Dragon Ball DAIMA Is Toriyama's Final Gift — And It Shows

Akira Toriyama died in March 2024, and Dragon Ball DAIMA — which premiered the following October — became something it was never designed to be: a farewell. Every episode aired with that knowledge sitting underneath it, and it changed how the series landed. You weren't just watching Goku get small and run through a demon realm. You were watching the last thing the man who created Dragon Ball personally greenlit, from concept through production.

That's an enormous amount of weight for any series to carry. What's remarkable about DAIMA is how often it doesn't buckle under it. The show is lighter than Super, more playful than any Dragon Ball series since the original, and intentionally smaller in scope. That wasn't an accident. Toriyama, in the interviews that exist, talked about DAIMA as a return to adventure storytelling — something he felt the franchise had drifted from. It shows.

Watching it now, with the full season available, DAIMA feels like a man trying to get back to something he loved before the franchise became a machine. That's worth something. More than something.

Mini-Goku was always going to be divisive. Dragon Ball's core audience has been conditioned for twenty-plus years to expect power escalation — each arc bigger, each transformation more significant than the last. DAIMA strips all of that away. Goku can't go Super Saiyan. The threat level is recalibrated. The show is interested in wonder instead of dominance.

The first half of the season leaned into that contrast hard. Goku and Glorio moving through the Demon Realm felt like early Dragon Ball — curious, physical, low-stakes in the best way. A lot of long-time fans didn't know how to handle it. The discourse was real: 'where's the power?' 'why isn't anything happening?' The answer, in retrospect, was that something was happening — it just wasn't the thing they'd been trained to expect.

The humor came back. The sense of scale appropriate to a small person in a large world came back. If you let go of the expectation that Dragon Ball is supposed to be Dragon Ball Super, DAIMA's first half is genuinely good television.

When the finale landed, it recontextualized everything that came before it. Gomah's arc — the reveal of what he actually wanted, what the Demon Realm mythology meant — felt like Toriyama building a corner of his universe he'd never get to expand. That's the most bittersweet read you can put on it, and it's the correct one.

The final fight hit differently than any Dragon Ball fight in years. Not because of animation — though the animation was strong — but because of what it meant to watch Goku fight one more time knowing it was the last fight Toriyama would personally direct our attention toward. The emotional register was set before the episode started.

DAIMA's finale isn't a perfect piece of television. Some of the Demon Realm mythology gets rushed in the back half, and a few character threads that opened in the first arc don't get the resolution they deserve. But the final moments land. They land because the show earned them, and because the context in which they exist is irreversible.

Toei has more Dragon Ball content coming. Super Dragon Ball Heroes continues. There are new series in development. The brand will not stop. That's both the nature of intellectual property at this scale and a testament to how deeply Toriyama's creation embedded itself in global culture.

But DAIMA was a rare thing in franchise entertainment: a creator returning to their own work not to expand it commercially but to say something specific with it. To slow down. To remember what they loved about it before the world decided what it was supposed to be.

The question isn't whether Dragon Ball continues without Toriyama. It will. The question is whether anyone steering it will have his instinct for when to be quiet — when to let Goku be small, let the adventure breathe, let wonder do the work that power used to do. DAIMA suggests that instinct was singular. We'll find out how singular in the years ahead.