Dragon Ball Super gets the spotlight, but Dragon Ball Daima quietly became the series Akira Toriyama poured himself into right up until the very end of his life. It’s smaller in scope, sure, but that never stopped it from throwing down one of Goku’s most entertaining scraps in years.
Episode 17, titled “Gomah,” is proof that the series is criminally underrated compared to the other franchise releases. Buried inside a bigger, messier battle is a one-on-one between Goku and Majin Duu that fans still bring up as the show’s best pure fight, and it’s easy to see why once you watch it unfold.
TITLEDragon Ball DaimaCREATORAkira ToriyamaIMDb RATING (as of September 13, 2026)7.7/10WHERE TO WATCHCrunchyroll, Hulu
How Dragon Ball Daima Became Akira Toriyama’s Most Personal Project
Goku from Dragon Ball Daima | Credits: Toei Animation
Daima wasn’t originally supposed to have much of Akira Toriyama‘s fingerprints on it at all. By his own account, it started life as an anime-original project that he was only meant to consult on here and there. Somewhere along the way, though, that changed completely. He ended up writing the story himself, building out the setting, and designing a huge chunk of the cast, admitting outright that he was putting far more of himself into this one than people might have expected.
That extra effort shows up in little details, like Goku relearning how to fight from scratch with his Power Pole because his shrunken body can’t rely on raw strength anymore. It’s a genuinely clever excuse to revisit a fighting style the franchise had mostly ignored since the original Dragon Ball, and it gave the animators a reason to get inventive with every single brawl, from a chaotic bar fight in the very first episodes to the full-scale finale.
Toriyama passed away in March 2024, just months before Daima premiered, which makes the whole project hit differently in hindsight. He’d been open about his declining health beforehand, even writing that he wasn’t sure how much more work he had left in him, but that he intended to keep creating anyway for as long as he could.
Furthermore, Goku’s Super Saiyan 4 form was also designed by Toriyama himself. Knowing that, it’s hard not to watch Daima and feel like you’re seeing Toriyama giving one last, generous part of himself to a world he’d built forty years earlier, wringing out every good idea he had left before he had to finally let go of it.
Goku And Majin Duu’s Wager Fight Turns Into A Total Slugfest
That care shows up most clearly in Episode 17, when Dr. Arinsu stops playing coy about her plans. She wants a version of the Demon Realm that’s meaner than the one Gomah currently rules, and rather than just grabbing the last two Dragon Balls by force, she offers a wager instead: one fighter from each side throws down, winner takes all three. Majin Kuu practically begs for a shot at Goku, but Arinsu sends out Duu instead, and it’s the right call. Goku and Vegeta bicker like siblings over who gets to fight, until Bulma steps in and lets Goku take this one.
Once the gloves come off, Duu turns out to be a genuinely nightmarish opponent. His body stretches and lashes out at angles that shouldn’t be physically possible, and Goku spends the opening exchanges just trying to figure out where the next hit is coming from. Goku eventually has to power up to Super Saiyan just to keep pace, and even then, Duu refuses to fold. The fight settles into something close to a stalemate, right up until Duu winds up for a point-blank mouth beam, and that’s exactly when everything changes.
King Gomah crashes the party, now transformed by the long-lost Oculus into something far bigger and meaner than before. Vegeta rushes him first and gets smacked aside like he weighs nothing, so Goku calls for a group effort instead. Even with nearly everyone piling on, Gomah barely flinches, and when he fires a blast meant to finish Goku off, Duu and Tamagami Number One dive in to block it. That buys Goku just enough time to power up into Super Saiyan 3 (one of the best-designed Saiyan forms), tanking the attack completely as the episode ends on a tense standoff.
What are your thoughts on Dragon Ball Daima? We’d love to know your opinions in the comments below.
All Episodes of Dragon Ball Daima are available to watch on Crunchyroll and Hulu.
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
