Sand Land, an upcoming open-world action-adventure game from Bandai Namco, honors the legendary Akira Toriyama by joining a long line of games featuring characters created by the artist.

With Toriyama’s recent passing, the game takes on special meaning as it might be the last game to include his one-of-a-kind character designs outside new Dragon Ball Z or Dragon Quest titles.

Toriyama’s characters are famous for their expressive faces, which makes bringing his 2D drawings into 3D a tricky task. The game’s creators recently shed light on what they encountered while taking on the challenge.

The Jump From 2D To 3D Was Laborious

Sand Land is an adaptation of Akira Toriyama’s manga of the same name.

In an interview with Game Rant, Sand Land producer Keishu Minami spoke about his ambitious plans for the franchise, but the meat of the discussion was the challenges of turning Toriyama’s classic artwork into in-game graphics while keeping the characters’ emotions and facial expressions.

 

Facial animations can make or break a game, especially during cutscenes. They can make characters feel real or fake, and can affect how much players care about them.

Bringing characters from drawings into 3D is always a challenge, but it’s especially hard when those characters are the creations of a famous artist with a unique style.

Sand Land‘s characters might be less well-known than some of Toriyama’s other creations, but the developers still wanted them to be interesting and relatable.

Honoring Akira Toriyama Was Crucial

Akira Toriyama | Source: egames.news

On account of the game using English voices and lip-syncing, this had a big impact on how the developers turned the characters from the Sand Land manga into 3D models for the game. Minami said:

We have focused a lot on the facial expressions. We have very unique characters. To bring out that uniqueness, we focused on making each facial expression and lipsync unique.

We have English voiceovers, so we are focusing on those lipsyncs and would like all English speakers to enjoy the gameplay through the English voiceovers.

We are working very hard to translate Toriyama-sensei’s characters into 3D with facial expressions and lean into each character’s uniqueness with supporting technology.

 

Although Sand Land‘s characters share some of the features common to all of Toriyama’s works, the main character, a demon named Beelzebub, and his friends are quite different from what players might expect from the artist’s other games.

Beelzebub is the protagonist of the game.

Introducing a lesser-known series to a new audience is a big challenge. Luckily, both the Sand Land game and the new animated series focus on bringing the characters to life by capturing the personalities and expressions from Toriyama’s original artwork.

 

Bandai Namco and ILCA’s Sand Land is an action-RPG based on the namesake Akira Toriyama comic. The game is set to release on 25 April 2024 for $59.99 across PS4/PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.