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Saiyan Fate Review by Majin Sam  Saiyan Fate, the first 'complete' and released Dragon Ball fan game for RPG Maker 2003 that I've encountered.
Made by Memmox, of Zero Gamez and Saiyan World, this game promised to be the first DBZ RM2k3 game released, and also
one of the best. After the almost gothic title screen, and several rather poorly made splash screens, put in the game purely to advertise, the game begins. You're immediately thrown into the action without any real explanation of where you are or what you're doing, other than Goku's remark of "I need to find firewood before Chi Chi finds out I was training!" and a mention of the fact that he needs to go to Master Roshi's house (Roshi spelt 'Roshie' in the game), presumably afterwards. This, you're left to begin running around a forest map.  Soon enough you hear a woman's scream and come to the first "Rest Point", and you actually have some sense of direction. This rather generic opening actually left me rather uninterested, but I continued anyway. I'll say this now, this game has one odd learning curve, seeing as you're thrown straight into the action, you immediately start having random encounters with various enemies, most of whom are a little overpowered for the first map at the start of the game. The game also assumes that you know how to use the battle system's interface, alienating those who've not played a traditional console RPG, such as Final Fantasy, before  However, the difficulty of the enemies, throughout the game, never seems to change. They all have the same skills, the same random attack patterns, they never work together, and all that seems to change is an enemy's health. This means that battles quickly become a nuisance, and a simple case of repeatedly using your most powerful skills just to win. Not only that, but the battles lack any kind of innovation. There are no fun ideas being put to use, no interesting skills, attributes, no condition ailments, such as posioning, no transforming enemies, and there's no sign of strategy anywhere. You get to play as two characters, Goku and Piccolo. However, they both have the same attacks. The only difference is that Goku has the Kamehameha while Piccolo has the Masenko attack, even then the attacks are practically the same! This means your characters are more or less clones of each other with no definition or role. On that note, enemies always seem to drop far more healing items than you actually need. This makes battles even easier, seeing as these items restore your 'Ki', meaning you can simply keep using your more powerful attacks. This, in turn eliminates the need to conserve your Ki, which also leads to there being absolutely no need to use any strategy in battle. Hence, the battles soon become a bland, boring and repetitive chore rather than a fun part of the gameplay. When you're not battling, you're on the overworld map, hoping not to bump into yet another random encounter while exploring several forest areas that eventually just blend together, more on that later. The quests are rather generic, you have to do them all, there are no alternate routes, and every last one of them results in a battle. There are no puzzles, nothing is optional, and it just feels like half of the game's only there to make it longer. Another problem is that you are forced to level up, for example, you can't leave the first area of the game until you are at least level six. This would be fair enough, if you didn't start at level one! This means you end up walking around a relatively small map with an annoying BGM for most of the start of the game just trying to level up. Again, this is a reason that some people I spoke to stopped playing.  You're also forced to level up just before the final boss of the game, where you must be at least level fifteen (which shows just how short the game really is). And by the time you've done that, the boss isn't even a challenge anymore because your party of two has become overpowered. Add to this the fact that bosses appear in random encounters just seconds after you defeat them, that there are chests you plain can't get to, and a complete lack of care to detail and you've got some shoddy gameplay. As I already pointed out, most of the game's maps are based in the forest, all the forest areas look almost identical with the same, rather ugly, fog effect that just makes them all drab, dreary and depressing. You'll spend the vast majority of the game trawling around these, and trust me, it's really not an incentive to continue playing. Granted, not every area is a forest, but there are only three to four maps that are really anything other than a forest. A cave, a submarine, and the top of a plane to be precise, most of which consist of one or two maps only. And even then, they're simply a panorama with tile definitons most of the time. Another annoyance is the HUD. It's alrge, ugly, clunky, unnecessary, and it just plain gets in the way. We don't need to know what level our character is all the time, we can check that in the menu. And the quest box could have been made much smaller too. Also annoying is the cut scene box.  Granted, it only seems to appear in that one scene, but note just how obstructive that is. As for the character sprites and map sprites, most seem to be rips from the Game Boy Advance's "Legacy of Goku" series, with a few minor edits and recolours. For example, the Goku set used is one I edited from Goku's sprites in "Buu's Fury". There are some custom sprites thrown into the mix, as you can see in that screenshot, there's a custom tiger faceset. However, as you can also see, it's somewhat less than desirable. Not only this, but the soundtrack is full of annoying and repetitive tunes, that actually had me turn my speakers off at one point! The plot follows the early episodes (or chapters) of Dragon Ball Z, and follows up to the point where Goku and Piccolo defeat Raditz. "That'll make for a short game!" True, but you see, there's a ton of non optional side quests that are less imaginative than the filler in your average anime series. Boring quests, such as "Use Piccolo to defeat three bosses in three different areas to get three different keys to go and fight yet another boss, none of which is entirely different, all the bosses fight in the same way, oh and they all happen to be really easy to find. And no, none of this really has any significance." Not only that, but the plot is spoilt by some rather bad cases of 'Engrish'. Fair enough, Memmox's first language isn't English, but for all the beta testers to miss it too just wouldn't happen. Seems to me like the beta testers would have mentioned it, but that Memmox simply couldn't be bothered to change it.  Also, characters commonly speak out of character, for example, at one point, you're 'treated' to Piccolo saying "Good day, I beleieve you have something that I require. May I have it?" I don't know about you, but that certainly does not sound like Piccolo to me. This is a problem I came across one too many times for my liking. This game fails to impress me, for all the reasons stated above and more. Believe me, I haven't even scratched the surface of just how many flaws this game has. I could go on about trees that have entire blocks of their graphic missing, how the battle animations fail to line up with the enemy and seem to magically appear from nowhere, rather than from your character's palms as it happens in the anime and manga. It's a shame that the first review I've ever given has to be of a game that could've been so much better, if only a little more attention and care had been put into it, yet ended up being rather bad. 32% This game could've been great, had more time and care been invested into it, as it is though, it's not really worth the installation. For die hard Dragon ball fans only. Copyrights All images and graphics are copyrights by their original artist and owner. Banner and various other original artwork by Majin Sam. Layout by Zanary.COM |
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