If you were almost literally jumping for joy, anticipating the new Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot DLC to blow your mind, only to watch your excitement drop like a Saiyan pod in West City, then you are not the only one. At first, the narrative of Bardock – Alone Against Fate DLC was supposed to be a melancholic experience for Leprechaun fans passing through one of the most iconic stories of the whole series. Nevertheless, this single has been overshadowed by so many bugs, glitches, and other technical problems that the Z-fighters not only find it difficult to continue their battle but also struggle to consume their Senzu Beans.
The arrival of the Bardock DLC was met with high expectations by everyone. Fans wanted to be Bardock and fight against Frieza’s forces. But the problems were there from the beginning, and the community was riddled with them. As GameRant mentions, PC users suffered from an error where the voice lines and text were not played or appeared differently. Some had the camera stuck at Vegeta’s feet, while others could not initiate the game even after the latest updates. For a DLC that you can finish in about 90 minutes if you do not take side quests, these bugs turned a fast trip down nostalgia lane into a frustrating grind.
Unfortunately, Bardock’s release with bugs is only the latest issue that has plagued Kakarot’s series. Save data corruption has been a nagging issue that has been around since the early DLCs, such as Battle of Gods and Trunks: The Warrior of Hope. Gamers have reported incidents of losing a complete save via GameFAQs – one even went from level 300 Goku to level 89 after a save file got corrupted. The worst thing? There is still no option to turn off auto-save, which might have prevented some of these losses. As one player said, all Bandai Namco needs to do is give us a manual save option – but that request is still waiting on Shenron’s to-do list.
Things do not get much better if you factor in platform-specific issues. The base game on the Nintendo Switch is generally playable—until you reach post-game, where crashes happen quite frequently, especially in docked mode. The DLC, strangely enough, is less crash-prone, but as soon as you return to the main game and switch back, it crashes so frequently that you could almost call it the very cause of the mini-challenge. Some have claimed that moving to handheld mode or turning off the device between gameplay sessions helps a little, which would mean that there are issues with memory leaks. PS5 users report a bizarre problem where the game asks for a PS4 disc even though they have the PS5 digital copy. Reinstalling does not fix it, and the only solution that has been reported is to remove the old PS4 disc if you want to access the new content.
The community’s response has been a mixture of comedy, supportive advice, and, sometimes, total anger. Some players joke about completing the DLC party menu glitch over and over as Bardock and therefore never actually finishing the story. Certain people find that their game freezes during a fight, which lasts for only a couple of blows, thus their loss of challenge. Some instances are so strange and unbelievable as to be fighting Demon King Piccolo as Prince Vegeta. However, whilst a minority of bugs are funny, the majority are simply exhausting. The forums are packed with players describing their difficulties, searching for answers, or venting to people who share the same experience.
The most painful thing about it is the developers’ silence, which is as loud as a drum. Despite countless complaints about save corruption, auto-save issues, and game-breaking bugs, very little has been said by the officials. No quality patches, no decent interaction – just fans left wondering and hoping for a miracle patch. Until that time, the best recommendation is to back up your games, log out between sessions, and if you like, have something there for stress relief when the bugs are piling up.
And still, the fans do not stop coming back. Maybe it is because the Dragon Ball world is just not something that you can resist. Maybe it is because they are looking forward to the next patch that will somehow make everything right. Or maybe, like Bardock, we just do not know when to stop – even though the odds, or the save files, are not on our side.