If I Collected All the Dragonballs, I'd Wish for a Better Game
Written: Nov 28 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Lots of secrets, true to the tv series
Cons: Horrible controls and the play system poorly steals from other games
The Bottom Line: Even as a fan of the Dragonball Z tv show, I could not enjoy this game, and if you're not a fan, you'll hate the game even more
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| duke101's Full Review: Dragonball Z Budokai 3 for PlayStation 2 |
Now let me start this review off by saying I am a BIG Dragonball fan, I've seen probably every episode of Dragonball Z, most of the original series, and even a fair amount of the inferior Dragonball GT. In spite of that, this game angered me immensely. So I can only imagine how annoyed a non-fan of the series would be with it. I was surprised by this given the overall positive reviews the game got from so many usually reliable critics, and the fact that I own the original Dragonball Z: Budokai, which was the first quality Dragonball Z game ever to be made, so I expected this one to only be better, not worse. But I can honestly say this is one of the most overhyped games I've ever seen. Here's how the aspects of the game break down:
GRAPHICS
This is pretty much the best attribute the game has to offer, and that's not saying much. The characters are nicely colored, and I like the visual effects around Goku as he transforms into a Super-Saiyan, but it's all just too cartoony. I know it's a game based on the cartoon show, but the graphics don't even resemble the series in most instances. The most interesting aspect of the graphics has to be during the fights when the screen breaks into the "dragon rush" feature, in which you the characters finally resemble the way they do on the series (of course, this feature makes for the most irritating part of the gameplay, but I'll get to that later...) The worst part of the graphics is that instead of seeing cutscenes reinacting the plot of the series with original graphics, we get literally snapshot photographs of the tv show, with words displayed over them summarizing the events.
MUSIC/SOUND
The music is unlistenable, making a frustratingly irritating game even more likely to make you want to throw your controller through the television screen. Instead of actually taking songs from the show, they tried to for the most part write original music, which sounds as repetitive as some of the early Nintendo game music (in fact, I'd prefer hearing the music from the original "Megaman" to do this game anyday). I will give the game this, however, they managed to get all the original voice actors from the series.
GAMEPLAY
Here's where the game really falls apart, and really this is the most important feature of any fighting game. There's more variety of modes in this game to try to make interesting the fact that the fighting is so limited and that's really the whole game, but that only does so much. The main mode of play is the "Dragon Universe," which lets you pick a character to reenact the events of the show. The first gigantic problem with this is that for every character on the show (including Goku), they were not involved in every plot point, because at various points in the series they would be dead or just plain not involved in a crucial fight. As a result, when you play through the series, you're stuck skipping over large portions of the plot (which are summarized confusingly by the characters' dialogue). For instance, during the game's reenactment of the Boo storyline, it gets particularly confusing to play with Goku, as near the start of that story, you're fighting an evil version of Vegita without seeing how he turned evil. The first Dragonball Z: Boudakai allowed you to change characters in the storyline so that you could more easily follow the plot (for instance, you would switch to Gohan to defeat Cell as it happened in the series, rather than simply skipping over that fight when you play with a different character). As a result, the only way you can even follow the plot in the "Dragon Universe" mode is to know everything about the series.
The "Dragon Universe" also gives you the ability to fly around a world map with your character (treating the character as if he were an airship in a Final Fantasy RPG), and "steering" your character through the air feels incredibly awkward. To visit a location, you often have to line up the character within the exact right coordinates, forcing you to go in reverse and turn several times until you get it right.
And then I come to the worst part of the gameplay, the fights. Too often they leave me feeling like I have carpel tunnel syndrome after only about twenty minutes of gameplay on EASY mode! This is because rather than using skillful button-pressing techniques that you have to memorize to perform the move (like in the classic "Street Fighter" series), you often have to pound the buttons harder and faster than your opponent just to have your attack register. This is especially true when both you and your enemy throw a fireball like attack at the same time. Unless you can rotate the joystick fast enough, his fireball will break through yours and hit you. Plus, the characters' movements fowards and backwards feel incredible limited. The only way to really get them to move foward at a reasonable speed is to hit forward twice so that they run at the enemy (in a style that's ripped off from "Tekken" and ruins the style at that). If you choose to walk, you'll almost never time your attacks properly, and although you can block, you'll probably get hit by some kind of projectile attack.
Also, all of the characters' play styles feel so similar that it doesn't even matter who you use. Unlike in the "Street Fighter" games, every character has a projectile fireball-like attack, which you can activiate simply by hitting the circle button which shoots a "ki" attack. This game did at least make the more powerful characters do more damage, unlike the original "Dragonball Z: Budokai," which is nice, because it's hard to imagine that a human like Tien could defeat super-saiyan Goku easily (which could be done without much trouble in the first "Dragonball Z: Budokai"), but still it would be nice to see more variety from one character to another.
And then there's the horrendous and confusing "dragon rush" feature, in which you will easily be killed if you can't press the right combination of buttons, because the opponent can easily get off up to 50 hits at once. In this game's defense, the feature might have made more sense to me if I bought the game and read the instruction manual, but I thankfully only rented this piece of crap (which, by the way, I would recommend if you're still interested in this game, because although the game has lots of hidden features you won't open up in five days, you really want to make sure you can stand this game before you purchase it).
Lastly about the "Dragon Universe" mode, even the game system is poorly done, as it comes across as a bad role-playing game. The game forgets that it's a fighting game, and lets you level up your characters. When you gain a level, you can attribute "Z Points" to different attributes. The problem is that just to stay alive in most of the fights, I wound up attributing all my "Z Points" to health, because you fight opponents whose health bars are so ridiculously large that you need to stay even with them (this is because unlike normal fighting games, when you "kill" an opponent's lifebar, it starts over again until it's gone through the numbers of lifebars the character has, which is often at least 3 to 4, making for long and tedious fights).
I can go on and on about the problems with the gameplay, but I'm sure you get the point.
REPLAYABILITY
Now I'm going to give this game the benefit of the doubt on replayability, because it does have one interesting feature. As you level up and customize your characters, you get a password, which you can enter to face that customized character. This allows you to challenge other players' customized characters, a poor imitation of online gameplay, but at least gives you something new to do with the game. You can also apply the "capsules" you acquire that give your characters abilities in different ways to try to maximize your characters' strengths. Unfortunately, this often results in making one character so ridiculously overpowered that when you play a friend at home, one of the players has no chance of winning. Unlike a normal fighting game like "Tekken" where you have no control over the characters' inherent abilities, you could be going up against a very unfair advantage. But the customization does make the game highly replayable, and if you actually enjoy this game, then you are definitely better off purchasing it then having to continually rent it just to unlock all the hidden characters and abilities.
All in all, the game does stay true to the series, but that's just the problem. The series doesn't translate well into a fighting game, despite what you might expect from a show that's so fighting based, and that's largely because the show contains characters whose power levels are so unbalanced (I mean, Goku could easily defeat most any character on the show at any point on Dragonball Z). I'd say that this is the reason why so many bad Dragonball Z games have been made, and in comparison, maybe this one is pretty good. But being better than the rest of the crap is not enough, and this game fails to achieve its goals.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
duke101
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Member: Adam
Reviews written: 175
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