Dragon Quest: Dai episode 2 review: a bloody, brilliant follow-up

Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai, the 2020 anime from Toei, kept its strong start going with episode two, "Dai and Princess Leona." It's another fantastically animated episode, and if you're a Dragon Ball fan, especially a fan of Dragon Ball Super: Broly, I think you need to see it.

The story, in my opinion, gets better and better as the series progresses, and I think you'll agree with me on that. At this point, though, we were only two episodes in.

Toei's Dragon Ball Super: Broly staff make episode 2 look great

You can't go wrong with this staff. Animators named Hamano, Yamamoto and Morita all worked on this episode, and the animation commentator Anime AJ talked about all of them being part of it on Twitter. As I've said before, there was a lot of planning behind this show. Toei put almost a year's worth of preplanning into it.

That tells me Toei went in with the best of intentions, making sure every episode could look as good as possible. A big chunk of the top staff from Dragon Ball Super: Broly worked on this show, along with other people from Toei. That's why I keep telling Dragon Ball fans, and Broly fans in particular, that they shouldn't skip this episode. Visually, it's great.

Princess Leona arrives on Dai's island for her 14th birthday ritual

Princess Leona comes to the island because it's her 14th birthday, even though, like many anime characters, she doesn't look 14. She's there to perform a ritual, but of course things don't go the way you'd expect. The knights who protect her all think the island is filled with monsters.

And it is filled with monsters. The knights come prepared with weapons, but the monsters on this island are benevolent, good creatures and friends of Dai. There are others in other places that aren't so friendly, and that's where the story heads later on.

The main plot of the episode is that Leona needs Dai to take her to the Earth Cave so she can do the ritual. Along the way they run into problems, most of all an evil giant scorpion. We'd seen this scorpion before in the preview of the show that came out, which ran almost an hour and covered material from roughly the first seven or eight episodes.

The evil scorpion breaks from Toriyama's original Dragon Quest design

The scorpion in this show doesn't resemble Akira Toriyama's original design for the scorpion from Dragon Quest I. For those who may not know, the Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai manga wasn't a Toriyama manga, and Toriyama didn't design Dai. He designed the characters and monsters from the games, so when you see slimes and other monsters in this show, that's Toriyama's work carried into both the manga and the anime.

With the scorpion, though, there were changes. Its face is different, with a big mouth that the scorpions in the game hid. Not every monster will look exactly like Toriyama's original design. The bigger point is that this evil scorpion isn't from the island. It isn't one of the benevolent monsters Dai is friends with, and that leads into the plot that follows.

The Adventure of Dai isn't afraid of blood

If you were worried about censorship because Dragon Ball Super was much less bloody than the old Dragon Ball shows, and many Toei shows aren't that gory, you've got nothing to worry about here. This show is on a different time slot, and it's gory and violent. It's not super bloody like many other anime, but there's a considerable amount of blood in this episode, more than you'd expect from a supposed kids show.

I like it. I've said before that "blood helps the audience understand the severity of the situation," and it tells you this is a bigger deal than you thought. In my opinion it's used effectively here, and animated well enough that it's not over the top but also not subdued. That's what we need from these types of shows.

The scorpion stings Leona, and the poison starts spreading through her body. If you've played Dragon Quest or any RPG, you know poison means your HP drops every time you walk, and it's the same here: it slowly kills you. Right after that, Dai slaughters the scorpion by going for the weak spot on its back and stabbing it with the royal knife Leona gave him. The blood is mostly blue, with a little red, but it's still more gory than I expected, in a good way.

Baron's betrayal and the plot to take Leona's kingdom

Now Leona is poisoned, and the big twist is that Baron, one of the men who came with the princess, is behind all of this. He turns on her and tries to kill her. That also happened in the old Dai anime, so the new show follows relatively the same path, not exactly, but relatively.

Baron isn't the only one behind it, though. The men with her made a plot: if she dies, the kingdom belongs to them. Dai gets dragged into a mess he wanted nothing to do with, but of course he makes a friend out of it. A lot is crammed into this episode, and that's not a bad thing. All of the monsters from the island, Dai's friends, are summoned to fight, and it gets very exciting very fast.

The Killing Machine is one of my favorite Dragon Quest monsters

Then comes the real antagonist, a non human one: the Killing Machine, unleashed by Baron. The episode explains that the Dark Lord created it to kill the hero, which matches how it was in the original Dragon Quest games almost exactly. There it wasn't really a boss, just a regular enemy, and there are different versions and upgrades of it, including the Assassin Machine.

The Killing Machine is one of the most awesome Toriyama designs. It's a giant machine with a bow and arrow and various metal swords, and it's tough to kill. When you fight one in the games, even though they're turn based RPGs, they usually attack twice in one turn, which makes them very dangerous if you're underleveled. It's one of my favorite monsters from Dragon Quest, and I loved seeing it here.

The episode also reveals that the Killing Machine has a pilot. That's interesting, because in the original games the Killing Machines were programmed robots with nobody inside. They're robots, not mechs like they are in this show. It's different here because the anime isn't exactly identical to the games.

Dai's glowing crest feels straight out of Dragon Ball

Then we get the moment of the episode, and if you're a Dragon Ball fan it'll look very familiar. Dai is worried that Leona will die from the poison, and he pulls a Gohan. He powers up, the crown he got in the first episode cracks, and he glows with blue energy. That blue glow is a mysterious energy that can't be explained yet, even though it will be later.

He explodes with power and carries her out of the cave, jumping right out of it. This scene looks so good. It was so good that I said it's "like my dream anime."

The glow on his forehead is very Dragon Ball. It makes me want to call him Super Saiyan Dai, just so Dragon Ball fans give this show a chance, because I want Dragon Ball fans to see it. As I saw it at the time, Super wasn't coming back that year, so in the meantime, enjoy this. It's good, and it's "the same spirit as Dragon Ball," especially the old stuff.

After the first two episodes made such a point of Dai not knowing how to cast spells, he powers up again, very Dragon Ball like, and fires off Swoosh, a wind spell. It knocks the machine back. The Killing Machine seemed invincible, but it really isn't.

The CGI fight looks like a high quality game cutscene

There's an animation cut in Dai's fight with the machine that's obviously CGI. You don't have to be an animation expert to see it. It reminded me of the Goku and Vegeta versus Broly part of Dragon Ball Super: Broly, where you can tell it's over the top CGI. The difference is that it's good here. There are a couple of awkward shots and angles, but it looks like a good, high quality video game cutscene, not a poor one.

Even the computer generated imagery in this show is better than some of the movie work. Think of the weird CGI part in Resurrection F where Goku and Frieza fly through space slowly and it looks awkward. This is better than that, and this isn't even a movie, which is crazy to me.

At one point the Killing Machine spins like a top and knocks Dai down, and that's exactly how they are in the games. They can spin the top part of themselves in a circle. I couldn't believe it. What an awesome ending.

The Sizzle spell wins the fight, and Avan is teased next

Dai stabs the Killing Machine in the little circle on its chest, its weak spot, opening a hole that lets him unleash Sizzle, a fire spell. In Dragon Quest there's Sizz and there's Sizzle, the upgraded version. I think the old English translation called it Firebane or Explode, which later became Bang. The names changed across translations over the years. I prefer the old ones, but that's nostalgia, since I played the games way back with the first translation.

Either way, it's an incredible scene. The symbol on Dai's head glows, he fires off the blast, and it's enough to knock out Baron, who's piloting the machine. Dai wins, and we get a happy ending: Leona is cured, and the traitor is going to trial. As she leaves the island, she tells Dai that maybe someday he could be a bodyguard, and maybe now he's getting more confident with magic.

The story isn't over. It's not really a cliffhanger, but there's a teaser of what's coming, because Dai meets many new companions on his quest. Next up was Avan, who has a very interesting backstory. I didn't know if they'd change it, and I won't spoil it for anyone new to the franchise, but he helps train Dai to become a hero. More party members are coming too, and I'm very excited, because this really is a video game come to life. There's no direct game it's based on, but the inspirations from the games are there.

This was a great episode, I enjoyed it very much, and the show was off to an amazing start. I hoped it would stay that way, because this is a great story.