(Paris) An ambitious video game, a new animated series… while Dragon Ball celebrates its 40th birthday in November, the universe imagined by the Japanese Akira Toriyama has never been so well, despite the recent death of its author and questions about its future.
Highly anticipated by fans, Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO comes out on Friday and promises nervous and pyrotechnic clashes between the game’s 182 characters – a record -, all from the manga, but also from the franchise’s many films and series.
“It’s a very important launch for us and we hope it will work,” Maurice Fontaine, product manager in France for Bandai Namco, the game’s publisher, explains to AFP.
It will be available on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
Dragon Ball – series which narrates the adventures of Son Goku, a young martial arts prodigy who protects the Earth from evil enemies – has more than a hundred video games since 1986, selling tens of millions of copies worldwide.
For Tadashi Sudo, journalist and cartoon specialist, “the structure of the work, with many fights, and the fact that the characters grow and evolve” make it the perfect breeding ground for video game adaptations.
“My first contact with the series was video games”, confirms to AFP Tsutomu Tanaka, a 19-year-old Japanese student, who underlines “the simplicity of the story” and “the character of the characters, easy to identify”.
With Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZEROBandai Namco wanted to reconnect with 3D fighting games, in line with games Budokai Tenkaichi released in the 2000s on PlayStation 2, which are among the most popular in the series.
Huge popularity
This choice seems to suit him since the game was well received by the specialized press, posting on Tuesday a score of 83 out of 100 on the review aggregation site Metacritic, based on 48 reviews.
Also starting Friday, Dragon Ball Daimaa new animated series offering younger versions of the characters, will be broadcast on Netflix.
Dragon Ball Supera sequel to the best-selling manga of all time previously supervised by Akira Toriyama, will also have new chapters despite the death of the creator of the saga at the age of 68 on 1er March.
His death caused a wave of global emotion, reflecting the immense popularity still intact of his universe.
“It’s a work that my father’s generation loved a lot, so we watched them as a family,” remembers Ayase, a thirty-year-old Japanese woman for whom the series “is part of our lives.”
“Commercial machine”
Saudi Arabia also announced in March the construction of the world’s first amusement park inspired by Dragon Ballthe opening date of which is not yet known.
“The commercial machine is already in place,” notes Tadashi Sudo, for whom the short-term future of the franchise seems assured.
But “the challenge ahead will be to see if creativity can be maintained without Toriyama.”
“If new ideas stop emerging, everything could become repetitive and it could be difficult to appeal to new generations,” he notes.
The journalist is also concerned about the battle over the rights to the work between Shueisha (publishing house which owns the Japanese weekly Shounen Jumpwhich first published the manga 40 years ago) and Capsule Corporation Tokyo, founded by a former Shueisha editor and close to the creator of Dragon Ball.
“As long as Toriyama was present, all major decisions ultimately fell to him, which reduced the risk of conflict,” says Tadashi Sudo.
Its disappearance “could compromise the coherence and sustainability of the franchise”.