Dragon Ball is an iconic franchise and has received many games in a variety of genres for a variety of systems. Now, Brazilian dev and YouTuber NaiSan has revealed work on a new homebrew Dragon Ball beat ’em up for the Sega Saturn, saying:
“At the end of last year, I gave myself a challenge: to create a beat ‘em up game for the Sega Saturn.”
“I chose the Dragon Ball universe as the theme because it’s one of my favorite animes and one of the series I love the most. It’s been five months since I started working on this homebrew, and the journey has been full of technical challenges. I found out that the hardest part wasn’t just programming the game itself, but also dealing with limitations and fixing issues in the homebrew SDK — as well as adding features that simply didn’t exist.”
The project uses assets lifted from the GBA title Dragon Ball: Advanced Adventure, Johannes Fetz’s Jo Engine and the Saturn Graphics Library (SGL), to make for a surprisingly polished fighter, complete with smoothly scaling sprites.
This all being said, I would not get too attached to the Dragon Ball theme, as NaiSan noted:
“My plan is to finish this demo, and later use this structure to create an original game with its own characters and universe.”
It will be interesting to see what becomes of this.
