Somewhere in a marketing meeting, somebody decided the best way to light the Dragon Ball fandom on fire was to hide a monkey tail in plain sight.
That’s the little grenade tucked into the latestDragon Ball Xenoverse 3trailer: a Saiyan silhouette that most people clocked for the loud, spiky hair… and then, after the internet did what it always does, frame-by-frame autopsy, fans spotted the real tell. Atail. The old-school kind. The “turn into a giant ape under a full moon” kind.
And yes, the same chatter floating around the trailer also points to a2027release window. Which is either a sober admission that big 3D action games take forever now, or a polite way of saying: “Please stop asking us every six months if it’s coming out.”
A tail isn’t a fashion choice in Dragon Ball, it’s a warning label
In Dragon Ball mythology, a Saiyan tail isn’t some cute accessory you slap on a character model. It’s biology. It’s lineage. It’s a built-in trigger for theOozaru(Great Ape) transformation, one of the earliest, most brutal power-ups in the franchise.
Dragon Ball Z gradually ditched tails for the main cast as the series sprinted toward power levels, god forms, and increasingly abstract glow-aura math. So when a modern Dragon Ball game flashes a tail again, fans don’t read it as nostalgia. They read it as intent.
And the trailer’s staging feels deliberate: the hair grabs your attention first because it’s the obvious “new character” hook. The tail sits there like a quiet little conspiracy for the hardcore crowd to find later. That’s not an accident. That’s how you get a week of free marketing from YouTube detectives without spending another dime on ad buys.
Who’s the tailed Saiyan? The trailer isn’t saying, on purpose
The trailer doesn’t confirm who this is, which is exactly why the speculation machine is humming. In Xenoverse terms, there are two clean possibilities.
One: it’s a brand-new character built for the game. Xenoverse has done that before, and it fits the series’ whole vibe, your custom hero, plus a bunch of “what-if” weirdness swirling around familiar arcs.
Two: it’s an alternate-timeline remix of someone we already know. Xenoverse lives and dies on timeline shenanigans, which is a license to print variants: different designs, different histories, different power sets, all without “breaking canon” because the game hides behind time anomalies.
Either way, the tail is the point. Adult Goku hasn’t had one in forever in the official canon. So if Bandai and Dimps are putting a tail front-and-center (even subtly), they’re choosing to reopen an older, more primal corner of Dragon Ball’s toolbox.
2027 sounds far away, because it is, and because Xenoverse 2 won’t die
A2027target lines up with the reality of modern development cycles, especially for a 3D action game that has to juggle huge rosters, transformations, online play, and the kind of customization Xenoverse fans demand.
Also:Xenoverse 2has had a freakishly long life thanks to years of add-on content and a community that kept showing up. That’s great for Bandai Namco’s bottom line, but it also raises the bar for a sequel. If Xenoverse 3 shows up feeling like “the same game, but with more characters,” people will roast it alive.
A long runway suggests they may be rebuilding fundamentals, netcode, servers, character creation tools, content volume, rather than duct-taping new stuff onto old scaffolding. That’s the smart move. It’s also the slow move.
The real prize: Oozaru gameplay, or at least Oozaru-adjacent mechanics
Let’s talk about what everyone actually cares about: if a tail is back, does that meanOozaruis back?
In the story canon, Great Ape got phased out because it’s a narrative headache and a power-scaling mess. In a video game, though, it’s pure spectacle, and spectacle is currency. Xenoverse’s time-travel premise gives it the perfect alibi to bring back anything the main storyline abandoned.
There’s a practical problem: giant characters are a pain in standard fighting arenas. Past Dragon Ball games often used Great Apes as bosses or scripted sequences because their size wrecks readability and balance.
So if Xenoverse 3 goes there, expect compromises: a temporary transformation, limited arenas, a cinematic summon, or a “buff-style” adaptation that captures the vibe without turning every match into a camera nightmare.
Customization might be the quiet reason this tail matters most
Here’s the sleeper angle: Xenoverse got popular because it let players build their own character, race, body type, outfits, skills, the whole dress-up-and-destroy package.
And for years, plenty of players have wanted a “classic” Saiyan look that actually includes the tail. If Xenoverse 3 finally bakes that into the character creator in a serious way, it’s not just cosmetic. A tail affects animation, collisions, and potentially even exclusive skills or transformations.
That would make the tailed Saiyan in the trailer less of a story character tease and more of a signal: the customization suite is getting deeper, and maybe a little more old-school.
Bandai’s favorite trick: plant an Easter egg, let the fans do the advertising
Big fan-driven franchises run on clues. Trailers aren’t just trailers anymore, they’re puzzles designed to be paused, zoomed, compared to manga panels, and argued over in 4K.
Dropping a tail without highlighting it is classic “community amplification” strategy: give people something subtle, let them “discover” it, and watch the theories multiply while you sit back and collect attention.
The risk is obvious: fans will treat that tail like a promise. If Xenoverse 3 doesn’t deliver some meaningful payoff, Oozaru, a new transformation path, tail options in the editor, people will feel played, even if Bandai never technically said anything.
For now, the only hard fact is the one the trailer shows: a Saiyan has amonkey tail, and it was hidden well enough that plenty of viewers missed it the first time. Everything else is speculation, just the way Bandai likes it, until we see a longer reveal, a roster breakdown, and actual gameplay.
