This is a game I last played through in 2014, and when I saw it for 400 yen a week or two ago I thought it was overdue for a trip down memory lane. The quite strange title's acronym of "D.O.N." stands for Dragon Ball, One Piece, and Naruto, as this is a Smash Bros clone featuring characters from all three series, and it was brought exclusively to Japan near the end of the GameCube's life by the folks at Eighting (who also made the excellent Naruto Gekitou Ninja Taisen 3 (also for the Gamecube) as well as Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom). It took me around 10-15 hours to unlock all of the content in the game.

There really isn't any story to speak of. There's an intro movie with the characters in the game fooling around and fighting a bit, and when you beat the main single player mode, there's another little cutscene of them all having a big party together. This is a game that really doesn't pretend it's anything other than what it is: A Smash Bros clone with these three series getting together to punch each other up. If that sounds appealing, then you're probably gonna be interested, but if it's not, this game doesn't exactly have any other trappings to draw you in.

Mechanically as a platform fighter, this is a remarkably solid one, and definitely one of the more solid games I've played in the genre. Eighting really don't beat around the bush when it comes to the crossover fighters they make, and this game is not exception. It, like the other Smash clone I've played on the GameCube, confusingly uses the A button to jump and B button for your main attack, and then the Y button is your special attack and the X button is your super. Shoulder buttons do blocks and you can roll just like you can in Smash Bros, and this game also has dashing and throwing just like Smash Bros. One nice feature this game does include is several control schemes you can pick from, which is always welcome in any fighting game.

For the fighting itself, the main mechanical difference to Smash Bros is the addition of the special meter. As like in a more typical fighting game, this meter builds as you take damage and deal out normal attacks. You then use this meter not just your super attacks, but it's also fuel for your special attacks and even your blocking. This means keeping tabs on the super meter hovering above your head is a necessity for both yourself and your opponents. Several characters like Chopper, Nami, and Bu are primarily built around their special attacks more so than their physical attacks, and there are also characters who use them more as supplementary moves to their normal attacks. It adds a cool layer of depth to how the fighting works and makes it feel different than Smash Bros in a more meaningful way than simply how the stage goals work or the nature of this particular crossover. The only mechanical complaint I really have is that it can be a bit frustrating to turn your character around with the joystick, and while you can use either the control stick or the D-pad to play, the GameCube D-pad isn't exactly the optimal way to play, well, anything XP

The way the fights themselves work follows a similar path to many other platform fighters (be it PlayStation All-Stars or TV World Fighters) that have wanted very much to not JUST be Smash Bros with difference licenses, and that's by taking a sort of Power Stone-ish approach. Each player starts the match with a certain number of health orbs they're carrying. Beating someone up makes these orbs fly out of them, and if you collect more than a certain percentage, you go into a super mode where you're faster, stronger, and your attacks will even sometimes upgrade as well (like Goku's super move, his Spirit Bomb, gets WAY bigger). That's really the only mode the game has, as well. This isn't like Smash Bros where there are a few other modes that take new spins on the main mode. This is what you get. There are some survival or tournament modes and even the option to use tickets you win (and we'll get to that later) to throw some modifiers into the fighting, but that doesn't change or hide the fact that there's really only one way to fight. The whole game is designed around only having this one way to fight, so it's not really much of a bad thing, per se, but I think it's worth mentioning when the main point of comparison for this game is Smash Bros Melee, which is a title that not only has a lot more content but also precedes it by like 4 years.

The presentation and overall quality of the crossover on the whole is really sweet, and you can tell that they put a lot of effort into making characters fight and feel like they do in their respective shows. Power levels have been toned up or down accordingly (there's no way any of the One Piece or Naruto folks could stand up to Goku in a real fight, of course ;b), but the attention to detail is still really neat. From one of Kakashi's specials being him summoning his dogs to hold you down (like he does in the Mist Village fight) to Chopper's main attacks being his weak deer mode and his special attacks being "human" mode, there are touches all over the place to make the crossover really make the most out of the characters it has. It's a level of detail that goes way beyond the Saiyans going Super Saiyan when they get into super mode, and it's something I appreciate even more replaying it these six years later.

The stages are mostly pretty good with a couple of the moving ones being pretty bad, and the weapons are pretty underwhelming and not very interesting (such is the problem with basically ever non-Smash Bros platform fighter), but the character roster is pretty beefy. Coming in at 20 characters (8 from Dragon Ball, 6 from Naruto, and 6 from One Piece), there's definitely a lot to enjoy here, even with 8 of the characters being locked at the start. But now that we've touched on how many characters (not to mention stages) are locked from the start, we have to get to what is easily the worst part of the game: how unlocks are managed.

Going through the normal single player mode (six random fights followed by fighting Cell or Bu at the end, depending on the difficulty), there will be missions presented at the start. These missions are of three difficulty sets, with tasks ranging from "jump 100 times" to "win without getting a ring out" to "win within 60 seconds", and each tier of difficulty gets you more coins. You then use these coins at the end of the mode (or, oddly enough, even if you duck out mid-run) on a slot machine. If you get the JUMP jackpot on this slot machine, you get to ANOTHER slot machine which will have its OWN jackpot, and that jackpot MIGHT be a new character or stage. Just like a real slot machine, there is no skill or challenge to this. The slot machine will randomly enter a fever mode where you're basically guaranteed to get a jackpot, and at any other time getting a jackpot is completely impossible (the reels don't stop even remotely close to when you press the button). This means unlocking characters comes down entirely to your patience to play through single player mode over and over and over, doing missions to get coins, to hope the slot machine gods will bless you with more unlocks. It's a dreadfully boring system that really gets in the way of what's otherwise a really nicely put together crossover platform fighter.

Verdict: Recommended. Platform fighters and party crossover games are certainly not going to be for everyone, but even with the dreadful unlock system, I think this is definitely one of the better ones out there. As far as Japan-exclusive GameCube games go, there are guides online to help you suss out which challenges are which, so it's a pretty accessible as well as cheap import. If the crossover sounds appealing to you, the base roster of the game is strong enough that I think it's worth the few bucks it'll run you to run this on a machine that can run imports. Even playing it by myself, I think I easily got my money's worth out of it, and I'm glad that I ran across it again to re-add to my library~.