Post
by kprison » Mon Feb 23, 2026 6:03 am
I reflected on this for a while, a whole year in fact, and my conclusion is that Daima is the best solely by process of elimination. GT fundamentally misunderstands Son Goku to such an extent that I just can't say it's a legitimate sequel creatively, I don't even think the ending is that good, it's just better than the Z epilogue. If you stop watching Z like 3 episodes early then you have a better ending than GT right there.
Super has some good in it, but even if the upcoming remake "fixes" it, to the extent that's possible, the Super stories are still mostly reskins of older ideas. You get little twists here and there, the arrangement of those old ideas are a little different, but at its core it's just an attempt to copy Dragon Ball Z, not an improvement or evolution of it, and it's not even a very good copy for the most part. I like the Tournament of Power as an episodic spin on Dragon Ball, and I like Moro, but is that worth sitting through a glorified reunion special, an actual reunion special, Freeza but worse, the Afterlife Tournament but worse, Purple Vegeta, the Android arc but worse, Movies 8 and 12 combined except less interesting, and then... a better version of the Android arc, but still not a very good one?
No, it's not worth it. Even if Black Freeza winds up knocking it out of the park, even if they go on to do amazing things in the Super continuity, it's just too little too late at this point. I hate the continuity that's been established and I would never sit through it again, nor would I ask anyone else to. Even the Tournament of Power, which I enjoy, is not something I would watch a 3rd time. Some will say the manga is better and I guess it's true that the manga is easier to read, but it also never reaches particularly high highs and the basic things that make Super's premise boring are all still there.
So we're left with Daima. Daima is flawed, poorly paced, doesn't use its cast well, doesn't always make sense. It's very much a "streaming era" show, it reminds me of new Trek actually. New Trek is well produced, every episode of every show looks like a high budget movie, but they've abandoned the Berman era rules for writing that made it unique, the morals are hamfisted, the conflicts are contrived and unbelievable, and everything takes forever because they're trying to hook you into a binge.
Daima is exactly the same. It's well produced, there's at least one good fight scene every episode, the lore dumps are a cheap mechanism to hook you in, keep you hooked for the binge, but they didn't actually have a story to tell.
I don't like Daima fundamentally, HOWEVER I also don't find it offensively bad, the lore dumps actually do make the world more interesting, and it's mercifully short, short enough that the premium visuals do somewhat justify 20 minutes of attention. Also, while narratively unsatisfying, it gives me Super Saiyan 4, my favorite Saiyan transformation, without having to sit through terribly written Goku solving boring plots and playing Space Monopoly to get to it.
If I view Daima as a sort of thematic evolution of those original 13 Z movies, then I can justify it, and I can get some enjoyment out of it.
Honestly though, I don't *like* any of them. I like the original manga and I like most of the additional worldbuilding from the original anime run. If you consider some of the old anime original content from the OG DB and Z anime sequels or interquels, I'd actually vote for, like, the Wedding Dress arc, the Afterlife Tournament, the episodic training filler, things like that.
