After 23 years of lying dormant, Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama’s post-apocalyptic manga Sand Land emerges from the barren wasteland anew, and in a massive way, with an all-new, feature-length CGI anime movie and action-RPG both from publisher Bandai Namco. After its world premiere at Summer Game Fest, I got the chance to go hands-on with Bandai Namco’s adaptation of Toriyama’s take on a Mad Max-like world–albeit, a world that centers around a demon boy with a heart of gold (because of course).
Years after a natural disaster and war, the world is left a desert wasteland where water is scarce and a tyrannical king now dangles his private supply of it as a precious and expensive resource. Like any post-apocalyptic story, gangs and factions now ravage the land, scavenging and raiding its resources, fighting over what’s barely left of it. That includes Sheriff Rao, a hoarse-voiced old man tired of the king’s greed, who sets out on his own pilgrimage to find water for his people. He eventually crosses paths with an unexpecting partner, the son of Lucifer himself, Beelzebub, the quirky demon prince who joins Rao on his journey out of, as it was described to me, boredom.
Springing off the heels of Rao and Beelzebub’s unsanctioned allyship, the demo began with an action-packed set piece that saw our unlikely duo slamming the pedal to the metal in Rao’s jeep while trying to outrun a geji dragon–an enormous, dinosaur-sized lizard squirming and swimming beneath the sand, hot on the tail of our heroes. In what felt like a scene out of Uncharted, I steered Rao’s jeep, weaving and dodging down a narrow canyon as the Geji Dragon burst from the ground trying to catch me in its grasps, before diving back into the sand all sandworm-like as if it was from Dune. It felt big, and not just because the dragon took up most of the screen, but as a tone piece for the world Sand Land is set in. There’s far more to fear in Sand Land than just bandits and scarce resources, there’s also giant, terrifying, menacing dinosaurs, too. Thankfully, as the son of Lucifer, Beelzebub has a few moves up his sleeves to stand his ground.