Dragon Ball Z fans can rest assured that the destructible environment, and character trademark attacks and transformations will be true to the series. These include signature Pursuit Attacks which enable players to initiate attack combo strings, juggling your opponent in a string of devastating strikes throughout the environment. Additionally, Dragon Ball: Raging Blast 2 will sport the new Raging Soul System which enables characters to reach a special state, increasing their combat abilities to the ultimate level. Sporting more than 90 characters, 20 of which are brand new to the Raging Blast series, new modes, and additional environmental effects, Dragon Ball: Raging Blast 2 is the next evolution in the home console series.
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I wanted to get this done before Sparking Zero, not that I think it has any chance of releasing soon but I'm also worried about my PS3 so I'm gonna try to clear my games that need it out of the way.
Every complaint I stated in my Review of Raging Blast 1 still stands but for anyone who doesn't wanna click, the tldr is that it is very similar to the first game with just some extra mechanics and balance changes that I am not well versed in the intricacies of this duology to understand it on a deep level. Outside of being able to be hit out of supers, new recovery mechanics, and a beam finisher for pursuits while in high tension mode. Otherwise it still feels floaty, supers lack impact, dash supers still have no range, the cameraman is being paid off by the enemy so its hard to see, the right stick for super attacks is still an awful control idea and its largest new mechanic called Raging Soul are not something I enjoyed either. I in fact hate the raging soul gimmick, and it sucks that I do because it causes the intro song to play and I am always of fan of that. Whoever decided to have its activation be the guard button should have been fired. So many times did I enter high tension but the enemy shot something at me so I intended to guard that it activated. So now I gotta only rely on rush combos for damage because it locks you out of supers and ultimate attacks without a specific customization item until you run out of ki. Sure I'm getting 20 hit combos, doing twice the work that any ai above normal can vanish out of at any time with a vanish for the same damage I could get for a 5 hit launcher into an ult. The game seems to have wanted to try to be a more competitive style.
The attention to detail from the first game is still here from the transformation scenes, Janemba's cubey movement and in battle dialogue. The customization is also more front facing than ever as it is the main component of the game's main mode, Galaxy. It stops Goku and Vegeta from taking up 50% of the slots and Orange Gi without the weighted clothes underneath still goes hard with SSJ3. There is no dragon fist still however so I'm gonna dock points for that. The roster is more to what I expect from a Db game, pulling from movies and adding in some baffling absences from the first game such as Ultimate Gohan. I will also give the game props for using some damn near unused characters to this day like Neizu, Dore, Tarble, Android 14 and 15. Also I got actually Future Gohan'd by the android's fusion attack, the disrespect on those damage numbers was off the charts. I was on my last health bar and it did 99999 damage. LSSJ Broly is still yellow hair despite SSJ Broly being blue, but at least SSJ3 Broly has the green he deserves. Again its a nitpick but if you're gonna have blue hair broly, then have green otherwise make SSJ yellow too.
As I said above Galaxy Mode is the main single player feature as it gives you the credits when you beat everyone's and its unfortunately a tedious gimmick fight slobberknocker. Its similar to Smash Ultimate's World of Light now that I think about it. While each mission has difficulty ranging from easy to ultimate and the AI does get more aggressive/actually uses the defensive abilities on the higher ones, the main difficulty comes from the debuffs you will get. Health constantly draining, start near death (one hit from it), beat the enemy before raging soul runs out etc. Sometimes the game throws you a bone and YOU get the buffs like constantly recharging ki but those are few and far between. There are seal items in the game that can counter those debuffs, but they come in levels 1-3,4 or 5 and it seems arbitrary on which strength you need. Sometimes the level 1 seal works on the ultimate difficulty and sometimes level 5 won't stop it at all. But when you get one of those seals to work, then the difficulty drops dramatically. Its honestly super lazy. You can either just try to get by with what you have like I did or leave that character's galaxy and go to another's to maybe find said seal. With the exception of the fights with "perfect action" criteria, I didn't see any indicator of "this battle has an item reward" and I got so tired of the "beat the enemy before raging soul runs out" fights that I just looked it up. Some character based rewards are out of order and by some I mean Future Gohan. I went through his, got to a perfect action mission only to find out I still didn't have his SSJ transformation and after doing all of his battles. Other times a move or ability you might need isn't unlocked until after beating the "perfect action" mission that required it to fulfill, so beat the mission then do it again and thats just a dumb design decision.
I get it, we've seen the Z story 18 million times before, so how about you make your own like what handheld games like Shin Budokai Another Road did? A selling point of this game is the "Plan to Eradicate the Saiyans" OVA and it has an easy way for this "dream match" with movie characters already explained in it. Instead its just "fight with these criteria for every single character in the game". Every character didn't need one, Saibaman didn't need one, Cell Jr didn't need one. You could tell they didn't really know what to do with some of these characters because they had maybe 4 battles to their name and fighting Saibamen, Guildo and Chiaotzu with draining hp every 3 characters probably means you should have cut down.
This also might not be the game's fault as the copy is used and a little dinged up, but the game crashed on me three times on a specific mention. One time my PS3 just full on restarted, I actually thought I lost power but didn't and the other times whenever Kid Trunks was tagged in and went SSJ the game would hard freeze the console. Taking the disc out and putting it back in seemed to fix the problem as I never had the issue again on that mission or any other.
One of the other solo modes was the World Tournament, you had access to both the World tournament and Cell games, complete with ring out option for the former (I didn't look for the latter). Did both on hard and it was nice to just have a fight without any sort of buff or debuff on either side. The other solo mode was Battle Zone and I was just so fed up with the game by that point that I only did the first one. It seemed like a standard arcade ladder affair with the fights having no real gimmicks to bog it down, again only for the first one cuz there is a handicap option that I assume comes into play in the later ones.
TLDR: Having gone through both now, I realize I didn't miss out on much skipping these back in the day as harsh as that sounds. Raging Blast 2 in my eyes did not fix any issue I had with the gameplay of the first. The increased roster in terms of inclusion was much better which didn't cut down on individual attention to detail in the characters and the customization in game is still strong. Its main single player mode however is a quantity over quality, annoying gimmick filled slog. The game was at its best when it was just a strong enemy with not bonuses on either side. Half of Galaxy Mode's content could have been culled with no loss of anything of value. I will never like right stick controls for supers and I pray that Sparking Zero takes more from BT3 with actual button combinations instead.
Every complaint I stated in my Review of Raging Blast 1 still stands but for anyone who doesn't wanna click, the tldr is that it is very similar to the first game with just some extra mechanics and balance changes that I am not well versed in the intricacies of this duology to understand it on a deep level. Outside of being able to be hit out of supers, new recovery mechanics, and a beam finisher for pursuits while in high tension mode. Otherwise it still feels floaty, supers lack impact, dash supers still have no range, the cameraman is being paid off by the enemy so its hard to see, the right stick for super attacks is still an awful control idea and its largest new mechanic called Raging Soul are not something I enjoyed either. I in fact hate the raging soul gimmick, and it sucks that I do because it causes the intro song to play and I am always of fan of that. Whoever decided to have its activation be the guard button should have been fired. So many times did I enter high tension but the enemy shot something at me so I intended to guard that it activated. So now I gotta only rely on rush combos for damage because it locks you out of supers and ultimate attacks without a specific customization item until you run out of ki. Sure I'm getting 20 hit combos, doing twice the work that any ai above normal can vanish out of at any time with a vanish for the same damage I could get for a 5 hit launcher into an ult. The game seems to have wanted to try to be a more competitive style.
The attention to detail from the first game is still here from the transformation scenes, Janemba's cubey movement and in battle dialogue. The customization is also more front facing than ever as it is the main component of the game's main mode, Galaxy. It stops Goku and Vegeta from taking up 50% of the slots and Orange Gi without the weighted clothes underneath still goes hard with SSJ3. There is no dragon fist still however so I'm gonna dock points for that. The roster is more to what I expect from a Db game, pulling from movies and adding in some baffling absences from the first game such as Ultimate Gohan. I will also give the game props for using some damn near unused characters to this day like Neizu, Dore, Tarble, Android 14 and 15. Also I got actually Future Gohan'd by the android's fusion attack, the disrespect on those damage numbers was off the charts. I was on my last health bar and it did 99999 damage. LSSJ Broly is still yellow hair despite SSJ Broly being blue, but at least SSJ3 Broly has the green he deserves. Again its a nitpick but if you're gonna have blue hair broly, then have green otherwise make SSJ yellow too.
As I said above Galaxy Mode is the main single player feature as it gives you the credits when you beat everyone's and its unfortunately a tedious gimmick fight slobberknocker. Its similar to Smash Ultimate's World of Light now that I think about it. While each mission has difficulty ranging from easy to ultimate and the AI does get more aggressive/actually uses the defensive abilities on the higher ones, the main difficulty comes from the debuffs you will get. Health constantly draining, start near death (one hit from it), beat the enemy before raging soul runs out etc. Sometimes the game throws you a bone and YOU get the buffs like constantly recharging ki but those are few and far between. There are seal items in the game that can counter those debuffs, but they come in levels 1-3,4 or 5 and it seems arbitrary on which strength you need. Sometimes the level 1 seal works on the ultimate difficulty and sometimes level 5 won't stop it at all. But when you get one of those seals to work, then the difficulty drops dramatically. Its honestly super lazy. You can either just try to get by with what you have like I did or leave that character's galaxy and go to another's to maybe find said seal. With the exception of the fights with "perfect action" criteria, I didn't see any indicator of "this battle has an item reward" and I got so tired of the "beat the enemy before raging soul runs out" fights that I just looked it up. Some character based rewards are out of order and by some I mean Future Gohan. I went through his, got to a perfect action mission only to find out I still didn't have his SSJ transformation and after doing all of his battles. Other times a move or ability you might need isn't unlocked until after beating the "perfect action" mission that required it to fulfill, so beat the mission then do it again and thats just a dumb design decision.
I get it, we've seen the Z story 18 million times before, so how about you make your own like what handheld games like Shin Budokai Another Road did? A selling point of this game is the "Plan to Eradicate the Saiyans" OVA and it has an easy way for this "dream match" with movie characters already explained in it. Instead its just "fight with these criteria for every single character in the game". Every character didn't need one, Saibaman didn't need one, Cell Jr didn't need one. You could tell they didn't really know what to do with some of these characters because they had maybe 4 battles to their name and fighting Saibamen, Guildo and Chiaotzu with draining hp every 3 characters probably means you should have cut down.
This also might not be the game's fault as the copy is used and a little dinged up, but the game crashed on me three times on a specific mention. One time my PS3 just full on restarted, I actually thought I lost power but didn't and the other times whenever Kid Trunks was tagged in and went SSJ the game would hard freeze the console. Taking the disc out and putting it back in seemed to fix the problem as I never had the issue again on that mission or any other.
One of the other solo modes was the World Tournament, you had access to both the World tournament and Cell games, complete with ring out option for the former (I didn't look for the latter). Did both on hard and it was nice to just have a fight without any sort of buff or debuff on either side. The other solo mode was Battle Zone and I was just so fed up with the game by that point that I only did the first one. It seemed like a standard arcade ladder affair with the fights having no real gimmicks to bog it down, again only for the first one cuz there is a handicap option that I assume comes into play in the later ones.
TLDR: Having gone through both now, I realize I didn't miss out on much skipping these back in the day as harsh as that sounds. Raging Blast 2 in my eyes did not fix any issue I had with the gameplay of the first. The increased roster in terms of inclusion was much better which didn't cut down on individual attention to detail in the characters and the customization in game is still strong. Its main single player mode however is a quantity over quality, annoying gimmick filled slog. The game was at its best when it was just a strong enemy with not bonuses on either side. Half of Galaxy Mode's content could have been culled with no loss of anything of value. I will never like right stick controls for supers and I pray that Sparking Zero takes more from BT3 with actual button combinations instead.
Ojalá tuviera un modo historia como el 1...
getting dunked on by my brother simulator 2
fuck you by the way
fuck you by the way
The fact you can be SSJ3 on Broly makes this 4 stars
"Don't get hit next time!"
Raging Blast 2 just feels like an alternate reality Budokai Tenkaichi 3 in the worst way possible. It feels bad to control, the art style is ugly, combat is slow, and the stage selection feels lacking. The music wasn't really anything of note and some of the characters are just strange. Super Saiyan 3 Broly and Vegeta is cool, but I always thought they were just fan made and weren't in any official game.