Those can’t be equipped to supporting characters, and I wish they could… with how many times Kid Gohan let me down I wanted to punch him myself.
They’re pretty simple, upgrading speed and defense and the rest of the basics, but there’s a space even for single-mission items to be equipped (like the Senzu Bean, which can bring you back from a knockout with full health) which can be all that it takes to turn the tides in some tough battles. Jerks.Ĭharacters can be customized between missions by way of assigning cards to characters. In nearly every match where I was knocked down, an AI would stand on top of me and never revive me.
And it’s the fights like this that highlight the less-than-stellar AI teammates, who suspiciously love to, let’s say, “run in front of the gun” too often and leave you dead at the first sign of… y’know, death and all. Those beasts are much more interesting to fight because of the big-boss-fight feel of them take out a body part, which can be tricky because of their constant flailing and energy attacks, to weaken them, then hammer away until they finally fall… or until you figure out Yajirobe is a bigger coward than you thought and didn’t even drop off his sword. When there aren’t multiple characters in a fight, sometimes there’s just the one: the mighty Uzuru, the massive ape form of the Saiyans. And when you do fall (your allies have the advantage of being able to raise each other from a knockdown), you better not have fallen with one or two others, or else it could easily be BAM!, Game Over! clones-at least two of which will target you and only you from the get-go-will screw up any momentum you’ll find. The fight with Perfect Cell, for example, is a prime example of an over-aggressive pain in the ass. With so much happening on screen, so many characters attacking you at once, and so many characters in the single-player mode, especially when attacking your character at once, it can be extremely frustrating to enjoy a match not just because the fighters are tough, but because they’ll sometimes gang up on the single player (when you’re actually a team of four) and disrupt any combos you might try stringing together. But hey, it’s DBZ after all, a show comprised of 500 punches, kicks and blocks in the span of ten seconds and six frames of animation. There doesn’t seem to be any ranking system to speak of, so the newbies are thrown in with the experienced pros, which can leave even advanced players overwhelmed by the pace. Action is fluid, even when it does feel like things are lagging some, and the major energy attacks allow for a little leeway here and there when necessary. It’s easy to imagine the online play, given a game that’s as fast as this one can be, to lag right when you’re trying to pull off that major energy wave, but thankfully that’s not the case.
Multiplayer battles are the bread and butter here, with local four-player and online eight-player battle modes to fiddle with. Over 60 characters are jammed onto the disc, and thankfully they all feel like you would expect them to feel: Gohan’s an in-your-face brawler, Vegeta likes throwing lots of energy attacks, Goku has a Kamehameha, and nobody plays Tien or Yamcha on purpose. The rest of the cast comes back with them, including just about everybody worth mentioning in the DBZ universe like Cell, Trunks, Buu, and everyone’s favorite loveable weakling, Jeice from the Ginyu Squad (from Space Australia).
The most noteworthy of those characters are Lord Beeru and Saiyan God Goku (or as I like to call him, “The Skinny Ginger”) from the first DBZ movie in over a decade, Battle of Gods. Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Z is the result, providing a few new playable characters for the first time. The big change this time is the taking away of the one-on-one fight to the death, instead allowing a bunch of people into the fight… so long as they don’t all Yamcha things up, which they will. Like, an Eternal Dragon that grants wishes (who disappears every time Piccolo or Kami die, which is often enough to consider renaming this so-called “Eternal” Dragon). Did I say testicles? Sorry, I meant balls.