A Legacy That Refuses to Power Down

Few franchises in the history of entertainment have demonstrated the kind of staying power that Dragon Ball has managed over four decades. What began as Akira Toriyama's manga serialisation in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 1984 — a loose, comedic riff on the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West — has grown into one of the most recognisable cultural exports Japan has ever produced. In 2026, with two major animated entries behind us and Toriyama's passing still fresh in the memory of the fan community, the franchise finds itself at a genuinely interesting crossroads. It is older than many of its fans' parents, yet it continues to attract new audiences and provoke passionate debate. How does a property sustain that kind of relevance? The answer, it turns out, is complicated.

Dragon Ball Super: A Flawed but Necessary Return

When Dragon Ball Super launched, it carried the weight of enormous expectation. The original Dragon Ball Z had ended over two decades prior, and while video games, movies, and merchandise had kept the brand commercially alive, there had been no mainline animated series continuing Goku's story. Super had to thread a needle — satisfy veterans who had grown up with the franchise while remaining accessible to younger viewers encountering it for the first time.

Its early story arcs were, by most assessments, shaky. The first two sagas adapted the theatrical films Battle of Gods and Resurrection 'F' in a manner that often felt compressed and visually inconsistent. The animation quality in particular attracted widespread criticism, with certain episodes becoming notorious online for their rough production values. For a franchise returning to television after so long, this was a rocky debut.

Yet Super found its footing, and when it did, it reminded audiences exactly why Dragon Ball had endured in the first place. The Universe 6 Tournament arc introduced fresh characters and an expanded cosmology that suggested the creative team was genuinely invested in growing the world rather than simply retreading familiar ground. But it was the Tournament of Power — the sprawling, multi-episode climax of the series — that represented Super's most significant achievement. Featuring fighters from across eight universes competing for their very existence, the arc delivered the high-stakes spectacle and emotional momentum that the series had been building toward. It was, by widespread agreement among fans and critics, a genuine return to form: the kind of Dragon Ball storytelling that felt earned rather than obligatory.

The Tournament of Power succeeded because it did something the franchise had occasionally struggled with — it made consequence feel real. The threat of universal annihilation raised the stakes beyond personal rivalries, and the ensemble structure meant that characters who had long been sidelined were given meaningful roles. It was imperfect, as any arc spanning dozens of episodes tends to be, but its ambition and execution largely justified the series' existence.

Dragon Ball Daima: Toriyama's Farewell

Dragon Ball Daima occupies a unique and bittersweet place in the franchise's history. The series was directly overseen by Akira Toriyama himself, making it the last project to carry his active creative supervision before his death in March 2024. That context is impossible to separate from how the series will ultimately be remembered — and how fans have engaged with it.

Structurally, Daima takes the franchise in a direction that recalls its earliest days. Goku and his allies are transformed into children through a mysterious wish, and the story leans into a lighter, more adventurous tone that echoes the original Dragon Ball rather than the relentless power escalation that characterised Z and much of Super. For longtime fans, this felt like a deliberate creative statement — Toriyama, given what may have been a sense of his own mortality , returning the property to something closer to what he originally envisioned: a journey story with humour, heart, and wonder at its core.

Whether Daima fully succeeds on those terms depends heavily on what a viewer values in Dragon Ball. Those who came to the franchise through Z's intense battles and emotional crescendos may find its pacing more leisurely than expected. But those willing to meet it on its own terms have found a series that feels personal in a way that much of Super did not. Toriyama's fingerprints are visible throughout — in the character designs, the world-building, the specific brand of absurd comedy that has always been native to his creative voice. As a final chapter in his direct involvement with the franchise, it carries genuine emotional weight.

What Has Worked and What Hasn't

Across both Super and Daima, certain patterns emerge when assessing what has sustained the franchise and what has occasionally threatened to undermine it.

  • World expansion: The introduction of multiple universes, divine hierarchies, and new cosmological concepts in Super gave the franchise genuine room to breathe. Rather than endlessly escalating power levels within a single universe, this structural choice opened narrative possibilities that the series has only begun to explore.
  • Tonal range: Daima's lighter approach demonstrated that Dragon Ball is not locked into a single register. The franchise's comedic roots are as valid a mode of expression as its battle epics, and the willingness to revisit that range has been largely welcome.
  • Production inconsistency: Super in particular suffered from visible drops in animation quality during its broadcast run. While home release versions corrected many of these issues, the damage to first impressions was real. This remains a structural challenge for long-running weekly animation.
  • Character depth: Both series have drawn criticism for treating certain characters — particularly many of the female cast members — as decorative rather than substantive. The franchise has made incremental progress on this front, but it remains an area where the gap between potential and execution is most visible.

Why Forty Years In, the World Still Watches

The more interesting question is not whether Dragon Ball has flaws — it obviously does — but why those flaws have never been fatal to its appeal. Part of the answer is cultural infrastructure. Dragon Ball is genuinely multigenerational at this point; grandparents and grandchildren can share a reference to Goku in ways that few fictional properties ever achieve. The franchise has become something closer to mythology than entertainment in many parts of the world, particularly in Latin America, France, and across Southeast Asia, where its influence on popular culture runs extraordinarily deep.

But cultural inertia alone does not explain continued engagement. There is something in the core proposition of Dragon Ball — the idea that effort, friendship, and the refusal to quit are the most powerful forces in existence — that continues to resonate across generations and geographies. It is not a sophisticated philosophy, but it is a consistent one, and Toriyama communicated it with a sincerity that audiences have always been able to feel beneath the spectacle.

With Toriyama now gone, the franchise faces a future shaped by others interpreting his vision. That is both a challenge and, potentially, an opportunity. The characters and world he built are rich enough to sustain new stories told by creative teams who grew up loving them. What remains to be seen is whether those teams can honour what made Dragon Ball endure without becoming mere curators of nostalgia. The Tournament of Power showed that genuine ambition is still possible within this universe. Daima showed that the franchise's creator believed there was still something new to say. In 2026, the question is who will carry that belief forward — and whether they can make the next forty years as compelling as the first.