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Sand Land

Sand Land

Akira Toriyama's manga Sand Land is now being released as a Japanese role-playing game, where vehicles, exploration and big bosses are on the menu.

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From being an obscure manga essentially only available in Japan, the late Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama's rather dystopian manga Sand Land has now gone mainstream. A brand new anime can be seen on Disney+ and now a video game that lets us experience the world after all the disasters that have left the green planet brown and gloomy has arrived too.

Sand Land
The world is destroyed, almost all life is scarred by war and people live in terrible conditions. This is the world of Akira Toriyama.

However, we can't blame Sand Land's frontman Beelzebub for being gloomy. He's a charismatic pink demon with more energy than the Duracell bunny, looking for water to quench the thirst of both humans and demons - who have been at war with each other for a long time. However, this adventure is initiated by Sheriff Rao, who doesn't like his own unscrupulous king, who he suspects is poaching water to benefit himself and keep the population in check.

Along for the ride is Beelzebub's companion Thief, and pretty soon the mechanic Ann, and the quartet make up the squad you have at your disposal, with Beelzebub being your main character. As in so many other dystopian pop culture phenomena set in desert worlds (such as Rage, Borderlands and Max Max), vehicles play a very large role and you'll quickly get to grips with a simple car, followed by a tank, motorcycle, robot and much more to help you get around the world.

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Sand Land
While it's easy to recognise Toriyama's character designs, his vehicles are almost even more classic.

The game world is very large and there are many things to explore. Unfortunately, however, I find that I'm rarely rewarded for actually doing so and most of what I find are resources and the like, which made me largely focus on moving forward in the adventure rather than scouting the world, even though side quests are normally the things I look forward to the most. However, the lack of good rewards is not my only problem with the Sand Land world, which is so large that it takes a long time to travel somewhere even with fast travel, and at the best of times, the travel is rarely that interesting.

Sand Land is at its best when things get really hot, either in vehicle races, boss encounters (these are numerous and generally very good) or major battles. Since you get the opportunity to really customise your weapons in several different ways, it is good to build something that feels a little extra reliable, and even the properties of the vehicles can be modified. Personally, I put all my money on big explosive stuff as I generally found the machine guns to be a bit on the flimsy side. You can also modify the appearance of your vehicle in several different ways, and if you know you like that, you have decent tools for this in Sand Land.

Sand Land
A clear marker guides you to the next part of the adventure and you can also set your own goals.
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But back to the game world, which I feel is a bit too empty and desolate. For the most part, you are on your own without enemies, and when I travel across the game world to places I haven't been to yet (and thus can't use fast travel), I get flashbacks of the boat trips in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, which unfortunately constituted that game's weakest point. Sure, you can use traits or Radio Towers to help you find more secrets, but overall the world could have been more exciting and interactive.

However, it helps that Sand Land is wonderfully presented with really nice and colourful graphics that truly highlights Toriyama's design. Technically it's nothing remarkable, although it runs smoothly, but overall I still think the game looks good throughout, and it's full of cutscenes that might as well be cartoons.

Sand Land

You choose between the vehicles via a simple radial menu and they all have their distinct abilities. The robot makes it possible to jump as a platform character and get up into the mountains, and nothing prevents you from then switching to another vehicle up there to try and reach another plateau, or perhaps take the hovercraft out onto a lake you've suddenly found. By far the most fun to play, however, is the tank, thanks to versatile game controls and a wide range of uses.

In addition to fighting in vehicles, you often have to fight on foot too. You can jump out of a vehicle at any time to explore a town, dungeon or other new area you've found. The combat system is set up like a simple beat 'em up, where at least on the normal difficulty level you can get very far by just hitting the X button (Xbox version) to fight. However, you can level up Beelzebub as you go along by unlocking new abilities in a level tree. Towards the end you get more and more brutal attacks, but as with all boring loot, most of it is things like larger health metres or getting a little stronger somehow. As the enemies become more and more powerful, it feels like Beelzebub is actually quite stagnant in his development and the challenge remains quite stagnant throughout.

Sand Land
There are stealth passages and many other things that provide gameplay variety.

Your sidekicks can also get involved in battles in different ways and you can also level them up individually. You can either give them traits that are passive (like getting more coins from battles) or active (where they actually get involved in the fighting) to provide assistance. I think it's a clever arrangement and the fact that I can so easily choose which properties they should use is appreciated, where especially Rao fits my style of play with a lot of extra damage. The menus in the battles are generally good and once again with radial design so that I can quickly choose the right item for the right time and not get hit for no reason. That said, I'm not as fond of the menus for upgrading things where it's not always obvious how much better an upgrade is, and it's easy to make mistakes. There is also a simpler system for building your own town and upgrading it with better shops and quests to find, which adds some gameplay variety.

The latter is an aspect I think is very good in Sand Land, where the many different vehicles provide varying character combined with exploration, a lot of puzzle solving, powerful boss fights, stealth passages and other side activities such as races and the like. The environmental variation is also unexpectedly good thanks to day/night cycles and caves, military bases, cities and actually even green areas. Between turns, there are also missions where my choices seem to actually matter, which helps to make the adventure feel more like my own.

Sand Land
Beelzebub is the main character but the others are also heavily involved in what happens.

By the way, I played the first hours of the adventure with English voices before switching to Japanese (requires a restart of the game), and I can say that the Japanese original is several times better. So unless you are completely allergic to reading subtitles, I think you should have the original voices when playing Sand Land.

All in all, Sand Land is a game I've had fun with, but apart from the more intense battles, it's a bit limited in its entertainment factor and fails to provide the feeling that things are actually at stake. As a role-playing game, there are simply a lot of Japanese adventures that are better, but combined with the very open world and the ability to explore as much as you want, as well as Toriyama's lovely design and "straightforward" storytelling, it still makes for a fascinating bit of fun.

Sand Land

What awaits is an elaborate adventure that I highly recommend to Toriyama fans. I really wish that Bandai Namco had made the game world more vibrant and rewarding to explore, but travelling around the game's dungeons and solving classic Tomb Raider/Zelda-inspired puzzles and battling big bosses still makes it entertaining throughout even for those unfamiliar with the Dragon Ball creator's work.

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07 Gamereactor UK
7 / 10
+
Delightful design. Good humour. Great boss fights. Strong gameplay variety. Entertaining vehicles. Smooth wheel menus.
-
Little reward for exploration. Lifeless game world. Boring English voices.
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Sand Land

REVIEW. Written by Jonas Mäki

Akira Toriyama's manga Sand Land is now being released as a Japanese role-playing game, where vehicles, exploration and big bosses are on the menu.



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