Sand Land is a breezy and enjoyable action RPG that stands out amidst the crowd with its unique visuals and gameplay giving one of Toriyama’s most underrated works the adaptation it truly deserves.
The Good
- Gorgeous visuals and music
- Great animation
- Satisfying combat
- Deep vehicle customization
- Great writing and storytelling
The Bad
- Party chatter can be irritating
I want to get this out of the way as soon as possible – Sand Land is utterly excellent. I think Bandai Namco really dropped the ball with this game’s marketing, with trailers that don’t really capture the essence of what makes it special; not to mention the groan-inducingly boring demo they put out last month that just plops you in a dull desert map with 3 vehicles and some enemies to fight, with zero context for anything that’s going on. But Sand Land is a game that, should you give it a chance, quickly transcends its terrible first impression to reveal something genuinely special and unique.
Sand Land chronicles the adventures of the demon prince Beelzebub as he makes his way across a land full of sand. You explore a war-torn landscape full of monsters, bandits, and warring factions owing to apocalyptic water scarcity. The inciting incident sees human Sheriff Rao team up with Beelzebub and his elderly companion Thief to embark on a quest to find the fabled eternal spring and bring water back to Sand Land.
This game adaptation comes to us courtesy of ILCA who have spent a long time cutting their teeth as a support studio on some beloved games like NieR: Automata and Dragon Quest XI. They gained some prominence last year with the release of One Piece Odyssey, a turn-based RPG that felt a bit like them flexing their learned skills from working on Dragon Quest. But Sand Land feels like ILCA has finally come into their own, delivering an open-world action RPG that combines your usual level grind with some chunky and satisfying vehicular combat.
The game has the bearing of an early 2000s title that was somehow teleported into the future. There’s a bit of Jak II here in terms of all the vehicles and the various gameplay systems and how they come together. But there is a lot of classic 3D Zelda in the way you constantly gain new abilities that you use to solve environmental puzzles in dungeons as well as to reach new areas in the open world. Except instead of magical items or gear, you get new vehicles.
Much of the early sections in Sand Land are spent pottering about in a tank, hurling missiles and machine gun fire at unsuspecting desert bugs and dinos. But it’s not long before you’re given access to a car, a mech, and a speedy motorcycle. Each vehicle packs its own tricks. The tank packs a lot of armour and firepower but can’t look up, the mech is weaker but effective against flying enemies since it can aim upwards as well as jump to cross ravines and broken bridges. The motorcycle packs a really effective close-range shotgun and can cross quicksand because of its high speed. There are a lot more vehicles to discover and master but I’d rather not spoil them here.
Much of the vehicular combat involves circle strafing around enemies and dodging the odd charge attack while returning fire whenever you can, but the game’s many boss fights all pack their own unique challenge. One early battle against a flying ship required taking cover behind rocks and finding elevated dunes or rocks to fire from, since your tank can’t aim upwards.
Further complexity is added when you’re introduced to Ann – a new character who acts as your mechanic and helps unlock new vehicles as well as upgrade the ones you already have. Vehicle customisation is a lot deeper and more interesting than you might think. Each vehicle has its own parts like primary and secondary guns, treads, exhausts, engines, etc. that drastically alter both your base stats as well as your moment to moment play style. You can swap these parts out in the garage in a way oddly reminiscent of Armored Core, and the possibilities to create builds entirely unique to your tastes and preferences only increases as the game progresses.
Outside of combat, your vehicles also act as “keys” inside dungeons as you encounter several roadblocks that require the use of specific vehicle abilities. A water-themed dungeon requires the use of the hovercraft to navigate certain rooms, while the mech is able to punch big rocks to open otherwise blocked-off areas. You’re able to switch vehicles on the fly using a quick radial menu, so the game definitely encourages experimentation with your kit.
This ethos is also applied out in the open world as unlocking new vehicles opens up previous blocked or unreachable areas. Open world exploration itself is quite rewarding. You’ve got your genre-standard radio towers that reveal areas of the map, camps full of bandits, caves full of loot, and the odd NPC to offer a side quest or two. Some NPCs – once you finish their quests – will join you back in your hub town of Spino where they unlock new vendors to browse and newer, better items and gear to buy. It’s not revolutionary by any measure but Sand Land does a great job of making sure your exploration directly feeds into the progression beyond the intrinsic joy of uncovering what’s behind every sand dune.
Over the 30 or so hours I spent with Sand Land, I got quite invested in the lives of the residents of Spino, and the ability to upgrade and rebuild this town ties nicely into the game’s theme of disparate people coming together in the face of disaster. Outside all this, there is a tremendously addictive Kart Racing minigame that sees you pit your vehicle builds against AI for prizes and bragging rights. I’m not proud to say I lost a lot of time to these races.
The side quests themselves run the gamut from your basic fetch and kill quests, to more involved quest lines with certain characters. One particular side quest about a blind girl genuinely made me tear up. But even the quests that might not be all that memorable all tie into the game’s overarching themes. ILCA has really done their homework here to make sure every aspect of Sand Land fits the story being told.
All of this is propped up by some truly excellent writing and voice acting. The original manga was a lead 14 chapters long that didn’t take any time to let the characters or the world breathe. Sand Land, by virtue of being an open-world RPG, gives you a lot more time to hang out with the characters and flesh out their relationships. For example, there is a running gag of Beelzebub being secretly sweet and kind, but only seeing being evil and morbid as the default way of life. His inability to fathom kindness as a virtue leads to a lot of the game’s best jokes as well as a genuinely affecting character arc for our hero. Sheriff Rao here has a very paternal dynamic with Belz (he calls him “sweet prince”) which is a very welcome addition to what Toriyama put down back in 2023. New characters like Ann are all beautifully written and fit so neatly into the existing canon as if they had always been there.
All this writing is brought to life by some excellent voice acting. Regardless of whether you play with the English or Japanese voices, every character comes to life exactly how I imagined reading the words on the page all those years ago. One thing that’s absolutely nothing like how I imagined, is the music. The soundtrack is surprisingly meditative and understated. It pumps up the jams during some of the bigger fights, but most of the time you’re treated to some lovely ambient synths and guitars and perfectly capture the post-disaster vibe of the world. A lot of the music here is genuinely beautiful and I’m already aching for a full soundtrack release.
I don’t really have too many criticisms of Sand Land. One slightly annoying thing is that the characters just never shut up. Similar to games like Xenoblade Chronicles or Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, your party has something to say about every single thing you see or do. A lot of their chatter while exploring the world is the same canned lines over and over. Sometimes specific story-related dialogue is overridden by a post-battle bark, which is quite irritating.
Visually, Sand Land is utterly stunning. ILCA has done a fantastic job of bringing Toriyama’s artwork to life, combining cel shaded graphics with thick outlines and cross-hatched shading around characters that really make them pop. You can tell from the screenshots that this is a visually stunning game, but they don’t even begin to do justice to how good it looks in motion. Toriyama’s penchant for designing unique and iconic vehicles is also on full display here, with every single car, bike, tank, and mech looking exactly like something you’d imagine seeing in a lot episode of Dragon Ball. The world design is also great with some astoundingly great texture work across the board.
I tested Sand Land on a RTX 3050Ti Ryzen 7 laptop and a Steam Deck OLED, and it was seamless across the board. The graphics menu doesn’t offer many options but it doesn’t need to because the game ran flawlessly on both configurations with little to no frame drops. ILCA has made effective use of Unreal Engine 5 features to deliver a game that may not be the finest showcase for your fancy new GPU, but nobody can argue it’s not a looker. Once again, you need to see it in motion to truly appreciate how beautiful this game is.
Akira Toriyama’s recent passing hangs as something of a cloud over the release of Sand Land, but if anything it makes me appreciate it all the more for it. Toriyama’s unique artistic stylings are plastered all over this game. It’s a game that stays true to the original vision, while adding newer and more complex narrative layers to further flesh out and accentuate what was already there. Seen as a videogame removed from its source material, Sand Land is a breezy and enjoyable action RPG that stands out amidst the crowd owing to its unique visuals and gameplay. But I can’t help but feel happy that one of Toriyama’s most underrated works has finally been given the adaptation it truly deserves.