RamGoat becomes the first DRAGON BALL GEKISHIN SQUADRA world champion at SQUADRA BLAST 2026

DRAGON BALL GEKISHIN SQUADRA has crowned the first world champion in its history. Europe’s RamGoat completed a lower-bracket comeback in Tokyo to win the inaugural SQUADRA BLAST WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP 2026, defeating North American representative Boyfriends in the Grand Final after the two teams had already met earlier in the tournament. Swag, Abe, Ani and Pride can now officially call themselves the first No.1 SQUADRA in the world, completing a global competition that began with open online qualification in May and ultimately reduced four regional ecosystems — ASIA, NA, SA and EU — to one final team.

The SQUADRA BLAST WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP 2026 FINALS broadcast represented a significant milestone for a game that only launched globally in September 2025. GEKISHIN SQUADRA was created around four-versus-four objective-based Dragon Ball combat, mid-match character progression and clearly differentiated Damage, Tank and Technical roles; less than a year later, Bandai Namco had already converted those systems into a formal international competition with regional qualification, hero bans, best-of-three series and an offline World Championship in Japan.

Four teams reached Tokyo after surviving three qualification stages: Nautilus representing ASIA, Boyfriends representing North America, LATENT representing South America and RamGoat representing Europe. The Finals were played on August 23 JST, corresponding to August 22 PT, and Bandai Namco used a double-elimination BO3 format that forced teams to demonstrate more than one preferred composition.

By the end of the broadcast, Europe had survived every obstacle the bracket could produce.

RamGoat had become world champion.

RamGoat had to recover from an early loss to Boyfriends

The championship run is particularly notable because RamGoat did not remain undefeated.

The opening upper-bracket semifinals produced victories for ASIA’s Nautilus and NA’s Boyfriends. Nautilus advanced from its match against LATENT, while Boyfriends defeated RamGoat, immediately sending the European representative into the elimination side of the bracket.

That created an unforgiving route for Swag, Abe, Ani and Pride. From that point onward, another series loss would end their World Championship.

RamGoat first faced LATENT in the Lower Semifinal and eliminated the South American representatives. The result kept Europe alive while reducing the tournament to three teams. Meanwhile, Boyfriends defeated Nautilus in the Upper Final and became the first team guaranteed a place in the Grand Final, reaching the championship series without losing a match.

RamGoat then had to confront Nautilus in the Lower Final. Europe won again, eliminating the ASIA champions and earning a rematch against Boyfriends.

The situation was therefore unusually clean from a narrative perspective. North America had already proved it could defeat RamGoat. Boyfriends had travelled through the upper bracket undefeated. RamGoat had been forced to survive LATENT and Nautilus simply to earn another opportunity.

The European team made that second opportunity count.

Boyfriends entered the Grand Final undefeated

North America’s Boyfriends had arguably the strongest route through the upper bracket.

The roster of Gant, Felolol, hanMan and LoMelloNate arrived in Tokyo after winning the NA 3rd STAGE and then opened the Finals by defeating RamGoat. From there, Boyfriends faced Nautilus in the Upper Final and won again, becoming the only team to reach the championship match without entering the lower bracket.

That achievement provided more than psychological momentum.

Bandai Namco’s tournament rules explicitly rewarded the Upper Final winner during the Grand Final draft. In a normal Battle 1, both teams simultaneously select a hero that becomes unavailable to both sides. For the Grand Final, however, the team arriving from the Upper Final received the right to select two heroes that neither side could use, while the team arriving from the Lower Final received no corresponding selection right.

It was a deliberate alternative to the conventional bracket-reset advantage commonly found in double-elimination esports. The published rules define the Finals as double elimination but do not provide for an additional reset series after the Grand Final. Instead, the undefeated team’s structural advantage appears directly inside the drafting rules.

Boyfriends therefore entered the last series not only undefeated but with additional control over the opening hero pool.

RamGoat still won the championship.

The Grand Final completed a full reversal of the tournament’s opening matchup

The final opponent could hardly have been more appropriate.

Boyfriends versus RamGoat had already occurred in the Upper Semifinal, and North America won that first meeting. The Grand Final therefore was not an unknown matchup between teams arriving from separate sides of the bracket. Both squads had recent information about how the other approached drafts, objectives and team fights.

What changed was the pressure.

Boyfriends had spent the tournament protecting an unbeaten record. RamGoat had already experienced elimination-point matches against LATENT and Nautilus. By the time Europe reached the Grand Final, the team had accumulated significantly more lower-bracket pressure while also proving it could adapt across consecutive opponents.

The official DRAGON BALL GEKISHIN SQUADRA account confirmed the result shortly after the match: RamGoat became the first-ever SQUADRA BLAST World Champion and the No.1 SQUADRA in the world.

No published official recap available at the time of writing provides a complete map-by-map statistical breakdown of the Grand Final, so it would be inappropriate to reconstruct individual battle scores or hero performances without reliable data. What is verified is the competitive path: Boyfriends defeated RamGoat first, RamGoat fought through the lower bracket, the teams met again for the title, and Europe won the rematch.

That alone gives the first GEKISHIN SQUADRA World Championship a memorable conclusion.

Europe’s first world champions are Swag, Abe, Ani and Pride

RamGoat represented the EU server, with Bandai Namco officially listing its four competitive members as Swag, Abe, Ani and Pride.

The roster now holds a distinction that future champions cannot duplicate: it is the original GEKISHIN SQUADRA world-title lineup.

That matters in a young competitive game. Established esports can contextualize every championship against years of previous winners, dominant organizations and regional rivalries. GEKISHIN SQUADRA had none of that history before August 23. SQUADRA BLAST 2026 was the event that created it.

Europe is consequently the first region to hold the global title.

Boyfriends becomes the inaugural World Championship runner-up. Nautilus finishes behind the two finalists after reaching the Upper Final before eventually losing to RamGoat in the Lower Final, while LATENT’s run ended against Europe in the Lower Semifinal.

Those placements establish the first meaningful international regional benchmark for the game. Regional server results can show which teams dominate locally, but until the Finals brought all four champions to the same offline environment, there was no direct competitive evidence showing how those ecosystems compared.

The answer from the first World Championship is Europe at the top, with North America immediately behind it.

Four regional champions had to travel to Tokyo to settle the title offline

The Finals were deliberately designed as something larger than another cross-server online bracket.

Bandai Namco required the four 3rd STAGE champions to participate in person in Tokyo, with the tournament organizer covering necessary travel and designated accommodation costs for qualified participants. Online participation in the Finals was not permitted.

The qualifying teams were:

ASIA’s Nautilus, represented by hanabishokuninn, diosTTV, yuto and koshikoshi-noNo1; NA’s Boyfriends, with Gant, Felolol, hanMan and LoMelloNate; SA’s LATENT, featuring capitanmontoya, Chipi, Chochiri TTV and Wolvezz; and EU’s RamGoat, with Swag, Abe, Ani and Pride.

Each represented a separate server environment and had won its respective June 3rd STAGE to qualify.

The offline requirement was competitively important. GEKISHIN SQUADRA supports cross-platform play across mobile, PC, PlayStation and Nintendo Switch, but the World Championship needed a standardized competitive environment. Bandai Namco’s rulebook therefore specified that Finals participants would use devices supplied by Tournament Administration, although approved personal peripherals such as controllers or keyboard-and-mouse setups could be permitted.

The tournament was therefore intended to identify the strongest team under standardized Finals conditions rather than simply reproduce each region’s everyday matchmaking environment.

SQUADRA BLAST started months earlier with open in-game qualification

The four Tokyo finalists represented the end of a substantially larger qualification process.

The 1st STAGE opened for entry on May 13 and allowed eligible teams to participate through the game itself. During this opening phase, teams needed to win three of five battles to qualify for the 2nd STAGE, and unsuccessful teams could attempt the first qualification hurdle again during the event period.

The 2nd STAGE remained online and in-game but became considerably less forgiving. It was separated across the ASIA, EU, SA and NA servers, and unlike Stage 1, teams could not repeatedly re-enter after failure.

The 3rd STAGE then moved to an externally operated tournament structure using Discord and start.gg. Regional brackets were held throughout June, with each server producing exactly one champion that would qualify for Japan. Earlier rounds used BO1 matches, while regional semifinals and finals became BO3.

Only those four regional winners survived into the World Championship Finals.

That format helped SQUADRA BLAST serve two purposes simultaneously. Its early stages allowed the tournament to reach the broader player population, while later stages gradually moved toward a conventional esports environment with fixed rosters, external tournament administration, livestreamed matches and stricter competitive regulations.

Every Finals match was BO3, but teams could not simply spam their best composition

The most interesting part of the Finals rules was the hero restriction system.

Every match was a best-of-three, first-to-two-wins series. The tournament used GEKISHIN Rules, random Divine Draw, no Divine Combo Card limit, the ASIA server and the latest game patch available by the day of the Finals. Every hero implemented by tournament day was eligible.

Battle 1 began with a ban phase. Each team normally selected one hero that neither side could use during that battle. If the teams banned different characters, both disappeared from the available pool; if they selected the same character, only that one hero was removed.

Battle 2 created the more substantial adaptation test. Any hero a team had personally used in Battle 1 became unavailable to that same team during the second battle. Crucially, an opponent using a particular character did not automatically prohibit the other team from selecting that character in Battle 2. Restrictions were based on a team’s own previous composition.

Battle 3 then removed those restrictions completely.

The design forced every roster to prepare multiple functional compositions. A team could not simply identify four dominant heroes and reproduce them through an entire BO3. Winning Battle 1 immediately removed those four characters from the team’s own Battle 2 options, making roster depth and role flexibility integral to tournament preparation.

For a four-player team game, that is an effective way of testing whether a squad understands the broader character pool rather than one optimized composition.

The Grand Final gave Boyfriends additional draft power instead of a second life

The championship rules contained an especially unusual competitive decision.

In many double-elimination tournaments, a team entering Grand Finals from the upper bracket retains a second tournament life. If the lower-bracket winner beats them once, the bracket resets and another series determines the champion.

SQUADRA BLAST 2026 used a different mechanism.

The published rules granted the Upper Final winner the right to select two heroes that neither team could use in Grand Final Battle 1. The Lower Final winner received no corresponding selection right.

That meant Boyfriends’ unbeaten run did matter. North America entered the title match with additional draft control rather than an entire extra BO3.

The system also made RamGoat’s victory more significant strategically. Europe had already lost to Boyfriends and was entering from the lower bracket, while Boyfriends possessed the tournament-defined upper-bracket advantage. RamGoat therefore had to overturn the earlier head-to-head result under rules that deliberately rewarded its opponent for reaching the final undefeated.

Whether Bandai Namco retains this exact system for future World Championships remains unknown, but it gave the inaugural Finals a distinctive drafting layer.

GEKISHIN SQUADRA becomes considerably more tactical under tournament restrictions

At first glance, Dragon Ball combat and formal hero drafting may seem like unusual partners. GEKISHIN SQUADRA, however, is built around systems that naturally support structured team competition.

The game is 4v4, and victory does not simply come from accumulating the most knockouts. Teams must fight through enemy territory, capture strongholds guarded by Gods of Destruction and ultimately seize the Dragon Ball positioned deep within the opposing side of the battlefield. Heroes gain EXP and level up during a match, unlocking or strengthening abilities as the battle progresses.

That means early combat can affect later objective control. Eliminating an opponent is valuable not only because that player disappears temporarily but because gaining experience and map access can accelerate the team toward stronger character states and deeper enemy territory.

The game also divides heroes into three official roles. Damage characters specialize in aggressive pressure, Tank heroes absorb punishment and protect teammates, and Technical characters provide support, healing or disruption.

Competitive drafting therefore involves more than choosing four individually powerful Dragon Ball characters. A composition must still perform jobs.

Removing one important Tank or Technical hero through a ban can alter what combinations remain viable. Battle 2’s self-restriction rule goes further because a team that uses its preferred role package immediately has to construct something different for the next game.

The tournament format exposes whether teams have genuine strategic depth.

Season 6 made the Finals meta especially difficult to predict

The World Championship also arrived during an active period of roster expansion.

Season 6 began on July 8 with Beerus, a Damage-role hero designed to operate across short and long ranges. Bandai Namco then added Goku Black on July 22 as a Technical character built around weakening enemies, restricting their movement and creating advantageous frontline situations.

On August 12, only eleven days before the Japanese Finals, Jiren (Full Power) entered the roster as a Tank. His official design centers on reduced frontal damage, increasing strength as combat continues and wide-area skills capable of controlling battlefield space.

All heroes implemented by the day of the tournament were legal, and the Finals used the latest patch available at that point.

That rule made late-season adaptation part of the preparation problem. Regional qualification concluded in June, but the final meta was not frozen around the same roster teams used to qualify. Competitors had to account for characters and balance changes introduced after earning their tickets to Tokyo.

The championship was therefore testing current Season 6 mastery, not simply asking regional winners to reproduce what worked two months earlier.

The tournament created a genuine regional comparison for the first time

Before SQUADRA BLAST, strong teams could dominate their individual server environments without proving those results internationally.

That distinction is especially important for a game with four regional competitive servers. Different regions can develop different preferred heroes, objective timings, team compositions and assumptions about what constitutes optimal play. Online matchmaking does not necessarily provide a controlled way to determine which interpretation is strongest.

The Tokyo Finals changed that.

Nautilus brought the ASIA meta. Boyfriends carried North America. LATENT represented South America. RamGoat arrived from Europe. Every team then played under the same patch, same server specification, same BO3 structure and same ban rules.

The bracket immediately produced useful cross-regional information. ASIA beat SA in the opening phase, while NA beat EU. Europe then eliminated SA, North America defeated Asia, and Europe subsequently defeated both Asia and North America to take the championship.

One tournament cannot establish permanent regional superiority. Rosters change, metas evolve and future international competition may produce entirely different results.

What SQUADRA BLAST 2026 does provide is the first baseline.

Europe owns the first global trophy.

RamGoat’s prize will literally become part of GEKISHIN SQUADRA

The champions receive something considerably more permanent than an ordinary event badge.

Bandai Namco’s official Finals prize structure gives each member of the winning team the ability to choose one hero implemented by Season 6 or earlier, after which the development team will create a dedicated skin for that hero based on the World Championship concept. RamGoat will also receive the WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP Champion Badge and a physical World Champion Trophy.

That champion-skin reward is particularly interesting because it allows the first world champions to leave a visible mark inside the live game.

Instead of receiving only an external trophy that exists separately from the player base, each winner gets to influence a cosmetic that can become part of GEKISHIN SQUADRA’s ongoing visual history.

Bandai Namco has not yet announced which four heroes RamGoat’s players will choose, so naming potential selections would be speculation.

When those choices are revealed, however, the resulting skins will effectively function as the game’s first esports championship commemoratives.

The public prize listing also focuses on these custom skins, the Champion Badge and trophy rather than presenting the event around a conventional cash-prize headline. Finals participants additionally receive commemorative merchandise.

Pick’ems let the wider player base participate in the championship

Bandai Namco also built a prediction game around the Finals.

SQUADRA PICK’EMS opened before the event and asked players to forecast how the World Championship and individual battles would unfold. Correct predictions generated points, with final rewards determined by percentile ranking.

The official championship page identifies a Master reward for players who correctly predicted every outcome, Gold for the top 20% by points and Silver for the top 50%. Simply participating awarded five P6G-Capsules.

This type of system matters for an emerging esport because most players will never qualify for an offline World Championship. Pick’ems give them a reason to learn the teams, understand regional strength and pay attention to the bracket rather than treating the broadcast as something detached from the game they play.

For Bandai Namco, it also turns tournament knowledge into an in-game activity.

A player who had watched Nautilus, Boyfriends, LATENT and RamGoat during the regional 3rd STAGE had information they could actually use when making predictions.

The Finals broadcast also carried exclusive Twitch rewards

Bandai Namco reinforced the event with a dedicated SQB WC 2026 FINALS Drops campaign on Twitch.

Players who linked their GEKISHIN SQUADRA account and Twitch account through the same Bandai Namco ID could receive a Visual Collection after one hour of viewing and an exclusive skin after five hours. The campaign ran around the Finals broadcast window from August 22 into August 23 PT.

The official social promotion identified the five-hour reward as an exclusive Goku Black skin, providing another incentive for the wider community to keep the tournament stream active even if they were not already invested in the competitive scene.

Together with Pick’ems, the Drops illustrate Bandai Namco’s attempt to make the World Championship feel like an in-game event rather than an isolated esports production.

The tournament had competitors in Tokyo, but ordinary players still had progression incentives tied directly to watching it.

SQUADRA BLAST arrived less than a year after GEKISHIN SQUADRA launched

The speed of the transition from launch to international championship is notable.

DRAGON BALL GEKISHIN SQUADRA officially began service on September 10, 2025, introducing its four-versus-four objective battles across mobile, Steam, PlayStation and Nintendo Switch with cross-platform play and progression.

Bandai Namco publicly revealed the first World Championship during Dragon Ball Games Battle Hour 2026 in April. The company described it as the title’s first offline-format World Championship, with winning teams from multiple servers invited to Japan.

Entries opened in May.

Regional qualification concluded in June.

The four champions gathered in Tokyo in August.

That is a rapid competitive-development cycle for a new multiplayer game.

It also suggests Bandai Namco views organized competition as more than a side activity for GEKISHIN SQUADRA. The company already operates a broader Tournament Support Program for community events, offering in-game rewards based on tournament size and result, while its July developer letter explicitly highlighted the approaching SQUADRA BLAST Finals as the competition that would determine the strongest team in the world under GEKISHIN Rules.

The championship demonstrates why the game works better competitively than its Dragon Ball spectacle initially suggests

GEKISHIN SQUADRA naturally sells itself through recognizable characters and enormous attacks. That is the immediate Dragon Ball fantasy.

Competitive play reveals the systems underneath it.

A team needs damage, frontline durability and utility. Players need to decide when to fight and when to prioritize strongholds. Character power grows during the match, meaning experience control matters. Progress toward the enemy Dragon Ball creates a spatial objective beyond simply chasing eliminations. Draft restrictions prevent one composition from solving an entire BO3.

Those systems create the possibility of strategic disagreement between regions.

One team may prioritize stronger initiation. Another may value Technical control. One may construct its Battle 1 composition around forcing an immediate advantage, accepting that those heroes disappear from its Battle 2 pool. Another may deliberately preserve a critical option for later in the series.

The SQUADRA BLAST rule set magnified those choices by forcing adaptation across multiple games.

That is why the first World Championship matters beyond the identity of the winner. It demonstrates that GEKISHIN SQUADRA can produce a tournament where preparation, drafting and coordination are visible alongside the spectacle of Dragon Ball characters throwing each other across the map.

RamGoat has written the first line of GEKISHIN SQUADRA’s international history

Every competitive game eventually develops a history of champions, regional rivalries, dominant metas and matches that define particular eras.

DRAGON BALL GEKISHIN SQUADRA now has its first entry.

RamGoat — Swag, Abe, Ani and Pride — is the inaugural SQUADRA BLAST World Champion. The European representatives lost their first series against Boyfriends, survived LATENT in the lower bracket, eliminated Nautilus, returned for a rematch with the undefeated North American squad and won the Grand Final in Tokyo.

That path makes the result considerably stronger than a straightforward undefeated run. RamGoat had already been shown that its original plan was not enough against Boyfriends. The team then had to remain alive through two different regional champions before being given one final opportunity to solve the matchup that had sent it to the lower bracket.

It solved it when the title was on the line.

SQUADRA BLAST 2026 also establishes several precedents Bandai Namco can build upon: four-region qualification, offline Finals, BO3 double elimination, evolving hero restrictions, community Pick’ems and champion cosmetics created directly around the winning players. Whether the exact structure returns for a second World Championship has not yet been confirmed, but the first event has provided the game with a genuine international competitive foundation.

The slogan for the tournament was “ONE GOAL, ONE SQUADRA, WORLD NO.1.”

For 2026, that No.1 has now been decided.

Europe’s RamGoat is the first World Champion in DRAGON BALL GEKISHIN SQUADRA history.