If you were so excited to the point that you were expecting the new Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot DLC to surprise you with something great and then to see your excitement crashing like a Saiyan pod in West City, then you are not the only one. At first, Bardock – Alone Against Fate DLC was promoted to Leprechaun fans as a dark trip down one of the most iconic stories of the entire series. Nevertheless, this pledge has been overshadowed by the huge amount of bugs, glitches, and different kinds of technical issues with which the Z-fighters have not only found it difficult to continue their battle, but also have had a hard time using their Senzu Beans.
When the Bardock DLC finally dropped, everyone had high hopes. Fans were excited to put on Bardock’s shoes and face Frieza’s forces. But right from the get-go, problems began surfacing throughout the community. As GameRant points out, PC fans experienced issues such as voice lines and text not playing properly or not appearing at all. Others even had their camera jammed on Vegeta’s feet, while others were unable to even get the game to load, even with the most recent updates. For a DLC that you can complete in roughly 90 minutes if you avoid side quests, these bugs made a fast trip down nostalgia lane into a frustrating grind.
Sadly, Bardock’s buggy release is only the latest in a series of issues that have been bothering Kakarot. Save data corruption has been a recurring bugbear since earlier DLCs, such as Battle of Gods and Trunks: The Warrior of Hope. Players have written horror stories on GameFAQs of losing a full playthrough—one even fell from a level 300 Goku to level 89 after a save file was corrupted. And the worst part? There is still no way to disable auto-save, which might have saved some of these losses. As one gamer put it, all Bandai Namco has to do is provide us with a manual save option—but that request remains on Shenron’s to-do list.
Things don’t improve much when you take the platform-specific issues into account. On the Nintendo Switch, the base game usually plays fine—until you get to post-game, where crashes become frighteningly regular, particularly in docked mode. Ironically, the DLC itself runs better, but as soon as you switch back to the main game, it crashes so frequently that you might as well call it a mini-challenge. Others have reported that switching to handheld mode or turning the system off between play sessions helps slightly, which suggests memory leak problems. On the PS5 side, gamers have encountered a strange issue where the game requests a PS4 disc, despite having the PS5 digital copy. Reinstalling doesn’t remedy it, and the only reported workaround is pulling out the ancient PS4 disc just to access the new content.
The reaction from the community has been a mix of humor, helpful troubleshooting suggestions, and outright frustration. Some players crack jokes about running around the globe as Bardock well past the end of his DLC, because of a party menu glitch. Others get stuck in battles that last only a couple of blows, taking away any sense of challenge. There are even occurrences that feel almost too bizarre to be true, such as battling Demon King Piccolo as Prince Vegeta. But whereas some bugs are humorous, most are simply tiring. Forums are full of players posting their issues, seeking solutions, or simply ranting to others who are experiencing the same chaos.
What hurts the most is the deafening silence from the developers. For all the grievances regarding save corruption, auto-save failures, and game-breaking bugs, there has been precious little official word. No worthwhile patches, no proper communication—just fans left in the dark, hoping for a miracle patch. Until then, the best advice is to save your games, shut down between playthroughs, and perhaps keep something close by to squeeze when the bugs pile up.
And still, the fans continue to return. Perhaps it’s because the world of Dragon Ball is simply impossible to resist. Perhaps it’s the expectation that the next patch will somehow put everything right. Or perhaps, like Bardock himself, we simply don’t know when to quit—despite the odds, or the save files, being against us.