© BIRD STUDIO/SHUEISHA, TOEI ANIMATION Somewhere during the middle of this episode, I came upon a harrowing realization: Dragon Ball Dai...
© BIRD STUDIO/SHUEISHA, TOEI ANIMATION
Somewhere during the middle of this episode, I came upon a harrowing realization: Dragon Ball Daima is an isekai. You might think I’m talking crazy, but our heroes go to another world, have a powerful demon king to defeat, and Goku even fills in as our obligatory overpowered protagonist. All we need are some stat screens and there’s no reason you couldn’t title this show “That Time I Got Turned Back Into a Child and Had to Journey the Demon Realm”. Now a Dragon Ball Isekai might sound slightly cursed on paper, but we got Suicide Squad ISEKAI earlier this year, and if that proved anything, it’s that execution is key, and you can get a lot of mileage out of familiar stories when injected with the right amount of dumb fun. The show might be ticking off a couple of boxes when it comes to familiar isekai tropes, but it’s still fun enough to make for a pretty good romp.
Most of this episode features a lot of what we saw in the last one when it comes to shifting between lore dumps and silly gags, with a little more emphasis on the former this time around. As Goku, Glorio and the Supreme Kai make their way into the Demon Realm, we learn a little more about how it’s structured, and how three separate Demon Worlds exist within it that have been closed off from one another. Our trio ended up on the third, the furthest from where King Gomah is. We still don’t know a ton about how society works here, but what we do learn about it implies there’s a literal class divide involved in keeping the worlds separate and that the Supreme Kai comes from higher up the social ladder than Glorio, who seems to have access to things he shouldn’t. While I certainly wouldn’t expect Dragon Ball to start dipping into serious class commentary or anything, I am at least a little curious to see how that plays into things later on, and it does make me a little more interested in learning about Glorio. So far he’s an enigma, and the conversation with the Supreme Kai about his line of work implies that he might be involved in some less-than-savory business, but he otherwise seems like a pretty chill guy. Ironically, he comes off as overly cool and serious. He could be the protagonist of a different isekai setting. Between Goku being Goku, and the Supreme Kai trying too hard to keep on top of things, he feels like the actual adult in the room, and I hope he can maintain that energy for the rest of the show.
Now if all the lore stuff sounds a bit too serious, you can rest assured that there are still plenty of gags here, and the episode does a pretty good job of weaving them into the infodumps. My personal favorite was learning how the gates to the Demon Realm are guarded by giant metal goldfish called Warps who don’t like being reminded that they’re well…giant metal goldfish, and Goku can’t help but spend the entire time putting his foot in his mouth and calling them out for being weird about it. I was a little less impressed with the punchline to Goku learning about how heavy the air in the Demon Realm is being a fart joke, but it takes a lot to get me to laugh at those, so I can’t hold that against it, and I appreciate the effort.
Of course, if you’re here for some bare-knuckled Dragon Ball fights, we get a good bit of action towards the end of the episode when our trio goes to grab some burgers and ends up in a bar fight with the locals. It’s a lot bouncier than your usual Dragon Ball fights thanks to Goku’s current size, but that works entirely in its favor as we get a lot more fluid movement and martial arts acrobatics as opposed to the typical barrage of flashing punches, and having Goku trying to eat while he fights does a good of mixing all the action with some good comedy. It does feel a lot like early Dragon Ball and I hope the level of quality stays for the rest of the show’s fights. It’s still hard to tell where things are going (since the bar fight resulted in Goku and the others losing their ride.) It’s doing a good job of expanding on Dragon Ball‘s setting, and as long as it can keep balancing that out with being funny, I’m down for the rest of this strange little isekai road trip.
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Dragon Ball Daima is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.
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