Animisery – A Blog About Living Miserably with Anime (Among Other Things)

If you are an anime fan and somehow not been made aware, the latest and quite possibly greatest Dragon Ball game, Dragon Ball Sparking Zero, has been made available to public or at least finally to those damnable cheapskates (like yours truly) who purchased the regular edition. I’ve never been a professed Dragon Ball fan but I certainly consider myself a Dragon Ball enjoyer. I’ve not yet invested my time to watch Super but I’ve read the original manga and watched Dragon Ball in Z and Kai forms and I get the gist. Well, Sparking Zero has arrived and made me think: Dragon Ball had a lot of games and I’ve weirdly enough played a few of them! I thought about it all day while I was forcing myself to cope with the post vacation blues at work and hey. Why not post about it?

My first real Dragon Ball Z game was The Legacy of Goku 2 that I got by trading a friend some Pokemon cards on the school bus way back when (kid economics is freaking wacky) and I really cherished that game more so that I think it deserved. The Legacy of Goku games are essentially top down beat em up slash RPG hybrid affairs kind of like if The Legend of Zelda had some extra wonky weird punching and beam attacks where you were guaranteed to be exposed to a cheese fest that would make the state of Wisconsin seethe with jealous rage by lacking comparison. It was a humble game for me at the tender age of 8 and I really never got actually competent at it. I flailed at the controls often winning out of sheer luck rather than an actual sense of ability but it was super novel when DBZ was just something I got to see after school if I wasn’t forced outside by a very haphazard babysitter who didn’t care if there had been a child abduction in the neighborhood last year (this is a very real thing that happened). The sprites were humbly satisfactory at best with some of the facial sprites for conversations being like someone drew the characters from memory and said artist was fighting a losing war with early onset Alzheimer’s.

Needless to say, it was that special sort of game for you as a kid. Maybe not quality but you didn’t have anything better so it was serviceable by merit of “I’m a stupid kid and don’t know no better”. I never beat it and it was eventually lost to time and probably a car seat. I don’t mourn the loss but I do wish that I got to play the sequel, Buu’s Fury. I heard that one was more exclusively Gohan centric and we love Gohan in this house.

My second major Dragon Ball game is another Game Boy Advance original and it’s one that I don’t hear too much discussion about because this game is actually low-key a fun romp that deserves so much more love. That game, pause for dramatic effect, is Dragon Ball: Advanced Adventure. I’ve told so many people about this game and how actually neat it was to play a side-scroller-beat-em-up-platformer-sometimes-fighting-game of early Dragon Ball with fantastic pixel art.

I don’t think the screenshot above actually gives outright clarity to how phenomenal the pixel art was but I think it comes really close. The sprites seemed to be ripped straight from an Akira Toriyama (rest in peace) sketch book and the fluid movement is crisp and fun. It’s all you could really want out of a game of its variety and it sucks that the west never really got an abundance of just Dragon Ball no Z games. I’m more of a fan of Dragon Ball just because of the ludicrous nature of fights in some parts of the series. There’s a charm in Dragon Ball that gets lost in Z and the journey elements of the original series is really captured in Advanced Adventure. I never really had a copy so I had to use some, cough cough, interesting means to play it. If you know, you know and if you do know, then go and play this gem. It’s kind of a twitchy game so no phones if you’re that kind of person.

I never really did get to play the original Budokai games because I was primarily a Nintendo fan and, by the time Budokai came to GameCube, I was more enraptured with being a MATURE GAMER which is exactly why I got a Wii and played Budokai Tenkaichi 2 there.

Let me tell you, playing Budokai Tenkaichi on the Wii is not advisable even during war times. You’re forced into the cruel hell of Wii motion which means that you’re stuck doing Kamehameha waves like a dork by throwing your hands back and forward which my Wii sensor bar really was taken aback by. It was so taken aback by the motions that it politely refused to acknowledge them which I respect as much as a person can respect a Wii. That said, Budokai Tenkaichi was a revolutionary game for me because I thought I was a Dragon Ball Z fan but BT2 said that I was a fake fan and gatekept me from even using yellow hair dye until I turned 19. I never really knew how many movies DBZ had and it was so shocking to see almost all of them (The World’s Strongest? Never heard of her) represented in BT2’s story mode. I can’t tell you how delighted I was with seeing a bunch of new residents to the DBZ universe that I knew nothing about because all the movies were clearly canon, right? I personally had such a huge soft spot for Android 13 because the androids and Cell were such interesting villains to me and getting more androids was a boon. I wanted to see all the movies that were allowed to be a part of the BT2 experience and I can proudly say that I never saw a single one barring The Dead Zone so reach for your dreams, kids. The fighting in BT2 was always so apt to replicate the experience of a Dragon Ball fight with super speedy exchanges and beam clashes but it always struck me as a little shallow in all honesty. Seemingly every character played the same but were stripped down to just how fast they could be and what special moves they had at their employ. There were obviously exceptions if you got to play a BIG character but I never found much depth in this game and I did actually load a lot of hours in BT2 just fighting characters to hear their unique dialogue because I didn’t have the luxury of YouTube at the time. It was clearly crafted by a team who had an objective of making a game for fans and that premise made its way into Sparking Zero as anyone can tell. BT2 was shallow in fighting for the most part to the untrained player and the balancing was thrown in the trash but it was meant to evoke the fun of DBZ and the fun of DBZ was sometimes just witnessing a beat down.

Before I reach my final Dragon Ball game in this tiny little personal retrospective, I would like to just (final) flash through some of the games I played only a little bit of but still want to highlight so I can have a little more credibility.

Dragon Ball Fusions (3DS): I definitely played this on a real non-hacked 3DS and didn’t get bored within thirty minutes after being shown the fighting system. I also definitely didn’t just look up all the fusions in the game and quickly expelled them out of my head.

Dragon Ball Z Sagas (GameCube): Mom let me rent this from Movie Gallery once and I couldn’t get past the third level. Thanks anyways mom! I heard this game was like Superman morphed into a donkey: a super ass. Reviews were mean and kid me was too bad to play that much anyways.

Dragon Ball Z Budokai 3 (PlayStation 2): I played it at a sleepover once and got my ass beat because no one explained the controls to me.

Dragon Ball Z: Hyper Dimension (Super Nintendo): Speaking of things I definitely played on actual hardware, I definitely played this game on a Super Famicom and not a PC with a keyboard. This game has pixel art that absolutely excels in every way and it’s a neat premise of a game too! It’s a fighter that feels like it’s reaching to be an honest DBZ game and even lets you separate from your opponent in a split screen way. Worth a check out!

Dragon Ball Z: Super Gokuden 1 (Super Nintendo): I just played a bunch of Super Nintendo Dragon Ball Z games as a kid courtesy of unchecked internet access and a dream. This game was one of those few that I got to play and it’s… interesting? I never did figure out how to actually control myself but I bet my adult brain would kick ass at it now. It’s kind of an RPG and partially a quizish thing? You play as Goku in Dragon Ball and adventure with Bulma and are asked to make decisions to follow the story of the manga. Meanwhile, some bozos narrate your decisions and I named the nice one Brooke after my crush in middle school.

Dragon Ball FighterZ (Playstation 4, PC): I originally got the game when it came out for PS4 excited because it was crafted by the phenoms at Arc System Works of BlazBlue and Guilty Gear acclaim. I quickly got decent at it and, unfortunately, couldn’t have fun with my friends any more because they weren’t experienced. Time passed and I bought the game (oh sorry the LICENSE, GO FUCK YOURSELF STEAM THAT’S DUMB) for PC to play with my buddy Earthworm from our podcast the Anime Brothers! Worm then proceeded to beat me like I was his meat and he was a fourteen year old home alone with some quality Sears catalogue time. I said I’d get good with Roshi but I didn’t. What can you do?

I’m choosing to end on my last major DBZ game and not focus on Dragon Ball Sparking Zero because, at the time of writing, I’m only an hour in and can’t guarantee I’ll be able to play until my off days. It’s a tragedy being an adult.

So Dragon Ball Z Kakarot was a huge disappointment but it was my last real excitement for a Dragon Ball Z game. It was supposed to be an RPG in the Dragon Ball universe! I could level up and explore the open husk of Dragon Ball’s world and side quest and FISH. You know a game is doing some serious business when you can FISH. Unfortunately, DBZ Kakarot is a nigh drag of a game where you’re not really playing an RPG but more of a fighting game that masquerades as an RPG. Your combat all gets rendered as your typical arena fighter affair and your health and ki carry from fight to fight but that just seems enforced because it is an RPG mechanic and not because Kakarot needed it. Kakarot is held up by the amazing talent at CyberConnect2 which translates to terrific cutscenes of intense anime fighting action… that is then dropped when you actually get in a fight. At that juncture, you’re just doing the same ol’ arena fighter affair: charge your meter, use an attack, completely whiff, get hit, back off, charge again, rinse and repeat until clean. The presentation is what keeps this game relevant but it’s just not fun to play. I was so beyond excited about the promises that this game had fashioned in my mind. I, Mattie, was going to play Dragon Ball Z like Dragon Quest! It was meant to happen! Shenron was summoned just for this!

Here’s the thing about RPGS: you’re playing a role in these ROLE PLAYING GAMES and Kakarot eventually descends into just being a fighter because you’re changing from character to character to fight a bad guy and move on to the next one. It’s almost as if you’re stuck on a conveyer belt that is propelling you to the next mandatory Dragon Ball Z story which is not very lenient on what can and cannot be accomplished. It’s almost like the widely ridiculed Dragon Ball Z Sagas reborn to some magnificent graphics and at least some meaning of understanding on how controls should work. I tried so hard to get into this game and managed to get to the Buu Saga (which is my personal favorite) but then decided to remove the shackles of “I paid money for this so I better enjoy it” and moved on. I think I’m happier because of it.

Sparking Zero, as mentioned earlier, is out now and being praised as the pinnacle of Dragon Ball gaming and from my hour of playtime I think I might be inclined to agree. It certainly leans into the sheer visceral joy of a Dragon Ball Z fight with all the tried and true mechanics of the Budokai Tenkaichi series. It’s amazing how far Dragon Ball has really come as I write this little blog post and ruminate on just where this franchise has gone in the video games market. Kid Mattie would’ve never anticipated seeing Dragon Ball rendered almost as if it were an anime on screen like Sparking Zero achieves. Kid Mattie also would’ve never anticipated his parents getting a divorce so maybe he’s not a good gauge of predicting what the future may hold. Regardless of if your parents can handle their marital strife, Dragon Ball will probably always have a beloved home in the media of video games. I can’t wait to see whatever the future may hold for it (and to play more Sparking Zero).