Battlemouth

I want to start by saying that I’m an avid DBZ fan that has been watching it since I was a kid.  Along with this, I have played almost every DBZ game out there.  I remember even playing that SNES card battle RPG game with an emulator with all the text in Japanese….Anyway, lets talk more about this game before I truly reveal to you how much of an inner geek I have.

Now what exactly is this game all about?  Well, it’s back to a more standard fighting game style.  With this, I mean that it’s more like the Budokai series with fighters sparing on a 2d plain, but they can still rotate and move around each other.  It leaves the full roaming movement of the Budokai Tenkaichi (try spelling that without Google) series behind.  They scaled down the amount of characters as well.  Instead of getting 200 characters that share 20 or so skill sets (is there really a difference between a pink beam and a yellow beam that do the same damage?) they have around 20 characters that are much more balanced.  The Tenkaichi games were great in that you could play as your favorite character, but everyone just played as the same five characters anyway.  You could not expect to fight with Krillin and win against super saiyan 4 goku.  That is not really the issue in this latest release.

Story, in a DBZ game?  Yes!  Well, kind of.  This is an improvement which most DBZ vets should like.  The story is created in small chunks.  Before each fight, they have a little cut scene showing what part of the story you are at and then you get another one right after the fight.  For those of us who have played through this same story line a dozen times already, this is a very welcome aspect.  I cringed when I thought of a game cramming the same story down my throat again for 20 hours.  Thankfully, Atari remembered that this is a fighting game.  I also don’t have to go through some inane Dragon Ball collecting game this time around.  I just go through the important fights until I get accustomed to the combat system, then battle my friends online like a good fighter.  There is one system they incorporated that I like and dislike at the same time.  In the “Z Chronicles” single player campaign mode, you get little short cut scenes in the middle of combat.  For example, if I’m beating up Nappa badly enough, he will bet all mad and make some comments about him being elite and what not.  Then he will get stat bonuses like increase strength, increase ki regeneration, or increased AI aggressiveness.  I like this because it makes the fight much more epic with the rapidly increasing difficulty towards the end of a fight.  However, I don’t like this because you cannot skip these cut scenes.  I got a Frieza death beam to the face only to watch four different cut scenes in a row, it was increasingly annoying.  This addition breaks up the combat too much and takes you out of the experience a little.

Now how could I talk about this new game without mentioning how beautiful the graphics are?  This is one of the best representations of cell shading you will be able to find.  Cinematic have great lighting effects and motion.  The game play looks fantastic as well.  They get the nice black lines in there to make it look much more like the anime, without all those nasty jaggies that previous titles suffered from.

The game play in this game is really where it shines through the clutter.  Like all fighters, you can button mash to victory, but a player that excels in dodging and blocking will wreck that button masher any day.  The combat is very fluid.  Having to attack, dodge, block and use Ultimate attacks are all easy to do and look great.  The button commands are very responsive as well.

Ok, so I owned and played the first three Budokai games, which this game is the successor to.  So I decided to play through on Normal (the hardest available difficulty to start off with) and beat the game without using the tutorials.  I got as far as final form Frieza before I got my ass kicked and hand to refresh my memory in the tutorial.  The difficulty is hard enough to be rewarding when you beat a hard fight.  It’s also fairly easy to unlock most of the characters. You won’t be forced to play for 150+ hours to unlock everything like in other fighting games.  I’m looking at you Soul Calibur!

They took out a component from the Budokai games which I personally hated.  When you land an Ultimate or Rush attack you had to play some dumb mini-game where you have to press a button faster than your opponent, or guess what they pressed.  Basically its bull shit.  (This game mechanic ruined everything Naruto: Rise of a Ninja did well.)  They took out most of those except for when your beams collide or when you punch at the same time and you play a tug of war.  I can live with that though.

I was impressed with this game.  Along with being a fan of the series, comes the cynical attitude towards its video games.  Not only is this game worthy of the DBZ title, but it comes out on top as a really solid fighting game as well.  Fluid combat and amazing graphics help it push through the crap fighters that we have to suffer through.