It’s been about a year since the release of the critically acclaimed Dragon Ball FighterZ, which saw Arc System Works work their fighting game magic on yet another beloved series to bring us one of the best games of the year, and one of the best Dragon Ball games ever. But the Shonen Jump behemoth shoulders on in search of more – much like Goku himself – and it seems that January will see the next Dragon Ball game be unveiled to the world.
Rumblings of a new Dragon Ball game began earlier this month under the codename ‘Project Z,’ and yesterday we finally got some concrete information on the project via the official Dragon Ball games Twitter account, which is solely dedicated to delivering information and updates related to the series’ countless home console and arcade games.
次のドラゴンボールゲームは…『Z』の世界のアクションRPG！
かつてない表現で、懐かしくも全く新しい #ドラゴンボール の世界が描かれる！
本作の続報に乞うご期待！
米時間1月26日~27日開催の『DBFZ』の世界大会で何かしらの発表が…！？ pic.twitter.com/PiQPGticjr— 「ドラゴンボール」家庭用ゲーム公式 (@dbgame_official) January 21, 2019
The tweet reads “The next Dragon Ball game will be… an action RPG in the world of ‘Z’! Experience a nostalgic, yet entirely new never seen before Dragon Ball world! Please wait for further information! Perhaps there will be an announcement during the American DBFZ world tournament (1/26~1/27)…!?”
The news that this next game will not be a fighting game but an “action RPG” was well received by fans, and I can’t help but be a little bit excited too. While the last two home console games FighterZ and Xenoverse 2 were good, these two titles were yet another fighting game in the series’ already long history of fighting games. Seeing a new, or at least fresher genre of game for the franchise is an exciting concept. Plus, there’s the issue of FighterZ nailing the concept of a Dragon Ball fighting game so well – there almost doesn’t need to be a new one at this point.
While there isn’t much information at all to speculate on, the appearance of the word “nostalgic” is quite telling. There’s been a big push to recapture the “roots” of Dragon Ball recently, with many fans rediscovering the more adventurous and carefree first half of the series, as well as staff on the anime looking back to the more fluid animation work of the earlier series. Given that, you could speculate that the game will be an open world one in the vein of ONE PIECE World Seeker, where fans can recapture the “nostalgic” feeling of a more carefree Dragon Ball adventure. As for the setting though, it seems pretty obvious from the teaser image of Gohan as a child that this will take part at the beginning of the Z part of the story, with Goku as an adult.
We don’t have much more in the way of information though, so we’ll just have to wait until the end of the week, when the FighterZ world tournament is set to conclude, for more concrete news.