Are you ready for 12 hours of Dragon Ball gaming action? Starting at 10 a.m. Pacific Time on Saturday 6 March, Bandai Namco and Toei will present the Dragon Ball Games Battle Hour. The daylong event (or overnight Saturday/ Sunday if you’re in Central Europe) will be a combination of online tournament and virtual convention, with five different channels of content.
The first channel, the Great Ape Arena, will feature the Battle Hour Special Exhibition Tournament, along with Another Showdown, Ask! Stuff!, and the Knowledge Showdown. The Shenron Arena will feature the Team & Draft Tournament. It will also have the Gogeta Showcase, which will probably feature Super Saiyan 4 Gogeta’s addition to Dragon Ball FighterZ.
The third channel will be the Producer Game Clear Challenge. The fourth will be the Diorama Art Challenge, and the final one will be the Mosaic Art Challenge. There will also be an opening ceremony, a Half Time Show and Second Half Introduction at 3 p.m. Pacific, and a closing ceremony at 8:50 p.m. Pacific.
JAM Project leader and ‘Cha-La Head-Cha-La’ singer Hironobu Kageyama will perform during the Half Time Show.
I’m not entirely sure why they are calling a full-day event the Battle Hour, unless the whole thing is running on Dragon Ball Z tournament episode time.
All jokes aside, they have packed a lot into this event. Like a lot of virtual conventions, this event will feature an online arena, where your Dragon Ball-themed avatars will be able to watch events. There will also be official Battle Hour T-shirts and other merch, which can be pre-ordered.
The Team & Draft Tournament features the 3D fighting game Dragon Ball FighterZ, with four teams competing. Interestingly, each five-person team will consist of one player from Japan, France, Spain, USA West, and USA East.
The Special Exhibition Tournament will feature the Dragon Ball Super Card Game. Players from Singapore, the United States, Canada, Australia, France, Argentina, the Netherlands, and Italy will compete.
And More
Ask! Stuff!, Another Showdown, and Knowledge Showdown will all involve the fighting/ action RPG mobile game Dragon Ball Legends. Dragon Ball fans will get the chance to ask Dragon Ball Legends producer Toshitaka ‘Toshi’ Tachibana stuff in the Ask! Stuff! section. Knowledge Showdown will be a trivia quiz show featuring ‘special guests.’ And Another Showdown will feature the game’s operation and development team against other players, and more of those mysterious ‘special guests.’
The Diorama Art Challenge will feature artist Satoshi Araki from Tokyo, who will reproduce scenes from Dragon Ball. The Mosaic Art Challenge will use screenshots from Dragon Ball game fans to create mosaic art. They received more than 10,000 submissions, so the end result should be interesting.