TL;DR Breakdown for Dokkan Frontier, the brand new upcoming game mode officially introduced today

PinnedBOTH Guide

Hi all,

the Saiyan Day Producer Letter just finished airing a few minutes ago, and we got a ton of fresh info during its runtime, with arguably the biggest news being the departure of Omatsu from the Lead Producer position, as well as the addition of a new mode, so I wanted to go ahead and put together a summary of its details that were to revealed to us

Not going to waste your time with a long-winded intro, so let's get straight into it, shall we?

#The Basics

As the thread title says, this mode is called Dokkan Frontierand it's a first brand new gameplay style since the introduction of Pettan Battle during the 2021 Saiyan Day celebration. Feels quite appropriate that another such thing would take place 5 years later during the same celebration
Although it's a Stage-based event, the actual amount of fights is closer to entire story chapters found in other games, with the closest comparison probably being the PVE Events found in Dragon Ball Legends
The mode takes a completely different aproach to the Team Building aspect, moving away from the standard 7-unit teams to 3-unit teams working side by side
While the Frontier doesn't quite tell a story the same way dedicated Quest mode or Story events or DB Story episodes do, it is certainly heavily inspired by the source material and features special dialogue between specific characters
Per Omatsu's and Geppy's wording, this mode is intended for Dokkan Veterans who already know the ins and outs of how the game works, have built a strong box, and can optimise the character lineup used here
We currently do not know how often new stages are going to be released, considering the higher amount of effort required to put them together as opposed to the typical Challenge-tier content we get on an almost weekly basis. It's possible they could only be relegated to the bigger celebrations (so Saiyan Day, Golden Week, Transcendent Campaign, Global Campaign, New Years, Anniversary) or it could be on a once-per-month basis like Chain Battle and Virtual Clash
We also currently do not know whether the new stage releases are going to be permanently available or if they'll only run for a limited time (from multiple days to 1-2 weeks), but considering the selection UI the former seems to be the case
The first stage is based around Namek Saga, even though the upcoming celebration is Buu Saga themed, so clearly the developers aren't necessarily going to align the content or follow a strict chronological order across Dragon Ball

#The Team Building

As mentioned above, the Frontier takes a totally different approach to how we typically play Dokkan, starting from how the stats are treated and down to certain restrictions
In this mode, you're tasked to build two teams of 3 units each, and each of these teams have their own leaders. This means that even though the event stages are limited to the source material, you could theoretically be running entirely separate categories simultaneously, or mix and match themas you see fit depending on the bosses
Friend Leads are unavailable here, so this mode is ran entirely in a solo fashion
Also neither Support Items nor Support Memories can be used. I'm not entirely sure what happens if all your units are KOd or whether they're just healed back up to full after beating a boss, but during the actual fights you can only rely on heals via same type orbs, passives, and I suppose revives
Unlike the total team HP found across most of the rest of the game, here every unit has a unique healthbar. That means you're free to slot in units however you want without fearing a game over, and either play as safely as possible or try to clutch it out with the last man standing
Whenever a unit is KOd, their status changes to what's called a LOST character. That unit can no longer activate any of their abilities, proc the links of other units on rotation, take enemy attacks, or grab orbs. However you can still put them in slots 1-3, and thus manipulate the boss attacks, as it will target the next unit in order. For example, if you see a ton of attacks in slot 3 but still want to build up your slot 2 unit - just place the LOST unit last and the boss will attack whoever is 2nd, kinda like a simpler version of the taunt mechanic
Lastly, like I said this mode takes heavy inspiration from the source material, and each fight in Frontier will have boosted units depending on the encounter. The gameplay demo shown used Scouter Vegeta against Cui, and just for the stages involving these two, Vegeta gets additional Ki, ATK & DEF. The good news here is that even if you haven't pulled the required/bonus unit, you can borrow it from the Special Guest lineup, so you're not enirely reliant on getting lucky with the pulls

#The Gameplay

After you access the mode UI and pick a stage, you'll be met with a Map Screen. The stage map features multiple Nodes, each being its own boss fight, and while it is mostly a linear progresion, there are some forks along the path to the finish line. Omatsu and Geppy haven't really mentioned this, but I'm assuming that certain bosses are unlocked if you meet the conditions for the connected node, such as clearing the fight above an HP threshold or within a specific amount of turns etc
It's currently unknown if all stages will share the format, but this Namek stage featured a total of 4 pages, with Page 1 featuring just 3 fights while Page 3 had 7 of them. They did not show what Pages 2 and 4 were like however
Anyway, once you select a fight to tackle and built a team, you proceed to pretty much your standard Dokkan gameplay experience, but with a few key differences
- First, if you have a select bonus/boosted unit on the team, you'll encounter a special voiced dialogue between that character and the boss. It is NOT the same as the Intro mechanic introduced with the 7th Anni, you just get a voiceline or two and you can skip it if you want. Still pretty cool nonetheless
- Second, the currently active team appears every turn, which means that units who build up their passives/stats or have normally have particularily difficult active/revive/transform conditions can access them much earlier rather than having to wait every other turn
- Third, changing teams consumes the Switch Gauge, and you only get a limited amount of charges per fight(?), which seems to cap out at 3. It's currently unknown whether the gauge can shrink/expand depending on the fight, but I wouldn't be surprised if harder bosses could do that
- and Fourth, although the Dokkan Mode gauge appears to charge as you would normally, i.e. by collecting orbs, with different speeds for same/non-same type, what's actually cool is you get to choose which units procs it instead of being locked into whover is slot 1, it's activated instantly just like the active/finish skills, and there's no Z-pattern minigame, so the Dokkan Mode Attack is at max power at all times. Using it also restores 1 charge for the Switch gauge
As you'd expect, every boss has their own gimmicks. In the two examples shown during the demo, Cui gets +300% ATK but -100% DEF when at 50% HP or below, while Super Zarbon gets +200% ATK and -100% DEF at 50% HP or below. Nothing too crazy, pretty much standard stuff. And that of course comes with being vulnerable/immune to debuffs such as ATK/DEF lowering, stunning, and sealing
However that's not it - certain bosses will have additional unique mechanics that are activated conditionally. In case of Super Zarbon, he focuses attacks on the unit with lowest amount of HP when he himself is at 70% HP or lower, thus forcing the player to actively manage your teams since now every unit gets individual HP bars. This is just one example of what's possible in this mode so I'm sure there'll be plenty more to see down the line.
Oh and those unique mechanics are also fully voiced just like the special dialogue, so now Dokkan can feature even more voicelines within the game, even if limited to just this mode

#The Intensity Level

Although this is directly tied into the gameplay of Dokkan Frontier, I wanted to dedicate a mini-section to this specific mechanic, as it's unlike anything we've seen before in either mode
We just went over the fact that Frontier uses two teams of 3 rather than 1 team of 7, and really you're free to use either Team A or Team B if you prefer, for example maybe you just want to see stackers stack and since our atk stats and damage values here are much lower (due to losing out on a secondary lead), the fights can take a while to beat. Sounds great, right? Well...... not really
With each passing turn, the Frontier bosses slowly build up what's called an Intensity gauge / level, and depending on the fight, it is a passive debuff that comes in different forms and negatively affects your entire unit lineup. In the aforementioned Super Zarbon encounter, the Intensity level could go up to a maximum of 4
- Starting from Level 2, Zarbon disables additional attacks of any kind, so every unit is now limited to just one super per turn
- Starting from Level 4, Zarbon now also disables dodge, plus he becomes supereffective against all types and he ignores the existing stat debuffs
In order to lower the Intensity level, all you have to do is switch teams, which will cause it to gradually decrease for Team A but instead start building up for Team B, so that's an additional micromanagement element you have to consider
Be careful not to have your units KOd, however, because they permanently raise the Intensity level by 1. Since you cannot heal/revive units mid-battle outside of their kits, this becomes all the more important as with each dead unit you now have 1 turn less to before the Intensity is once again increased and the debuff from a boss is reactivated

#The Rewards

Finally, just a brief mention of what was said by Omatsu and Geppy
By completing a stage you can expect your standard rewards such as stones, some zeni statues, some HiPo orbs, potentially skill orbs, you know, the usual stuff. But there's one more cool addition exclusive to the Frontier
This is something they're calling a Special Effect, and in a way it's an evolution of the Special Stickers, which can nowadays be obtained from missions and the monthly Virtual clash runs
What's really cool is these new Special Effects are applied automatically upon obtaining, and can now be used on LRs, whereas before they were limited to Dokkanfest and EZAd TURs
Based off the two examples shown, which were Scouter Vegeta and Krillin/Gohan, you can expect the following changes to occur:
- Additional animations when tapping the artwork to hide the UI
- Active Skill themes playing in the background instead of the main menu/extreme z-battle one
- Character voicelines with stylised quote text being displayed for the LRs
- And the unit info screen designbecomes slightly different with bolder text and darker colors used for HP/ATK/DEF values, while the card title (that's the one above character name) becomes colored, in Vegeta's case now being half blue and half pink

That's pretty much all the info we have at the moment

The mode itself goes live in 4 days alongside the Saiyan Day celebration, so we'll have more details once the campaign kicks off, including the event duration and the rewards, but not gonna lie I'm pretty excited for this

Posted Mar 14, 2026, 6:14 AM UTC

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