Dragon Ball DAIMA Taking Very Brief Break in New Year

Dragon Ball fans who were looking forward to celebrating the start of 2025 with a brand-new episode of Dragon Ball Daima will be disappointed by a recent update on the 40th-anniversary series. Dragon Ball Daima will take a short break during the first week of January 2025.

Fuji TV, the Japanese TV station that airs Dragon Ball Daima every Friday in Japan, has the Akira Toriyama series listed as being on a break for Jan. 3, 2025. This somewhat disappointing update was shared by Dragon Ball Daima‘s official X (formerly Twitter) account. The one-week break means that Dragon Ball Daima Episode 13 will instead air the following week, on Jan. 10, 2025.

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Dragon Ball Daima Takes 1-Week Break at the Start of 2025

Since it premiered on Oct. 11, 2024, Dragon Ball Daima has aired new episodes every Friday in Japan, followed almost immediately on English-based streaming services like Crunchyroll. Outside of daylight saving time altering its English premieres, Dragon Ball Daima has been consistent with its Friday air time for about three months. The beginning of January will mark the first time the series has gone on a break. However, fans shouldn’t be concerned about the show’s production, as Japan’s first three days of the new year are typically treated as holidays by many major companies, although only Jan. 1 is a national holiday. Dragon Ball Daima likely won’t be the only high-profile show, anime or otherwise, that will take a week off within the first few days of 2025, with some making way for special New Year’s-related programming.

Considering how common it’s become for anime series to suddenly announce a break with no end date in sight, such as Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, it’s understandable why some fans might fear the worst over Dragon Ball Daima being off for one week. However, there have been no alarming signs of production problems at Toei Animation with Dragon Ball Daima. The situation is actually a complete 180 of what happened to the Dragon Ball Super TV anime series when it premiered in 2015, as early episodes commonly suffered from low-quality character drawings and appalling animation.

Dragon Ball Super’s poor animation stuck out like a sore thumb because the early episodes retold the recent anime movies at the time. It made the bad TV animation all the more apparent when compared to the high-quality animation of Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods and Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection ‘F’. Even Toriyama publicly expressed disappointment with Dragon Ball Super during its early run. Fortunately, Toei Animation was able to right the ship around the time of the “Future Trunks” story arc, leading to an explosive and highly satisfying finale for Dragon Ball Super in 2018.

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Although Dragon Ball Daima fans will have to wait one more week for Episode 13, there’s still a lot to look forward to in 2025. The English dub of Dragon Ball Daima will officially premiere on Crunchyroll on Jan. 10, 2025. Stephanie Nadolny, Kid Goku’s original English voice actor, will reprise her iconic role after 15 years. According to Nadolny, Toei Animation played a significant role in bringing her back for Daima.

New and previous episodes of Dragon Ball Daima are available on numerous streaming services like Crunchyroll, Netflix and Hulu. The Dragon Ball Super manga will resume publication, albeit only temporarily, with a special one-shot story in February. Previous chapters are available to read digitally via the Viz Media and Manga Plus app.

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Dragon Ball DAIMA

Due to a conspiracy, Goku and friends are transformed into children. They intend to travel to a mysterious new world to undo this change

Release Date

October 11, 2024

Seasons

1

Studio

Toei Animation

Creator

Akira Toriyama

Story By

Akira Toriyama

Writers

Akira Toriyama

Number of Episodes

11+

MyAnimeList Score

7.86

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Source: X (formerly Twitter)