Dragon Ball Online

~ the last words ~

There is no version of my life where I played this one. It launched in Korea and later reached Taiwan and Hong Kong, and that was the complete map for its entire existence. A Japanese release was announced and never happened. A western release was wanted loudly for six years and never got as far as being announced at all.

The developer was NTL, a Korean studio, working with Bird Studio and Shueisha. Akira Toriyama did not simply license the property across and walk away. He designed the setting for it. The game runs in Age 1000, 216 years after the end of Dragon Ball Z, in a world where the fighters everyone knows are long dead and their descendants have gone soft. Yuzo Koshiro wrote the music.

It was announced in 2007 with a Korean launch penciled in for that summer and a Japanese one for 2008. It arrived in Korea in February 2010, published by Netmarble, three years behind schedule. Taiwan got it on 15 June 2011 through Cayenne Tech, and Hong Kong on 8 September of the same year.

What makes this one slightly sad from the outside is how many people wanted in. There was a large English-speaking community and an even larger Brazilian one, both following patch notes for a game they had no legal route to for years. Turkey was never in the conversation and neither was anywhere else. A property this size shipped to a smaller map than most Korean MMOs of its generation managed.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

You picked a race and the race decided most of what you were. Earthlings had the widest class spread, running from martial artist through to engineer, while Namekians split between the Dragon Clan healers and plain warriors. Majins came in two shapes, one built for support and one for hitting things. Progression ran on the usual Korean grind of the period, with a flight system and a scattering of Dragon Ball set pieces on top.

The hook was the timeline. Playing in Age 1000 meant the canon was history rather than furniture, so the game could invent its own antagonists without stepping on anything. Toriyama drew them himself. Towa and Mira came out of this game, and so did the Time Patrol and the premise of somebody attacking the Dragon Ball timeline from outside it.

~ the last two dates ~

The Korean numbers spiked at launch and then fell off, which is ordinary, and Netmarble answered by slowing content development, which is not survivable. Shanda Games had signed for China and quietly dropped the title from its release plans. Without a fourth territory there was nothing left to grow into.

Netmarble announced the closure in September 2013 and switched the Korean servers off on the 26th, three years and seven months after launch. Taiwan and Hong Kong followed on 31 October. That was the end of the licensed game entirely, and nothing since has tried the same thing at the same scale.

~ what came after ~

Toriyama's material did not die with the servers. Towa and Mira turned up in Dragon Ball Heroes and then in Dragon Ball Xenoverse in 2015, where the Time Patrol premise became the frame of the entire game. Xenoverse sold in the millions, in every territory Dragon Ball Online never reached. The idea got a global release. The game that invented it did not.

The other afterlife is unofficial. Fans rebuilt the servers from what they had kept, and Dragon Ball Online Global has been running for years now with an English client. The western players who spent 2007 through 2013 waiting for a legal version eventually got an illegal one instead, and it is the only way anyone plays it today. It has been left alone so far.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »