Over the weekend the latest Dragon Ball Series released it’s first episode, With the new anime being dubbed “Dragon Ball Daima” and it’s first episode being titled “Conspiracy” we venture into a new story created by the late and great Akira Toriyama. From the get go we hit the ground running with more or less “spooky” themed characters as the story takes place in the Demon Realm of Dragon Ball previously only canon to the video games and the extended universe. With this fresh new story we get a quick recap of the Majin Buu saga from the original Manga and Anime run, complete with a new look that reimagined the iconic scenes of many childhoods. For anyone not familiar with the franchise the first 15 minutes of the episode allow for a quick recap of all the important bits needed to fully understand this first episode while dropping some massive lore for the series. While this here is a spoiler free review of the episode (my next post will be massively spoiler heavy for both manga and anime) it is important to note that while this is an original story with no manga to read, it is canon to the main anime timeline. While there is many discourse online as to if it’s in the main continuity I have found no reasoning as of writing this (October 14th 2024 at 9:58pm) to showcase otherwise. With that being said the episode itself as stated beforehand was a heavy recap filled episode taking its new art style for a run! The animation is incredibly smooth and fits well with this new art style, Personally I have always enjoyed the line art heavy art style shown in some episodes of the anime but the less line art doesn’t exactly draw me away from it, the heavy focus on showcasing the characters without it allows for a more immersive feeling in my opinion and with no line art it allows the anime to feel more 3 dimensional while still being 2 dimensional. While the use of CGI is there, it does not take away from the story itself as the scenes that do use it would’ve resulted in massive delays if done by hand furthermore it allows the feeling of this otherworldly being to be shown in it’s fullest. Going back to the “spooky” feeling, the character design is so on theme for the month of October, All three of the first characters shown have this vampire feel to them that is hardly done by mistake as again the Demon Realm is now fully canon to the main timeline. From the clothes to the general backgrounds everything feels so halloween almost like if a spirit halloween threw up and made art! Yes that was graphic and unnecessary but again gotta keep it on theme! All in all I rate it a 10/10 for amazing art, amazing animation, massive lore and finally because this is the last piece of Akira Toriyama we will ever get.
Thanks for reading and I will write to you all again, this has been Anthony!
