Some goodbyes you can see coming from a mile off and they still knock the wind out of you. “Dragon Ball Daima” aired its twentieth and final episode tonight, February 28, 2025, and the timing is enough to make a grown fan sit very quietly for a minute. The broadcast ran late, past midnight and into the small hours of March 1 — the anniversary of Akira Toriyama’s passing in 2024. Whether that was fate or careful scheduling, the effect is the same. The last chapter of the last Dragon Ball story Toriyama personally built landed on the exact day the world lost him a year ago.
Let us not tiptoe around what “Daima” actually was, because it matters. This was not a series someone made in Toriyama’s honor after the fact. He developed the story himself. He designed the characters. He crafted the settings. This was his project, his ideas, his pen guiding the whole thing — which means that in all likelihood, it is the last Dragon Ball anime to carry his direct creative fingerprint. Everything that comes after, however good, will be other hands interpreting his world. This was the man himself, one more time. Warning: beyond this point there are spoilers for the Dragon Ball Daima finale and its final battle.
The last chapter of the last Dragon Ball story Toriyama personally built landed on the exact day the world lost him a year ago.”
The premise was pure late-period Toriyama mischief. “Daima” shrank Goku (Masako Nozawa) and the gang down into small, childlike forms and sent them off into a strange new world, leaning hard into the adventurous, gag-heavy spirit that defined the earliest “Dragon Ball” long before the franchise became an arms race of screaming power levels. It was the first Dragon Ball anime to air as a late-night series, twenty episodes that started in October 2024, and it felt like a creator returning to the sandbox he loved most — the sense of wonder, the goofy detours, the joy of a small hero in a big weird universe.
The finale, fittingly titled “Maximum,” went big before it went quiet. It centered on the clash between Super Saiyan 4 Goku and the giant form of the villain Gomah, delivering the kind of escalating spectacle the franchise trades in, and then it did something classically Toriyama: it did not slam every door shut. The final episode left deliberate wiggle room — enough space for a potential second season, a movie, or some related project down the line. Even in what may be his last direct contribution, Toriyama could not resist leaving the horizon open. Adventure, in his world, was never really supposed to end.
Most series endings are about a story wrapping up. This one is about an author saying goodbye without ever getting to say it out loud. Toriyama did not know “Daima” would be a memorial when he was building it — it was meant to be a fun new adventure — and there is something almost unbearably gentle about that. He was making something joyful, and the joy is what he left behind. You watch the last episode and you are laughing at the same gags that made you laugh at ten years old, and then you remember, and the laugh catches in your throat.
It is worth pausing on Masako Nozawa here too, because she is a piece of living history. She has voiced Goku since the character first appeared in the 1980s, carrying him across roughly four decades of anime, and hearing her deliver the final lines of Toriyama’s last story is its own quiet monument. The creator and the voice, together at the finish line one more time. If you wanted a symbol of how much continuity this franchise has held onto across the years, it is right there in the sound of Goku’s voice not changing while everything around it did.
For those of us tracking Dragon Ball as a decades-long saga — the original adventure, “Z,” “Super,” the movies, the games — “Daima” now occupies a strange and sacred spot on that timeline. It is a story set within the established world, but it is also a full stop of a kind no other entry carries. Slotting it into the chronology is the easy part. Sitting with what it represents is the hard part. Toriyama gave the world a hero who always got back up, and his final gift was one more adventure for that hero, delivered with a wink and an open door. We will take the adventure. We will miss the man who dreamed it. And we suspect Goku, small and grinning and ready for whatever is next, would tell us not to be sad about it.
What Do You Think? Does “Daima” deserve to be remembered as the perfect send-off for Akira Toriyama’s direct involvement, or do you wish his final Dragon Ball had been a grander, more conclusive statement? With the finale leaving room for a second season or a movie, should the franchise continue building on “Daima” without him, or is there something to be said for letting his last personal story stand alone? And after nearly forty years of Masako Nozawa as Goku, what happens to the soul of Dragon Ball whenever that torch finally has to pass?
See you on the next binge!
