Dragonball Musou

One video game I’ve always wanted to see is Dragonball Musou. That is, a Musou fighting game like the Dynasty Warriors series, but in Dragonball.

This is a better fit than it might seem at first glance. The Musou series emerged from fighting games, and while they’ve drifted enough that you couldn’t make a good Dragonball Musou game just by slapping a coat of Dragonball paint on the latest Dynasty Warriors release, the fundamental bones are very much amenable to Dragonball. In the Musou series, there are peons, huge swarms of generic mooks, generic officers, 100+ minor characters who all share one of 3-5 generic models and movesets between them, and face officers, each of whom has a unique moveset and character model. Officers, especially face officers, are so massively more powerful than peons that not only are they expected to take out an average of about 400 of the poor bastards in every battle, they’re not even expected to be at any significant risk when doing so. Peons can do a bit of chip damage to officers, but stand almost no chance of inflicting serious injury on them by themselves.

Instead, peons serve three combat roles: Number one, they hold the line against enemy peons in places where officers aren’t present. The battlefields are big enough that there are times when peons fight other peons with no officers around, and battlefield control has an important impact on reinforcement rate and/or morale, the latter of which makes peons more aggressive, attacking more often and more willing to attack officers instead of enemy peons and therefore dealing more chip damage against officers, as well as allowing them to win fights against other peons. Morale is determined by a combination of battlefield control, defeated officers, and peon casualties, which are mostly under the control of officers, so you can swing a battle your way as an officer by getting a morale advantage, which causes peons to attack more often for a favorable casualty ratio against enemy peons and to steadily advance to claim territory even in locations where no officers are present, which can cause the morale advantage to snowball.

Number two, peons bog down enemy officers. Some peon attacks just about bounce off of officers, but others cause the officers to flinch, which means trying to run past a peon swarm can see you getting knocked off your horse (bear in mind we’re still talking about Dynasty Warriors now, we’ll talk about adapting this to Dragonball later) and potentially surrounded by a dense enough crowd of peons that it takes you a while to get past them. Not only that, but trying to run right past the peon line without defeating them means that, whenever you arrive at your destination, you will have to fight a bunch of peons to clear it out, which is usually what you’d like to do. Ignoring the front line to charge directly to an objective is still a valid strategy because peons still aren’t much of a threat, and even if the fight at your destination will be slower if you have to do it alone instead of bringing your own peons with you, the time saved in getting there without fighting will usually make up for it. You’ll take much more chip damage but it’s still a difference of 10% of your healthbar (total, for the entire attack) the slow way versus 30% the fast way, so it’s not like you’re in great danger of dying from the peons even when surrounded behind enemy lines.

However, it’s still a high-risk strategy, because number three, an officer with peon backup is much, much stronger than an officer alone. This is due to a combination of the flinch mechanic and directional blocking. Peons almost always deliver only 1 or 2 attacks by themselves, maybe 3-4 if they’re a high-ranking NCO (Dynasty Warriors runs firmly on authority = asskicking rules). Difficulty level and morale can affect this, but peon combos are timid enough that flinching from them doesn’t make much difference when fighting other peons. Flinching does, however, prevent you from interrupting the combos of enemy officers, and it works the same way for you: Your attacks cause enemy officers to flinch, which means they cannot interrupt your combos until you’ve reached the end (which is usually at least 6, often 8-9 depending on the character’s moveset – some characters technically have like 19-hit combos but their damage is low to compensate). Some characters have mid-combo attacks that have a fairly long wind-up time, but still not quite long enough for an enemy to recover from the flinch in time to get their block up. As long as each subsequent hit of the combo hits the target officer and causes them to flinch, you will get the entire combo off on them.

Unless an enemy peon hits you mid-combo, causing you to flinch and interrupting the combo. Furthermore, because the game has directional blocking, i.e. when you block you only block attacks from about a 120 degree arc in front of you, and because flinches also interrupt blocks, it’s possible to be in the middle of blocking an enemy combo from the front only to be hit from behind, causing you to flinch, and then the back end of the enemy combo (usually including its most powerful attacks) will hit you in the face. Even though peons do very little damage, the flinches they cause mean that an officer with peon backup is considerably more dangerous than an officer alone. Blitzing right past a peon front line to attack an enemy control point is a risky play because you’ll be in a whole lot of trouble if an enemy officer shows up.

I’m not counting this as a full separate point, more like point 3B because it’s an outgrowth of peons-as-reinforcements, but if a fight with an enemy officer has reduced you to very low health, it’s entirely possible to be finished off by peons. Being scared of enemy peon masses only happens when you’re very badly damaged from an officer, but it does happen.

How do we translate all this to Dragonball?

First, peon design. In Dynasty Warriors, peons (when they are differentiated at all – in a lot of games, they aren’t) come in varieties that basically scale upwards from light infantry to heavy infantry to elites (in Dynasty Warriors 4, light infantry are usually privates, heavy infantry are sergeants, and elites are majors, but in 5 they break things up more to have units of pure heavy infantry), plus ranged units. There’s also some special units like sorcerers with elemental attacks and grenadiers who throw bombs (not as insane as it sounds, China had gunpowder bombs very early, although having grenadiers in the 3rd century is definitely anachronistic – it’s Dynasty Warriors, what do you expect?). For Dragonball Musou, every faction has peons in at least two varieties, light and heavy, and may also have some number of special peons, often a flying unit or a variation on the heavy unit that’s dedicated anti-air (although some heavy units might already be anti-air). Since flight is very common, it’s important that peons be able to fight back effectively against air units.

Second, map design. Dynasty Warriors uses rat-tunnel maps to funnel the battle along a handful of different axes of advance, and we’re going to retain that design, but the vast majority of officers will be able to fly over the walls and columns of the rat tunnels. We’ll use the tunnels to direct the flow of peons but the assumption for Dragonball Musou is that officers can get as far behind enemy lines as they want and cross the map at high speed. In Dynasty Warriors, crossing the map from one end to the other in two minutes instead of five requires a special build, in Dragonball Musou, that’s the default. If Recoome can’t come and fight you right now it’s not because he’s all the way over there, it’s because he’s busy with something else. Similarly, while there are flying and anti-air peons, you can fly higher than the limit on ranged attacks (including both peon laser cannons and warrior ki blasts), so ignoring the front line is easier than ever, but you still face the problem that in order to actually accomplish something you will have to descend back within anti-air range, and if you’re far behind enemy lines, you then risk getting attacked by an enemy warrior while he has peon backup and you don’t.

But we’re also going to make sure every map has at least one big proper battle arena on it for a big spectacular DBZ showdown. If the balance of morale gets too far in your favor, then the strongest enemy officer on the field will fly to the arena and call out the strongest friendly officer (probably you). If you refuse the fight, the enemy gets a morale boost, potentially putting them back in the game. If you confront the enemy officer and win, the enemy’s morale (already low, or this wouldn’t have happened) takes a hit and the rest of the battle is basically just mop-up. There’s a greater nemesis-ish system I’ll get to in a bit for these challenges, but for the sake of map design, it’s important that maps have large open arenas in them as well as lots of little rat tunnels. The big arena might be in the middle or in a corner or whatever, it doesn’t really matter because Z fighters are extremely mobile so we don’t have to worry much about their ability to reach the arena for the challenge regardless of where they are on the map.

I’d ideally like Dragonball Musou to be a single seamless world, about two or three dozen different battlefields all linked together such that you can fly around the world in 10-15 minutes. When one faction attacks another (whether the AI launching an attack or the player initiating one by hurling ki blasts across the border), each side has some finite amount of time or number of peon respawns before they have to stop and recuperate, which helps divide up the game into specific battles with specific stopping points rather than a continuous war on all fronts. This does mean that the game also needs some kind of side activity to engage in for a few minutes while the troops regenerate, and while minigames could serve that purpose (and some kind of challenge mode for training makes a ton of sense for the Dragonball theme specifically) it can also just be, like, menu management assigning new stat points from the XP you got in that last battle and buying replacement consumables and stuff. If balanced properly, players would end each battle with enough XP to spend a few minutes in menus shopping for power, then tab over to a world map to examine the strategic situation, and by the time they’ve figured out their next target, their faction has regenerated enough peons to have a go at it.

While it’s certainly not the core of the experience or anything, I think an underrated part of Dragonball is how they’ll sometimes just fly to a new location and I wish there was a game that made use of that between fights. There are some games that have overworld maps that let you fly down to a location for a battle, which at least lets me fly around, but the barrier between the overworld map and the battle map breaks the flow. I think it’d be cool to be able to fly around the same fighting arenas you use for combat, but between combats you can just pass through, look around, chill out a bit. Dragonball (in the Z/Super stage, at least) has a pretty straightforward option for a fast travel system to prevent this from getting annoying: If you fly up insistently enough, you will fly into space, and from there you can fast travel between however many different points wind up being needed to prevent flying around from becoming a chore.

Third, the design of the campaign. Skip straight to the Empires installment where you control a faction and invade other territories and then fight on the ground (or, being a Z fighter, in the air) in that invasion. Dynasty Warriors always leads with a main game that tells the story of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and then an Empires expansialone that uses the same mechanics for a Risk-style strategy meta-game, but for Dragonball Musou, the retelling of the story is a fighting game, and if you’re doing Musou at all, you should immediately go to Empires. You can split money between regenerating your peon forces and building improvements that upgrade your territory with fortifications (big castles with turrets on them or bunkers or whatever’s appropriate to the faction you’re playing as), economic improvements that cause you to generate money passively but can be destroyed if that territory is attacked, or buying upgrades for your character like senzu beans or saiyan armor.

Assuming the continuous map and a real time campaign (rather than each of about two dozen battlefields being silo’d off and linked together by a turn-based campaign), zenii income flows constantly into whatever projects you have active. If you start building a new fortification in a certain province, money starts filling in a bar at a certain rate until it’s full and then the fortification is complete. Likewise if you’re building a new economic improvement in a provice, which will then cause your total income to go up, or if you’re regenerating the peons in a specific province (Dynasty Warriors usually has peons attached to officers, but Dragonball Musou will attach them to provinces, because officers are much more mobile than peons) then money will flow in and cause peons to regenerate there at some specific rate, or you can spend on research to put new items into capsule stores or divert some amount of money into your personal pocketbook (which is also where it accmulates by default) so that you can spend it at capsule stores to replace consumables and equip yourself and allied NPCs. You can also transfer zenii back from your pocketbook into the general fund, where it will get distributed between all the projects you’re working on. You can prioritize the projects as well, using little sliders so that 60% goes to peon regeneration in Greenfall Forest while 40% goes to building a Capsule Corp Building for more income in South City, or whatever.

I’ve already mentioned the need for some kind of side content while you’re waiting for your peons to regenerate if the map is continuous and real time rather than each of the two dozen-ish battlefields being silo’d off from one another and a turn-based Risk map uniting them. We need some kind of side content in the campaign anyway, to cover two key aspects of Dragonball: As mentioned earlier, training, but also searching for the dragonballs and martial arts tournaments. Side quests about fighting bandits or ogres in the wilderness or whatever would also be good additions.

Training challenges give you more XP to increase character stats, bandit/monster hunts give you extra zenii. There are two martial arts tournaments, both of which are projects you can “build” in one of your provinces. The first is a regional martial arts tournament against only warriors of the same faction that allows you to get XP for both your own character and all allied warriors, with extra XP for both your character and the character you fight in each round of the tournament. The world martial arts tournament includes warriors from all factions, and pays out a cash prize to the winner (although not enough to recoup the cost completely if you win your own world tournament) but also gives a major morale boost to whoever wins. Putting on the world martial arts tournament runs the risk that you’ll spend a lot of money to give an advantage to your enemies, especially since there’s basically no downside to showing up to try and win.

Hunting for dragonballs lets you win instantly by wishing for world domination, although you can also wish for money, power (i.e. XP), to unlock a new character, or for a pair of panties (in the latter case, as in the show/manga, the only function of the wish is to waste the dragonballs so other people can’t use them). You’d also want a toggle that disables the world domination wish or disables dragonballs completely, and there should definitely be an achievement for winning the campaign with world domination wishes active but without ever gathering up all seven dragonballs. So how do you find the dragonballs? Each of the two to three dozen provinces has a special side quest that lets you look for dragonballs with some little story vignette attached, some drawn from dragonball hunts from the show while others can be original. If you complete the quest, you get that province’s dragonball, if it has one. The seven provinces that actually have dragonballs are randomly selected each campaign, and a dragon radar will tell you which ones they are. You can only look for dragonballs in a province you control.

Fourth, factions. In Dynasty Warriors, every faction is basically the same. There’s occasionally factions with radically different appearances, like the Yellow Turbans or the Nanman, but Wei, Wu, and Shu use pretty much the exact same army but with different color uniforms. That makes perfect sense for Dynasty Warriors and you’d really have to reach to find strong differentiation between the major factions, but not in Dragonball Musou.

Each faction has two starting characters (enabling multiplayer co-op) as well as a general aesthetic. Some campaigns start with specific scenarios with specific factions with specific characters on the map, and you can also randomize or free-build scenarios, allowing you to make scenarios with any unlocked factions and characters, including adding or removing characters from factions, so you can make a faction whose starting characters are Freeza and Android 16 with Turtle School peons.

So what are our factions?

The default scenario has the following:

Turtle School starts with Goku and Krillin. Their political leadership is President Cat (this isn’t relevant to the gameplay, but I feel it’s important to note that the Turtle School isn’t actually ruling territory, it’s just lending its warriors to the generic good guy government). Their light peons are friendly looking people (including dog and cat people) with guns, their heavy peons are Capsule Corp mechs, and their generic warriors are the kinds of generic martial artists that you see filling out the ranks of World Martial Arts tournament preliminary fights.

Chi Chi and Yamcha can be recruited from dragon ball quests (not necessarily exclusively by the Turtle School, although Chi Chi might be Turtle-only). If you have both Goku and Chi Chi, Goten appears automatically after a while. If the Turtle School or the Capsule Corporation have Vegeta recruited, Kid Trunks appears automatically after a while. If you participate in a world martial arts tournament as a Turtle School fighter and haven’t won yet, then the final round will always be against Jackie Chun, who is (naturally) a reskin of Master Roshi’s moveset. If you defeat him, you unlock Master Roshi.

Most factions can potentially recruit enemy warriors by defeating them. The odds of being able to recruit a defeated enemy warrior are based on the relative strength of the two factions – if they’re about even or especially if their faction is stronger, odds are low, but if your faction is much stronger, you get better odds. Warriors who canonically switch sides, like Piccolo Jr. and Vegeta, are more likely to defect, especially when their faction is close to destruction.

Crane School starts with Tien and Chiaotzu. Their light peons are evil bandits, their heavy peons are dinosaurs with war paint and laser turrets on their back, and their generic warriors are martial artists like Turtle School but with a different color gi.

The Red Ribbon Army starts with Dr. Gero and Android 19. They have Red Ribbon soldiers for light peons, tanks for heavy peons, and Red Ribbon officers for their generic warriors, guys in stylish military uniforms taken from anywhere between Napoleon and WW2 and who can shoot ki blasts and stuff.

The Red Ribbon Army’s home province spawns with a building called Dr. Gero’s lab, and if it gets destroyed in a fight, it spawns Androids 16, 17, and 18, rogue agents who will randomly attack buildings, especially economic improvements, belonging to any faction. At some point after their rampage begins, Imperfect Cell shows up to begin hunting them, and he attacks cities to heal by consuming people, which drains peons from the reserve and damages or destroys buildings (left to his own devices for long enough, he’ll reduce all improvements in a province to nothing). The rogue androids can be recruited by defeating Cell at any point along his transformation – you can get them back wtih dragon balls if Cell absorbed them first. Future Trunks shows up to help fight 16, 17, 18, and Cell, and will join whichever faction has defeated those warriors most often (there should probably be some kind of unique dialogue if, using the Defeat Means Friendship mechanic, that faction has recruited some of the androids, but it should still be possible, seeing as how that happens in canon).

The Red Ribbon Army can also unlock characters like General Blue by pouring a bunch of money into recruiting them. They can also hire Mercenary Tao this way, although they probably aren’t the only ones, dude’s a mercenary after all. Likewise, Hit is associated with no faction in particular.

Piccolo Kingdom starts with King Piccolo and Piccolo Jr. They have little demons for light peons, big oni type demons for heavy peons, and flying bat-winged demons as special peons because their heavy peons have clubs and not bazookas. Their generic warriors are a mish-mash of elite demons based on King Piccolo’s kids other than Piccolo Jr.

Piccolo can recruit Kid Gohan by completing a side quest to kidnap him from Goku. Playing as Kid Gohan can unlock Teen Gohan, and playing as Teen Gohan can unlock Adult Gohan. When you unlock an older version, you can choose to keep the one you have for the rest of the campaign or replace him with the new one, so you don’t have to move on from Kid or Teen Gohan if you don’t want to, but you can’t have both of them at once (unless you make a custom scenario where two or three different Gohans are all starting characters – let people be weird in custom scenarios if they want to). If we have any of King Piccolo’s other children, they are unlocked by investing a bunch of money in recruiting them.

The Saiyan Warriors start with Vegeta and Nappa. Instead of peons and generic warriors, they have saiyan warriors. Saiyan warriors are like peons in that they don’t have individual names, aren’t listed in the roster of warriors, and new ones respawn from reinforcement points for as long as the province has reserves. They’re like generic warriors in that they have a full moveset and a respectable healthbar. They spawn in squads of five rather than overstuffed platoons of fifty.

Raditz, Bardock, Broly, and any other leftover saiyans can be unlocked by investing a bunch of money into recruiting them. Broly eventually goes rogue and will show up to battles in progress to kill other saiyans, especially Goku, regardless of which faction they’re in or who they’re fighting against.

The Freeza Force starts with Zarbon and Dodoria. Their light peons are Freeza soldiers with the little blaster glove things, their heavy peons are some kind of scary walker with the same basic aesthetic as Freeza’s ship, and their generic warriors are Freeza officers like we see some of in the early Namek saga.

The Ginyu Squad’s assorted members can be unlocked by dumping a bunch of money into them. Freeza is unlocked once some number of dragon balls have been located (by any faction), probably four.

Babidi’s Army starts with Babidi and Dabura. Their peons are demon-flavored the same way as the Piccolo Kingdom’s are.

Babidi’s Army has a mechanic for harvesting energy from fights. If you get enough of it, you can unseal Majin Buu. If you play as Majin Buu enough, you unlock Super Buu. If Super Buu is defeated, he transforms into Kid Buu.

Universe 6 comes from after the Budokai Tenkaichi character lists I’m using to try and estimate what’s a reasonable starting roster for the game, but I want a sixth team, so I guess I’m gonna say Cabba and Cabba and Caulifa. If we need to, we can cut a Universe 6 starter in favor of Hit. They get off-brand Freeza Force peons just like they’re off-brand saiyans.

Then there’s some non-default scenarios that include other factions: Cooler’s Force, Lord Slug’s Kingdom, Bojack’s Crew, Pilaf’s Empire, some kind of Goku Black army, the Pride Troopers. Some characters show up as side quests rather than full on factions: Dr. Wheelo, Tapion/Hirudegarn.

I’m holding the Pride Troopers in reserve rather than using them as the eighth faction in the base scenario because pretty much the only thing Jiren has going for him is that he’s the biggest and strongest guy ever, so he needs to be part of some secret unlockable scenario and not just a default faction. He could also show up in the late game of the default campaign as an endgame super faction of some kind.

Another cool scenario would be a Dragon Ball scenario where Turtle School’s characters are Kid Goku and Young Krillin, which uses the Crane School and Piccolo Kingdom plus a version of the Red Ribbon Army that uses characters like General Blue instead of the Z-era androids.

I want to give Goku Black an army because that means you have more room for a Future Trunks scenario with a Capsule Corp faction (similar to Turtle School except Adult Gohan and Future Trunks are the starting characters), the Red Ribbon Army under Androids 17 and 18, and Goku Black, and maybe a Crane School bandit faction if we can find characters besides Tien and Chaotzu to man it.

You could put Cooler, Slug, and Bojack in a Goku vs. Movies sort of scenario, but I could also see them being split up amongst special scenarios. Cooler Force, Freeza Force, Saiyan Army, and Lord Slug in battle of the alien tyrants, for example, or Bojack vs. Crane School bandits vs. pirates (I’m leaning into a bandit-adjacency that the Crane School doesn’t really have for their peons, but whatever, the vibe matches).

I think non-obvious concepts like this one are the best way forward for the Dragon Ball series in general at this point. This might just be informed by when I grew up, for the longest time Dragon Ball, DBZ, and (to whatever extent it got to be included) GT were a canon that got reimagined but not meaningfully expanded. But I think there’s a strong argument to be made that Dragon Ball Super, though a better attempt than GT, isn’t really successfully getting Dragon Ball out from under the shadow of the Freeza Saga, and that ultimately DBS’ greatest contribution is less in the stories it tells and more in the cool new character designs and worldbuilding it contributes to potential video game adaptations (or, theoretically, an anime that ditches the convoluted lore and power creep that Dragon Ball has built up to either reboot the series completely or else does something like continue on from the Cell Saga with an emphasis on Gohan as the protagonist, but that seems less likely than the video game adaptations going in a weird direction).