The new game based on Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama’s comic Sand Land will release on April 26, 2023, announced Bandai Namco on the PlayStation blog. The action-RPG will have players puttering around and bashing baddies in a kind of cute, monster-infested manga version of a Mad Max wasteland.
The original Sand Land was a short one-off comic that really highlighted Toriyama’s delightful obsession with chunky little vehicles of various sorts. The game will expand on that world by letting you customize, tweak, and refactor the various vehicles of Sand Land to explore it and find a hidden water source to save Sand Land’s inhabitants from their grisly fate.
PC Gamer’s Wes Fenlon was thrilled when the game was unveiled last year, revealing himself to be a thorough appreciator of Toriyama’s vehicle designs.
“If you’ve only ever watched the Dragon Ball anime or played Dragon Quest, you probably haven’t picked up on quite what a car fiend he is. Or really a vehicle fiend: trucks, scooters, bikes, Toriyama just loves to draw anything with a motor. Practically every issue cover of the manga has Goku or one of his pals hanging out in some ridiculously detailed ride. Goku really has no good reason to drive around in a Volkwagen Beetle, but clearly Toriyama just really wanted to draw a Volkswagen and nobody was gonna tell him no,” he wrote at the time.
He was able to spend a bit of hands-on time with it later that month, finding it an interesting exercise in an action RPG that also had you jumping in and out of vehicles.
The PlayStation Blog post that announced the release date came with a pretty thrilling array of gifs and announcements about vehicle types you’ll be able to drive and tweak in Sand Land: Hovercars, Hovertanks, walkers, drone attachments, and more.
You can find Sand Land on Steam for US $60, and see more about it on Bandai Namco’s website. There’s a deluxe edition with some cosmetic bells and whistles, and a collector’s edition with a statue, a steelbook, some postcards, and the like that’s only available directly from Bandai Namco.
Nice spot, Eurogamer.
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