Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot Lets Players Revive Major Villains With the Dragon Balls

No matter who Goku and his friends are fighting in Dragon Ball Z, the coveted Dragon Balls are pretty much always involved in a conflict if not at the center of it. Heroes and villains alike race to collect all of them to harness their power and make wishes, and it looks like Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot players will be able to do the same when the game releases. A Dragon Ball-collecting feature has been confirmed for the game that’ll allow players to bring back some of Goku’s greatest adversaries to earn Soul Emblems and see what Bandai Namco called an “exclusive short scenario.”

The feature was detailed earlier in the week when scans from V-Jump revealed what players could do when they collect Dragon Balls. Some new screenshots and details shared by Bandai Namco this week offered more insight into how this works by saying they’d let players revive enemies to embark on a side quest.

Screenshots shown in the tweet below gave a visual for how this might work. We see Goku’s Community Board supplemented by souls from two different versions of Frieza with both of those Soul Emblems affecting his stats in different ways. The first version of Frieza the Z Fighters encounter is shown in front of Goku after he’s been revived as is Cell in a different screenshot after Goku brought the villain back to life.

Since Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot will take players through the entirety of Dragon Ball Z – and beyond that, in a way, since there’s going to be content not found in the anime or manga – one would imagine that you’d have to progress to the point in the story that you’d kill these villains in order to bring them back and get their Soul Emblems. It’s unclear how the Dragon Balls are collected and how simple of a task that might be, but if this system works the way it sounds like it will, it’ll present a nice back-and-forth between villains old and new. Kill a villain, work on the next one, revive the old one with the Dragon Balls, and repeat so that you’re not just barreling through the storyline we all already know so well.

More details on the Dragon Ball feature will likely be revealed before the game releases on January 17th, so expect to see that info from Bandai Namco before then.