Sand Land isn’t the game of the year, but it’s still a fun time with a lot of that classic Akira Toriyama charm.
As every Dragon Ball fan will know by this point in time, Akira Toriyama sadly passed away in March of this year. I won’t spend too much time eulogising him, many others closer to him have put it much better than I ever could, but it was obviously a monumental loss for the world of anime and manga. And games, too.
There quite literally is no Dragon Quest or Chrono Trigger, amongst so much else that his work inspired within video games, so Sand Land – based on one of his own worlds and stories – finally getting its due in both the form of a film (later released as a series in the west) and as a video game felt more than appropriat. It felt like it was always meant to happen. The final result isn’t perfect, granted, but I came away loving it specifically because of how strongly the themes you find in Toriyama’s work come through. Before we get ahead of ourselves though, let’s set the scene.
Sand Land is a much lesser known manga title from Toriyama’s catalogue, originally releasing in the year 2000, only consisting of a single volume following Beelzebub (the prince of all demons), Rao (the aforementioned old man), and Thief (another demon that serves as a guide to Beelzebub). The game and series actually added a fourth member to the crew, Ann, a mysterious young woman and mechanic whose story ventures into spoiler territory. They all reside in Sand Land, a desert area ruined by climate disaster and war, and the main setting for the game which you traverse around as you set off on a quest to find a Legendary Spring so that the country’s people have easy access to water again.
It’s an enjoyable narrative, too. One that is annoyingly relevant more than two decades later, and one that is held up by its very likeable protagonists that have that effortless Toriyama charm. I can’t really tell you all that much about the story – spoilers – but also because if I did I’d be giving too much away. There’s nothing overly mind-blowing, the stakes are pretty typical of an RPG, but I never felt bored, and I definitely felt compelled to see it through to the end.
With the whole original point behind Sand Land being that Toriyama wanted to tell a story about a man and tank, comes the obvious assumption that a lot of what you do in the game is driving a tank around — which would be correct! The game actually has several vehicles you can slowly unlock, but the first permanent addition is a tank, which of course has Toriyama’s incredible mechanical stylings, realised perfectly by developer ILCA.
