Capcom is Producing a Dragon Ball Z
Fighting Game

Capcom has never owned the rights to Dragon Ball video game production in either the US or Japan, and most likely never will. Other than a brief stint with Epoch, Bandai has exclusively produced these games in Japan since the very beginning. Atari (formerly Infogrames, and now completely reacquired by Infogrames) held the international rights up through the late aughts to some amount of western development and distribution; however, those full rights have reverted back to Bandai (now as a larger conglomerate of Bandai Namco).

In 2005, however, slightly more truth came to this rumor when it was announced that Banpresto would be creating an all-new Dragon Ball Z fighting game for arcades entitled Super Dragon Ball Z. In charge of this game would be ex-Capcom producer Funamizu, along with his studio Crafts & Meister.

Unlike typical Capcom games, however, Super Dragon Ball Z would retain the recent cel-shaded style of 3D graphics. The game was released to Japanese arcades 22 December 2005, and eventually saw a home console release worldwide on the PlayStation 2.

In 2018, Arc System Works released Dragon Ball FighterZ, a three-versus-three, team-based fighting game, arguably in the direct style of Capcom and Marvel’s Vs. series. Echoing the style of their previous work such as BlazBlue and Guilty Gear, the game’s presentation is a fully-3D-rendered cast of characters placed on a 2D field. The game’s special move inputs adhere more closely to traditional fighters, fireball motions included.