Dragon Ball Z II: Gekishin Frieza!! is a role playing video game released only in Japan by Bandai on August 10, 1991, for the Nintendo Famicom. Gekishin Freeza!! is also one of the games downloadable in the game compilation J Legend Retsuden for Nintendo 3DS.
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Game Review - originally written by Spinner 8
The only thing I really know about Dragon Ball Z’s story is what little I gleaned from the intro to the first game, plus a couple volumes of the original Dragon Ball that I’ve been reading. That said, I’m still horribly lost in the second game, and although no one needed me to say it, let me just tell everyone that the only people who will gain any kind of understanding or enjoyment from this game’s story will be those people who are already Dragon Ball Z fans and, as such, will already know everything that will happen anyways.
Also, I can’t really understand why someone would play this game without having played the first Dragon Ball Z game, so I’ll skip the “how to play” part and just talk about what’s been changed. There’s thankfully an Auto mode for battling, so you don’t have to waste time on picking your cards for easy fights if you don’t want to. Enemy encounters are no longer random: every time you move, you’re shown eight face-down cards, and asked to choose one. If you pick one of the (many) Freeza cards, you have to fight some enemies. And of course, it’s possible that you can pick a card that gives you some kind of beneficial thing.
This change to the encounters, of course, means that you could theoretically (and likely) be fighting enemies every single time you move. To offset this, you’re given a Bulma card, which can be used once per turn to heal one of your fighters for a piddling amount of HP and BP. I’m grateful it’s there, but it’s really not enough, especially at the beginning of the game where you have no other way to heal yourself. This change to the enemy encounters also means that with some simple savestate abuse, you could probably avoid fights altogether if you want. But, I suppose that that kind of applies for a lot of emulated games.
The only thing I really know about Dragon Ball Z’s story is what little I gleaned from the intro to the first game, plus a couple volumes of the original Dragon Ball that I’ve been reading. That said, I’m still horribly lost in the second game, and although no one needed me to say it, let me just tell everyone that the only people who will gain any kind of understanding or enjoyment from this game’s story will be those people who are already Dragon Ball Z fans and, as such, will already know everything that will happen anyways.
Also, I can’t really understand why someone would play this game without having played the first Dragon Ball Z game, so I’ll skip the “how to play” part and just talk about what’s been changed. There’s thankfully an Auto mode for battling, so you don’t have to waste time on picking your cards for easy fights if you don’t want to. Enemy encounters are no longer random: every time you move, you’re shown eight face-down cards, and asked to choose one. If you pick one of the (many) Freeza cards, you have to fight some enemies. And of course, it’s possible that you can pick a card that gives you some kind of beneficial thing.
This change to the encounters, of course, means that you could theoretically (and likely) be fighting enemies every single time you move. To offset this, you’re given a Bulma card, which can be used once per turn to heal one of your fighters for a piddling amount of HP and BP. I’m grateful it’s there, but it’s really not enough, especially at the beginning of the game where you have no other way to heal yourself. This change to the enemy encounters also means that with some simple savestate abuse, you could probably avoid fights altogether if you want. But, I suppose that that kind of applies for a lot of emulated games.