Play Dragonball Online

Dragonball came out for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1986, a time when the console's library was still growing. Bandai published it, and it was one of the earlier attempts to bring Akira Toriyama's manga to a video game. It arrived before many of the more polished action RPGs that would define the genre on the system, occupying a specific niche for fans of the source material.

You control Goku, a young boy with a tail, traveling across a world map and entering towns and caves. Your main goal is to gather the seven Dragon Balls before Emperor Pilaf does. The game plays out in a mix of overhead exploration and first-person perspective dungeon crawling. In the dungeons, you move screen by screen, fighting random enemies in turn-based battles where you select attack, item, or run. You also collect power-ups and new techniques, like the Kamehameha wave, to defeat stronger foes. The pacing is slow by today's standards, and the difficulty can be unforgiving, especially with the limited guidance. Playing it feels like a methodical, sometimes frustrating, but earnest early effort to capture an adventure.