Non-Fan:
This is where it gets ugly. The standard fighting engine used by most fighting games, featuring D-pad movements, has been totally scrapped, in favor of a system that uses sequential button presses as a means for starting special moves. The game is very deep. Too deep, because the lowest difficulty setting is more than enough for most. The controls are harsh. and pulling off those moves can be infuriating. It sometimes seems as though the game is bent on steamrolling you. The game starts cheating at the upper levels to make up for somewhat inferior AI. The characters are fairly unbalanced. They are true to the show, which in this case is a bad thing.To be honest, a die-hard fighting game fan not interested at all in DBZ will not, and should not, touch this game. For the fans of the series, I apologize for this slamming of a franchise game, but Infogrames is not the group I would like to see make any more fighting games, at least not until they look at good examples of the genre.
Fan:
Alright, I got my ranting done. The game has several parts, including at least one secret game, which, for spoilers' sake, I will not reveal here. Go to IGN or somewhere if you want to know. The Story mode is an abriged version of the DBZ story covering three sagas: Saiyan(Goku vs. Vegeta), Frieza (Goku vs. Frieza), and the Androids(Gohan vs. Cell.) It acts like the show, with episodes. The game has to sacrifice some story in exchange for playability; but even the staunchest of DBZ fanatics has to agree that a bit of truncation on the part of the story is a good thing, in a series where 5 minutes can translate to about 15 episodes. The 23 characters (about 15 of whom you start with) are all fairly balanced. You can balance them better with the custom character option, which lets you customize each character to your liking. You see, some characters can do things in Story Mode that can't happen in the other modes, that you can use by playing the story mode and unlocking. At least three of the characters are, naturally, facets of Gohan, one of which is a secret character. And there is one other secret character, who seems fairly unbalanced for this game, but given the circumstances and the mode in which this character is in, it's forgiven. My biggest beef is that You Can't Fly! Well, you sorta can, but it's not controllable. You can knock people into the air, and they'll hang there. you will float up to them. You can't fly up in the air of your own volition. This is unforgivable in the DBZ world. This hurts the game's score seriously. The game has a World Tournament mose; useful for unlocking characters and special moves. It's really hard, because the mode is set in the only place where ring-outs are possible. It's frustrating because the majority of the characters' attack have a bit of knockback, and the cheap AI always tries to knock you out. Overall, the game is very unpolished, and if it were not a DBZ game, it wouldn't be played. |
