Episode 12 – Dragon Ball Daima

After spending a lot of its run harkening back to the franchise’s earliest days, this is the first episode of Daima that’s felt a lot more in line with modern Dragon Ball. It’s entirely composed of fights as it spends most of its runtime finishing out Vegeta and Majin Duu’s respective battles against the Tamagami. Fortunately, while that does make for a slower-moving episode than the last few we’ve gotten, it’s no less funny or exciting in its execution and makes for a fun way to close out this chapter of Daima’s saga.

Duu continues to put up a pretty good fight against the Tamagami he’s facing and impresses Dr. Arinsu with his skills. We’re treated to an impressive and hilarious fight as Duu squashes and stretches his body like a Looney Tunes character while the Tamagami struggles to keep up with him. Equally funny and interesting is what happens after the fight, as the Tamagami decides to test Duu on his wits. In Duu’s case, he gets a tough math question that even Dr. Arinsu can’t solve. While I was expecting the punchline here to be Duu accidentally guessing it correctly, Kuu figures it out and slips him the answer. Since no one else seemed to notice, Duu ends up getting all the credit. While Kuu doesn’t seem fazed by Duu taking up all of mom’s attention, I wonder if he’s going to stick to playing the lackey or convince Duu to help him ditch the doctor and strike out on their own. Having the two of them function as a duo with Kuu as the brains and Duu as the brawn seems like a great villain dynamic, though I also can’t discount the possibility of them snatching some fusion bugs and fusing into a form that has all their best traits. Given his penchant for naming puns, I can’t believe Toriyama would miss the opportunity to give us Majin Puu.

That brings us back to Vegeta’s fight, and as funny as it would have been for him to end up monster chow, there was no way he was gonna get done quite that dirty so it doesn’t take long to learn that he managed to avoid getting eaten. Vegeta proves a bit too slippery until Neva gives the Tamagami a power boost so Vegeta has a chance to test his limits. After he’s finally pushed far enough, we get to see Vegeta whip out a trick that in hindsight, I’m shocked never came up for him during the Buu saga: Super Saiyan 3. Vegeta gets to show it off in style as he turns the tides of the fight pretty quickly. While this does end up giving us a pretty solid bit of spectacle, if I had to lobby one complaint here, it’s that the fight choreography gets a lot less impressive once the battle is stacked in Vegeta’s favor and ends up coming off more like a standard Dragon Ball Z fight. Cool as the fight was, though, I got a bigger kick out of Vegeta’s post-battle trial, as much like Kuu, he too is subjected to a seemingly impossible math problem. I was expecting him to get it wrong to balance out Kuu’s success, but he manages to figure out it’s a riddle at the very last second. While that’s not quite as laugh-out-loud funny as his failing, it demonstrates that while he’s not as smart as his wife, he is at least smart enough to solve brain teasers, and since I can’t say the same about some of his companions, I suppose that at least counts for something

With both fights ending with dragon balls in hand, the big question now is what happens next. I’m eager to see what happens when Kuu and Duu meet Goku and Vegeta. We also can’t forget about King Gomah and Degesu. While they spend their screen time here gasping in horror about the fact they now have two groups of troublemakers to deal with, it does seem like they’re at least working on a contingency plan. As of this moment, I’m not sure if there’s been a confirmed episode count for how long this series is supposed to run, but apparently, it’s supposed to be on the shorter side by Dragon Ball standards, so we might already be midway through it. If we are, then this seems as good a halfway point as any, and while there are a lot of ways the series could go from here, all of them seem fun enough that I’m excited to see how the rest of it unfolds.

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Dragon Ball Daima is currently streaming on
Crunchyroll.