Highlights

  • Sand Land faithfully adapts Toriyama's work, overseen by the creator himself, ensuring a true-to-source experience for fans.
  • The game's focus on storytelling and pacing mirrors the animated series, offering a snappy and immersive gameplay experience.
  • Returning voice actors add to the game's immersion, enhancing the feeling of playing the show in an interactive format.

Despite its posthumous release following this year's passing of legendary manga artist Akira Toriyama, Sand Land is still one of the many games to receive praise from the creator for how it faithfully adapts his body of work. Sand Land is the game adaptation of one of Toriyama's lesser-known works from later in his career and follows the same general story as the manga. Along with a new animated series on Hulu/Disney Plus and plans for a feature-length animated film based on the IP, Sand Land is a critical component of a multimedia push to bring the property to a wider audience, and its faithfulness to the show is one of its greatest assets.

Toriyama himself would oversee the development of Sand Land as a project supervisor, contributing to the process of converting his 2D drawings into three-dimensional character renders and providing guidance on critical elements of the design. He also served as a project supervisor on the Sand Land animated series, working closely with Bandai Namco to oversee all aspects of the multimedia "Sand Land Project" launched in 2022. That singular vision and focus toward the Sand Land Project makes the game feel like an essential adaptation and interactive version of the new animated series.

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Sand Land Dev Talks Translating Toriyama's Characters into 3D

In a recent interview with Game ZXC, a Sand Land developer discussed the process of converting iconic Akira Toriyama characters into 3D models.

Sand Land Sticks to the Show's Script Where it Makes Sense

Outside some subtle deviations, the Sand Land game tells mostly the same story as the new animated series. Where it makes sense for the game to differentiate, it does so, fleshing out sections that add to its retelling of the same general Sand Land story in interactive media. While the Sand Land show might gloss over some parts of Beelzebub, Rao, and Thief's travels through the desert wasteland, the game occasionally needs to zoom in the focus and follow the heroes as they explore the world, collect parts for vehicles, and otherwise engage in very "video gamey" elements that don't need to show up in the context of the animated series.

That faithfulness to the show and its general plot makes Sand Land's pacing feel definitively snappier than many other, similar titles. Even though the activities that players will be completing in Sand Land are fairly standard for open-world games, the title's emphasis on stringing players along using the humorous and heartfelt tale at the core of the manga and animated series incentivizes sticking to the critical path and taking detours only when necessary. The general structure of the world itself is designed in such a way as to give players plenty of opportunities for resource collection as they organically complete each main story mission, allowing the story to take center stage.

Sand Land's Voice Actors and Performances Enhance the Feeling of Playing the Show

Risa Mei, John Lipow, and Owen Thomas each return to voice their respective roles from the Sand Land animated series – Beelzebub, Sheriff Rao, and Thief.

In a move that only serves to add to the immersion of playing the video game adaptation as if it were an interactive version of the Sand Land animated series, all the primary voice actors for the English dub of the show return to reprise their roles. Further, each of their performances are just as noteworthy as they are in the animated series, which quickly establishes Sand Land's presentation as being impressive even when stacked up against other games utilizing Akira Toriyama's body of work.

Players will hear several conversations on a loop when exploring Sand Land's open world, but hearing them in the voices of the talented cast from the series' English dub softens the blow. Similarly, the game's reliance on familiar open-world design can feel like a missed opportunity. Still, its production values and adherence to its source material make Sand Land something greater than a standard anime video game adaptation.