I think you're giving too much credit by implying it's a forced error. The original run has plenty of instances where everything seems adequately solved for, and then Toriyama would bring in a new card to keep things going. The choice to shift to "episodic arcs" was entirely voluntary.The Dark Knight wrote: Mon Feb 23, 2026 8:13 am I generally agree with what you said here, for the most part. All three of these sequels have aspects that I like, but unfortunately, for everything they get right, they get one or two things wrong that end up bringing down the entire product. I think the biggest issue facing a continuation of Dragon Ball is that Toriyama wrapped up every story arc and plot point by the time the manga concluded, which results in any long-term continuation being forced to retread old ground.
The problem, imo, is more that what made Dragon Ball work so well originally wasn't Toriyama's "creative genius" or anything so abstract. It's actually that Toriyama was specifically good at knowing how to pace things out in the context of a weekly manga with cliffhangers, twists, giving Goku personal motives and victory conditions apart from simply repelling threats., and then the anime was more or less able to adapt that. Toriyama was good at being a battle mangaka, not necessarily a drama storyteller more generally. The talent he had for writing a manga on a tight schedule just didn't translate to other iterations of creative roles.
This is actually exposed pretty well in the way battles are written after Z, where the events that unfold usually aren't influenced by the personal goals and personal flaws of the fighters. Rather, fights just happen until one side dominates, and then the next thing happens. No one has ever been able to recreate the classic Dragon Ball fights even in shows with premium production value because so much of how those old battles went hinged on real-time characterization and that 15 page per week format that always ends on a small cliffhanger.
It also seems to be the case that Toriyama, when he was alive, didn't actually have more stories in mind to tell. He had new characters to introduce, little pieces of lore, which was cool. He had funny ideas for how to use the characters for jokes (which were sometimes great and sometimes annoying) but overall his involvement was for marketing. They wanted to be able to put his name on the credits.
When we take a survey of what we know about Super's stories, it seems that Toriyama was usually more of an editor than anything. BoG was a rewrite, RoF was his script but bringing back old villains is not an idea he would have on his own, he was almost certainly asked to write that story, which was also how it worked for the Goku Black arc, and the Broly movie. The Tournament of Power is a story that only makes sense as a very episodic anime, also not something Toriyama would write on his own more than likely. U6 Tournament was maybe all him but it didn't really do anything on its own, it was all setup for things that mostly didn't wind up happening. We know he didn't write Moro. Super Hero is very different from what he had in mind, it more or less is a reimagining of the Android arc. The only thing he *might* have had a thorough creative passion for in the Super continuity was Granolah, and everyone hates Granolah because it doubles down on Nu_Bardock!
I don't like platitudes like "it didn't have soul" but in the case of Super, I legitimately think that's the problem. Almost everything we got from Super was a conscious effort to call back to something old, it wasn't an expansion, and when we got more than that, it seems like Toriyama didn't really understand what made his own work so great in the 80's and 90's, so it fell flat.
Daima is a bit different, they made the right call by tying it in so closely to Boo, it allows the story to sort of piggy back off an era that still worked and shed the reputational baggage of Super. I don't think it's fundamentally better though, really. I think it's accidentally better because it's trying to emulate straight to web sequels. I referenced Trek before, they do the exact same thing, where they'll put out these sequels to old shows with high production value and strong continuity, but the original content will be not that great. Daima is just emulating that style of binge format web sequels. To be honest, though we know for certain Toriyama was more closely involved, I'm skeptical that this means what the marketing tried to sell it as. I think, most likely, Toriyama's involvement was the lore dumps and some of the jokes, and probably everything else was just the staff doing its thing. It has more to add than Super but I think that's entirely because the type of show it's trying to be leans into continuity to artificially appeal to enthusiasts
