Dragon Ball's Ending, Explained
Chapter 519 ends it, and almost everything made since happens before it. What Goku does with Uub, why GT is not the ending, and why Super is a prequel.
Spoilers throughout. This page assumes you have finished the series.
Dragon Ball ends at chapter 519, "Farewell, Dragon World!", and everything that has happened since takes place before it. That sentence is the whole article, and it is the part people get wrong.
What actually happens
The last stretch of the manga, usually called the Peaceful World Saga, jumps ten years past the defeat of Kid Buu and lands at another World Martial Arts Tournament. Goku meets a boy named Uub, who is Kid Buu reborn as a human, wished into a better life. They fight. Goku deliberately fails to finish it, and then leaves with the boy to train him as the next person who will protect the world.
That is the ending. No final villain, no funeral, no assembled cast waving from a hilltop. The strongest character in the story walks off with a child who used to be the thing that nearly ended it.
Why it annoyed people at the time
Because Goku leaves. He abandons his family again, at the end, having done it repeatedly throughout, and the series treats it as a happy ending rather than a flaw to answer for. Readers noticed. The affection this ending now enjoys is partly hindsight and partly the fact that no subsequent ending has beaten it.
The defence is that it is the only ending consistent with the character. Goku is not a father who fights; he is a fighter who has a family, and every attempt the franchise has made to sand that down has produced a worse Goku. Ending on his most selfish likeable instinct is more honest than a domestic scene would have been.
GT is not the ending
Dragon Ball GT aired straight after the Z anime and looks like a continuation. Toriyama did not write it. It was made by the studio without a manga to adapt, and the franchise has since treated it as outside the story: it is not referenced, not built on, and Uub, supposedly the point of the entire finale, barely features in it.
Watch it if you want. Plenty of people are fond of it. But it is not the author's ending and nothing later treats it as canon.
Super is a prequel, which surprises people
Dragon Ball Super looks like a sequel because it came out later and features older characters. It is not. Super takes place inside the ten-year gap between Kid Buu's defeat and that last tournament, which means the entire Super era, gods of destruction and tournaments of power included, happens before chapter 519 rather than after it.
So the ending has not been replaced. It has been given a very long middle. Super has never retconned it, and the more Super adds, the odder the ending's own terms look, since Uub is presented as the next great hope in a world that now contains several beings who could remove him from it without effort. That tension is unresolved and the franchise has not tried to resolve it.
Where the franchise now stands
Akira Toriyama died in 2024. Dragon Ball Daima, the last animated series he worked on, finished on 28 February 2025. The Super manga released a single chapter in 2025 and went quiet; its editor asked for patience rather than giving a date, and when it resumes it will be Toyotarou continuing alone.
The practical consequence is that chapter 519 is more final than it has been at any point in thirty years. There is no running anime and no running manga, and the ending the author wrote is once again just the ending.
So which one should you treat as real?
The manga's. It is the only version the author wrote as a conclusion, it has never been contradicted, and it is the one the rest of the franchise arranges itself around, including the parts that pretend to come after it. The Z anime reaches the same place; GT is a separate thing that begins where the ending stopped; Super is the long detour taken before arriving.