Rating of
3/5
BLAND Land or Toriyama’s Swan Song
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/10/24
“Sand Land” was a random surprise release that had no hype surrounding it, at least that I was aware of. One day, I was completely oblivious to the game’s existence, the next I had watched the trailer on Steam and added it to my wish list based on the presence of customizable mechs in an open word game.
Had I done more research, however, I would have learned one thing about “Sand Land” that would have made me far less willing to jump on board at closer-to-full-price than usual: It’s a Licensed game. I knew Akira Toriyama, the late manga-ka whose iconic creature designs have been a mainstay of the ‘Dragon Quest’ series since the beginning, was one of the driving forces behind the game, but I had no idea that the game was based on a manga AND anime by Toriyama. Unfortunately, in my haste to play something new and different, I stumbled right into a minefield of mediocrity.
Presentation
“Sand Land” looks and sounds… fine. It’s an Unreal Engine title, and I was able to catch that infamous Unreal peripheral pop-in that has been a problem with the engine for as long as I’ve been playing games built with it. Character designs are 1000% Toriyama, so if you don’t like his art style (which I’m not in love with outside of ‘Dragon Quest Monsters’), you won’t like the way “Sand Land” looks. Compared to the cartoony, silly, and stereotypical character designs, the environmental design is outright BORING. A solid half of the game takes place in a mostly-empty desert – the titular Sand Land – and there is very little to break up the monotony.
Audio is equally… fine. While the game is fully voiced by the typical stable of anime dubbers – in this case, quite literally the same cast as the anime adaptation of the manga – the soundtrack is completely forgettable. To make matters worse, the lip synch between the Unreal character models and the dub are really weird, with flapping lips that awkwardly shift into a frozen pose once a line of dialog has been delivered, probably in an effort to match the individual panels of Toriyama’s manga.
Technically, “Sand Land” is… fine. I’ve seen plenty of people on the Steam forums complaining about how the game stutters and has shader cache issues, but I never ran into any such glitches personally. I only experienced a single random frame rate drop in my entire playthrough. For the most part, “Sand Land” has all the modern QoL features one would expect from a modern multi-platform release, including native Xinput controller support on PC, the ability to manually save anywhere, and somewhat generous auto-saves. However, I don’t think the autosaves are quite as generous as they should be, as early on I managed to lose 30 minutes of progress on several different occasions due to not remembering to manually save often enough. “Sand Land” isn’t up to the standard of the typical Ubisoft Sandbox with regard to making sure your actions are recorded.
Story
Oh, dear, what did I accidentally do? Not only am I not a fan of Toriyama’s seminal work, “Dragon Ball Z,” I’m not much of a fan of shonen battle manga in general. Little did I know that “Sand Land” is not a 100% new IP, but a faithful adaptation of the first season of the anime, which is, itself, allegedly, a fairly faithful adaptation of the manga of the same name. Of course, with Toriyama having shuffled off this mortal coil last year, it’s unlikely that anything ‘Sand Land’-related will continue, so the game does include a nice clear-cut ending without any cliffhangers or dangling plot threads to set up any sequels.
Our story takes place in a typically anachronistic anime world where technologically advanced humans are living a rather medieval lifestyle in a massive desert which they also share with honest-to-goodness demons. Our hero is Beelzebub, the child-like (but not exactly young) son of the Demon King, Lucifer. With water being in short supply in the desert and the humans of the Sand Land Royal Army hoarding most of it, the demons have to steal what they can from army convoys, but generally keep to themselves.
Beelzebub’s perspective is suddenly widened one day when an elderly human sheriff named Rao travels to Demon Village from a nearby human settlement to request aid in searching for a Legendary Spring, which will provide water for non-army-affiliated humans and demons alike. Thus Beelzebub and his right-hand fiend, Thief, set out with Rao to learn the secrets of the vast desert.
It isn’t long before the boys cross paths with a bodacious blonde mechanic (with… dreadlocks?) named Ann, who agrees to maintain their vehicles in exchange for their protection. Of course, Ann turns out to be a person of interest to the Royal Army, but the depth of the secrets held by all of the main characters only come to the surface after a great deal of digging.
Just when it seems that our heroes have accomplished their goals and shared their deepest secrets… the ENTIRE SECOND HALF of the game starts, taking the action outside the borders of Sand Land and pitting the team against an existential threat.
In general, I did not particularly enjoy the storytelling in “Sand Land.” The plot and character arcs are fairly rote and predictable, and generally come across as rather juvenile and silly. If you love shonen anime like “Dragon Ball Z” and “Hunter X Hunter,” you’ll probably go gaga for “Sand Land,” but I found it hard to stop cringing. Maybe I’m too far outside of the target age group of 8-14.
On top of the fact that the storytelling isn’t exactly revolutionary, the world building is completely nonsensical. There are obvious attempts to bring in “exotic” tidbits from Western Abrahamic religions, but they’re not faithfully handled and likewise lean too heavily on the well-worn story trope of Inverted Good and Evil. There are even random Little Green Aliens thrown into the mix to make the world’s cosmology even more bizarre.
For a blind not-quite-completionist playthrough, I clocked 70 hours of runtime in “Sand Land,” but I was ready for it to be over just as it was really getting started at the 30 hour mark. While it isn’t the worst story I’ve ever experienced, and it does have a structured beginning, middle, and end with properly tied-up arcs for every character, I just found the entire thing to be an exercise in boredom.
Gameplay
“Sand Land” is a modern-style Sandbox game that embodies all of the things people complain about Ubisoft doing that the best Ubisoft games don’t actually do. You’ll be searching out radio towers to uncover a vomit-heap of icons in a section of the world map. Nearly all of these icons indicate a “grotto” or an “outcrop,” which are boring environmental objects that are literally copypasta’d across the entire game, which may contain a respawning clutch of natural resources or a non-respawning number of treasure chests.
There are very few locations in the game world that aren’t copypasta’d environmental objects, and to make matters more boring, the tiny handful of towns in the game don’t really have anything to do in them. Certain locations across the world – including the towns – do have unique merchants who each have a unique set of crafting blueprints in their inventories, but everything else about the towns just comes across as window dressing.
There are also a number of Army forts scattered around, which Beelzebub can infiltrate stealthily in order to pilfer the each base’s fixed number of treasure chests. Unfortunately, the stealth segments in “Sand Land” represent the lowest moments of gameplay, with strictly-enforced stealth and no ability to shift between combat and stealth, but rather resetting the player’s position to a previous ‘safe’ point if Beelzebub is spotted.
The vast majority of the game, however, does not involve stealth (which only makes the story-forced stealth sections even more jarring), but rather gives the player the opportunity to either fight on foot with Beelzebub’s fists and rudimentary demonic powers, or to hop into one of a large variety of vehicles ranging from tanks to dunebuggies to motorcycles to mechs. Unfortunately, when it comes to combat, regardless of mode, the default control layout feels a bit iffy and unintuitive. To make matters worse, while it is possible to do battle in a wide variety of vehicles, the default tank if by far the best performer in any combat situation, rendering most other vehicles into niche performers for navigating specific environmental obstacles.
Indeed, combat in “Sand Land” never feels particularly fun. Melee combat is incredibly simplistic, in spite of the tutorials early on that go into excruciating detail for combat maneuvers that almost never come into play. Vehicular combat is slightly more fun, but in every situation, the N64 era “strategy” of circle-strafing is really all that’s needed, making every boss encounter feel very samey and forgettable.
“Sand Land” follows a fairly typical pseudo-RPG progression system, with Beelzebub and his friends gaining experience points from defeating enemies and completing missions – both main and side. Gaining a level awards a skill point, and each character has a specific skill “tree” on which to spend said points. However, Beelzebub’s tree is roughly three times the size of everyone else’s because “companions” all level up as a group and share skill point awards. Not that it really matters, as nearly all of the skills are situational or useless outside of Thief’s vacuum-powered resource gathering skill, while Beelzebub’s high-end skills are all locked behind story progress.
Vehicles level up differently, requiring the player bring requisite crafting materials to Ann’s garage to apply an upgrade. Vehicles also employ far more ‘Diablo’-like equipment mechanics, being capable of equipping a wide variety of primary weapons, secondary weapons, engines, and wheels/legs with variable stats, rarities, and level requirements. Unfortunately, I found the upgrade system to be rather annoying in that it frequently requires rare monster alloyed metals, which are painfully hard to come by when the player really needs them. Rare vehicle parts dropped by enemy vehicles are almost always too high-level to equip, and tracking down every merchant in the game in order to buy blueprints off of them is incredibly tedious. Moreover, I was never really clear about whether new blueprints were becoming craftable because I bought them or if they were automatically added to the garage menu after specific story missions… but I suspect it was mostly the latter.
Perhaps the most aggravating part of the vehicle crafting system, though, is the fact that each vehicle archetype has entirely separate components. Do you have some really cool Jump-Bot legs that you’d like to equip to your Hopper? TOUGH! You can’t, even though they are both jumping, single-person mechs. Do you have a multi-barrel machinegun you’d like to equip to your dunebuggy? Well, it had better be a dunebuggy multi-barrel machinegune and not an identical gun earmarked for a Hopper!
Overall
As the final project for one of the biggest names in shonen manga, I was really hoping that “Sand Land” would allow the late Akira Toriyama to go out on a high note. Unfortunately, every single aspect of the game is mediocre, from the boring, empty world to the juvenile storytelling to the nonsensical worldbuilding to the bland and tedious gameplay mechanics. I was hoping for an open-world ‘Armored Core’ competitor, but “Sand Land’s” vehicular combat and customization are too hindered by limitations to meet said expectations, while the non-vehicular gameplay wavers between boring Beat ‘em Up fighting and even more boring enforced Stealth. That said, I didn’t abjectly hate “Sand Land” in spite of its shortcomings, and I think people who are more in-touch with their inner 8-14 year old boy (not that kind of touch) will probably get a bigger kick out of it than I did.
Presentation: 4/5
Story: 2.5/5
Gameplay: 2.5/5
Overall (not an average): 3/5
