Dragon Ball Super Director Reveals the Staggering Time It Took to Make Tournament of Power Episodes
Dragon Ball Super’s Tournament of Power didn’t just shatter power levels—it devoured production schedules. In a candid talk with Spanish outlet Mision Tokyo, first director Kimitoshi Chioka and current producer Hiroyuki Sakurada reveal the relentless hours and painstaking craft behind every universe-shaking bout.
Ever wonder why Tournament of Power episodes looked like they were animated by a small army running on pure adrenaline? Turns out that is not far off. Two key DBS creatives just laid out how long a single episode actually takes, and the number is... a lot.
So how long does a DBS episode actually take?
In a chat with the Spanish fan site Mision Tokyo, Kimitoshi Chioka (the first director of Dragon Ball Super) and Hiroyuki Sakurada (the show's current producer) walked through the timeline. A translation credited to Kanzenshuu sums it up: from first script pass to a finished episode, you are looking at roughly half a year. Four of those months are animation alone.
- Approx. 6 months per episode from script to completion
- About 4 months of that is just animation
- Production is digital (specialized software), but original drawings and keyframes are still hand-drawn
Wait, then how did a weekly show hit deadlines?
They were not spending six months on one episode start-to-finish and then moving on. The team staggered the work. Multiple episodes would be in the pipeline at the same time, at different stages, with different animators or units handling separate installments in parallel. That is the only way the schedule makes any sense.
Why Tournament of Power was a blast and a headache
The Tournament of Power is the arc where DBS went big and refused to come back down. Zeno and Future Zeno hosted a battle royale featuring the strongest fighters from eight universes. The stakes were brutal: lose, and your entire universe gets erased. The stated goal behind it was to cut down the total number of universes by wiping out the ones considered primitive or not showing improvement. Fun premise, sure, but it also meant an avalanche of characters to juggle.
Chioka and Sakurada both said the format was a good time, but also a pain because of the sheer headcount. Keeping track of who is where, who is eliminated, who is powering up across eight different squads is not nothing. The flip side: that chaos created a kind of energy the show had not hit before, with Goku in the thick of it, pulling everyone into the hype.
How it landed with fans
If you like numbers: Dragon Ball Super sits at 8.3/10 on IMDb and 7.47/10 on MyAnimeList. Not exactly niche.
Where to watch
Dragon Ball Super is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.