Summary

  • Skip the game and watch the anime for a more dynamic and emotion-filled experience with Sand Land.
  • The English voice acting in the game is lackluster, while the Japanese version offers a much better performance.
  • The anime delves deeper into character relationships and world-building compared to the shallow game adaptation.

I’ve never been a hardcore fan of the late Akira Toriyama. I have a passing knowledge of his work, and I’ve never read the Sand Land manga. I did, however, review the game. I figured that since Sand Land is a standalone game intended to act as an approachable, complete adaptation of the manga in its own right, it wouldn’t matter if I’d read the manga or watched the movie or anime adaptation. Turns out there is a lot of Sand Land out there.

Unfortunately, the game isn’t very fun. A large part of this is due to the English voice acting being generally mediocre to bad, and there’s no option to change to the original Japanese. Dialogue is sometimes poorly paced and often delivered with strange inflections and pauses. The characters don’t seem to have deeply developed, interesting relationships with one another. The game’s villains aren’t particularly distinctive or compelling.

I thought that maybe Sand Land was just like this – uninspiring and shallow. But Toriyama’s legacy is great for a reason, and his work is beloved worldwide for even more so. I decided to check out the anime to see if it was more of the same, because I’m not going to rag on an adaptation for having a boring story without making sure that the others are equally as bland.

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Sand Land has received both a movie adaptation and an anime adaptation in the last year, with the movie following the manga’s original story and the anime having an additional second arc that’s replicated in the game. Since the anime is closer to the game, and it’s on Disney Plus, I decided to watch it. Within minutes, I was enraged – not because it was bad, but because it was so much better than the game. Both had similar aesthetic styles, portrayed the same events, told the same story, and had the same characters, but somehow, the anime did everything better.

The cinematography, from the very first scene, was far more effective in the anime than in the game. While the game does have some moments of nice camera movement, the anime feels so much more dynamic. The characters’ relationships are far more fleshed out, and I started to see aspects of their personalities that never showed in the game.

Without the strict adherence to Beelzebub’s point of view that the game arbitrarily enforces, the anime could move to show us what our antagonists are doing outside of Beelzebub’s knowledge, further fleshing out their characters and developing the context of the world. It is shocking that despite taking quite a bit of dialogue and adapting scenes wholesale from the anime, the game manages to lessen the emotional and thematic impact of Toriyama’s story to a huge degree.

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That said, I did watch the anime in Japanese. The English VA cast is the same in the anime and the game, and both performances are woefully underwhelming in comparison to the Japanese casts’. I switched between the audio languages a few times while watching the show to see how much of a difference it made, and while I’ve never been a strong advocate of a blanket rule for subs over dubs, Sand Land really does make it a necessity.

Even if you play and watch Sand Land with the sound off, there’s a distinct gap in the quality of the cinematography, attention to detail, and the quality of the writing and animation. As much as I’d like to tell you, as a person who loves video games, that the game is a worthy contender for best Sand Land adaptation, it’s not. You can get a better, shorter, better-crafted experience from the anime, so just watch that instead.

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Sand Land

Action RPG Systems OpenCritic Reviews Top Critic Avg: 74/100 Critics Rec: 54% Released April 26, 2024 ESRB T For Teen Due To Fantasy Violence, Language Developer(s) ILCA Publisher(s) Bandai Namco Entertainment Engine Unreal Engine 5 Franchise Sand Land
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Sand Land is an open-world RPG based on the hit manga series from Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama. On a desert world severely lacking water, you'll set off on a quest to find the Legendary Spring.

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