Bandai Namco took to this year’s Game Developer Conference to announce Dragon Ball Legends, a new online fighting game for mobile that’s powered by Google Cloud Services. Unlike the previous mobile game, Dragon Ball Z: Dokkan Battle, this game will be full-on action and take place in real time. Much like older fighting games on the Nintendo DS, special moves are triggered with cards, which sit along the bottom of the screen. In the top part of the screen, a full 3D battle takes place in real time, and players can move their characters by swiping, or tap to unleash a barrage of basic attacks. The gameplay is somewhat reminiscent of the Dragon Ball Xenoverse series on consoles and PC, eschewing the fast-paced, mechanically complex Guilty Gear-esque trappings of recent smash hit Dragon Ball FighterZ.
The details are courtesy of a live gameplay demo that took place at the conference, which can be seen at about 5 hours and 43 minutes in the conference video embedded below. The video depicts a match between players in San Francisco and Tokyo, fighting in real time with almost no lag. According to Bandai Namco, the powerful Google-owned cloud servers behind the game will keep latency between players worldwide at an absolute maximum of 150 milliseconds at all times, provided the connection from smartphone to server is good for both combatants.
Until now, the Dragon Ball franchise has had no representation on the Play Store in terms of hardcore fighting games, a genre that the series has had a long string of famously good titles in since the 1980s. Starting in arcades and going through early Nintendo systems, the classic Sony Playstation, and all the way to today’s consoles, Dragon Ball has had hits like Hyper Dimension on the Super Nintendo, Ultimate Battle 22 on the Sony PlayStation, and the aforementioned Dragon Ball FighterZ on modern consoles. This longstanding tradition making the jump to mobile is a turning point for fans on the go, and only time will tell if Legends can really scratch the itch left unscratched by Dokkan Battle, older titles in emulators, and innumerable imitations, fakes, and fan efforts in the Play Store.