It’s time for Tekko. Tekko is Pittsburgh’s local anime convention. I’m helping out with their video games and running a semi-casual tournament. For Tekko, I’m gonna be reviewing a few anime games, and I’m gonna start with Super Dragon Ball Z, a PS2 game from 2006.
Super Dragon Ball Z was marketed as being a return to traditional, 2D fighting games from the 1990s after the Budokai and Tenkaichi Budokai games went to 3D. One of the developers was Noritaka Funamizu who worked on Street Fighter II, Street Fighter Alpha, and many other Capcom fighting games. Surely, Super Dragon Ball Z was going to be a fast, furious game.
The game was released to Japanese arcades at the end of 2005 and followed on the PlayStation 2 in the summer of the next year in North America, Japan, and Europe. While Japan and Europe both got a nice cover, the North American version was of course published by Atari who supplied an odd cover featuring Goku and Vegeta, lit up very brightly, muted in color, and with overly clean digital coloring, blasting at each other. For some reason, Goku is sideways. It’s a pretty messy cover.
The in-game graphics are a bit messy too, but they aren’t bad. The 18 characters, from Frieza to Gohan to Videl, are rendered nicely. The game has a cool cel-shaded look to bring out the designs from the TV show. However, the characters are animated stiffly, something that also plagued the earlier Budokai games, and the game incorporates all kinds of sound effect words flying across the screen. The sound effects look kind of cheap. The cheapest has to be the weird image of the planet splitting in two when the opponent is finished with a super move.
The sound design is of similar quality. The audio seems thin and sort of harsh. The actual songs resemble the kind of rock musick you find in the American dub, varying from pretty cool to goofy. I wish that the American version still had Cha-La-Head-Cha-La as the opening theme, but, alas, it has been replaced by an instrumental in the rock/metal style. The voice actors from the dub versions are here; that’s the best part of an otherwise lackluster sound design.
As a fighting game, Super Dragon Ball Z should have good gameplay. I think it falls a bit short. Despite all of the talk of Street Fighter II, Super Dragon Ball Z is a 3D fighting game. Players can walk around each arena and fly into the air; you are not limited to a back-and-forth style match. This is kind of cool, but it presents some problems. You have to press a button to jump and another button to block. Obstacles get in the way of fights, particularly the World Tournament ring. Of course, many obstacles are also destroyable which is a fun mechanic. There are also parts of each stage where characters can be knocked into new arenas. The game kind of plays more like the Mortal Kombat games from this era instead of Street Fighter II.
Super Dragon Ball Z also continues the RPG-style character building seen in the earlier PS2 titles. You can, and basically have to, create a custom character by selecting a normal character, giving them a custom name, and playing through modes to earn BP to buy skills and abilities. Characters have a limited number of slots for custom stuff. I don’t really like these modes, as they set a barrier to quick play. I wouldn’t really mind having them much if these could be ignored, but Survivor (a survival mode that uses a roulette system to restore health and give other rewards) and Original mode (the arcade mode) require custom characters. The former cannot be played at all without a custom character; both require a custom character to collect the Dragon Balls and unlock new stuff.
The actual roster is pretty cool, including original Dragon Ball characters like Chi Chi and King Piccolo in addition to your standard Goku, Vegeta, Trunks, Cell, and many others. I’m glad they have Videl as a choice too, and I wish they would have gone a bit farther with non-Saiyan characters; I’d love to play as Yamcha, Tien, or Mercenary Tao. With 18 characters, Super Dragon Ball Z isn’t exactly limited though, and I don’t think that a fighting game needs a huge roster to be fun.
So, did I have fun with the game? That’s a “yes” and a “no”. The gameplay is fine, but it is nothing that special. Super Dragon Ball Z has only two attack buttons, a strong and weak attack, so it’s pretty limited. There are both Tekken-style combos and Street Fighter-style fireball inputs, kind of like Street Fighter EX. Characters have an action meter, mostly for defensive maneuvers and dashing. The action meter is fine, but it seems to make long-range attacks \especially strong. There’s no ki, so characters like Vegeta can just pummel you with beams. It’s not exactly a return to the classic days of the 1990s.
If you really like Dragon Ball Z, Super Dragon Ball Z might be for you. I don’t regret buying it, as it was pretty cheap, but I’m not the biggest fan. The overall presentation is hit-and-miss, and the gameplay has similar flaws.
Super Dragon Ball Z receives a Neutral.
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