One of the most requested fighting game franchises is finally back with a new and long-awaited entry. Bandai Namco has officially revealed that they are developing a brand new Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi title, the first mainline entry in the series in 16 years. The announcement was made at the Dragon Ball FighterZ World Tour Finals, which concluded just before the reveal. The company also released a teaser trailer, giving a small but exciting glimpse to what the development team has been working on building up to this moment.

new Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi is in early stages of development. Teaser trailer (stream recording) https://t.co/UFbWf1aZcz pic.twitter.com/QqATbe1QEs

— Wario64 (@Wario64) March 5, 2023

In addition, Bandai Namco is also working in tandem with the show’s long-time production company Toei Animation. The trailer shown starts off with some older gameplay footage of Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3, which released way back in 2007 for the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo Wii. The footage is shown on an old CRT Television. It then transitions into Goku powering up into Super Saiyan, which is then transitioned to a much more modern HD look in line with today’s graphical expectations. Goku completes the change to Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan and the reveal is made to everyone present.

Tenkaichi is the spin-off series of the Dragon Ball Z Budokai franchise. The latter’s gameplay was in lieu of a traditional fighting game, one fighter on the left, one fighter on the right. The Tenkaichi entries had the fights take place in a fully 3D environment where the fighters flew around and attacked their opponent, just like in the original manga/anime that we all grew up with. As we already mentioned, the last entry for the Budokai Tenkaichi series was in 2007, and a lot has changed for the entire Dragon Ball Universe since then.

The IP continued to pump out title after title, and while some of them had varying degrees of success, none of them would come even close to the massive acclaim of Arc System Work’s Dragon Ball FighterZ in 2018. Many fans of both Dragon Ball and the fighting game genre consider that title to be the greatest Dragon Ball fighting game ever made. In short, this new Dragon Ball Budokai Tenkaichi title will have a bit of pressure leading up to its release, but either way, we’re very excited to see this announcement and can’t wait to find out more in the foreseeable future.