for me its dragon ball z. i’ve always wanted a good 3d open world dbz action rpg kind of game, but it’s just never been done to its full potential. the closest we’ve gotten in my opinion is dragon ball z kakarot, which has great DBZ fighting game style fighting, and tries to incorporate it with an open world with rpg-light type features, but the world and rpg elements are just so uninspired and poorly done. they don’t really blend well with the fighting segments either, it feels like all of the ‘open world’ is more of just a 3d overworld with minigames
I love this game so much, but i totally understand what you mean. Once you get over the initial joy of flying around in the Toriyamaverse you realize that it’s a really small and shallow RPG world with not a lot going on besides fighting an endless stream of samey robots and saibamen.
I think for this idea to work you need to break away from the DBZ canon. Do a game set 100 years in the future, Master Roshi is still alive cuz he’s been immortal the whole time, but everyone else is gone for good.
Ancient Piccolo as a mentor, or Super Kami Dende or smth would be fun.
Dragon Ball Online did a lot of this stuff - Toryiama actually wrote the plot outline for it, it was set several hundred years in the future, featuring ancient Piccolo and Master Roshi still being around and stuff like that, and Dende, but otherwise all new people besides occasional exceptions for the time-travel heavy main plot - but gameplay wise it was very much the typical MMO.