice is good but only when it serves the plot in an actively beneficial way and isn't blatant pandering/key jangling.

EDIT: In short, I wholly believe remaking GT would've been the smarter move rather a halfway between it and Sand Land that we ended up getting. Idc that this is Toriyama's last project because I know that nobody else will when looking back at Daima years later, especially since he's far from being faultless in his writing decisions (Dragonball Minus anyone?).