Out of Dragon Ball's overwhelming catalogue of video games, this is an often overlooked one. What I love about this game is that it does more than just rest on the intellectual property of Dragon Ball.

The gameplay and combat system is relatively unique and introduces new concepts and mechanics not seen at all in other Dragon Ball games and possibly not commonly in fighting games generally.

The game's visual styling is based on the original manga, which is my favourite part of Dragon Ball - and helps portray the cartoonish and silly side of the series which is an important part of it.

The stages feel like living parts of the Dragon Ball world and have interactivity within them. The characters have unique movesets and choreography which you might expect from a fighting game, but you most Dragon Ball games of this era had very little emphasis on this and instead more of a focus on special attacks.

In terms of narrative and story, there really isn't one to speak of - and the game lacks a distinctive setting in terms of the overarching Dragon Ball plot. But, this is commonplace for Dragon Ball spin-off media sadly.

Because of that, the character cast feels a bit random, and does include copies of the same character in a different form or age (a pet peeve of mine). Including Chi-Chi and Videl was a nice touch, particularly in giving them unique and inspired fighting styles.

The last point worth mentioning is the way you can customize your characters through skill trees. Although the implementation is quite grindy, it was fun exploring the options and creating different setups. I particularly enjoyed upgrading Freeza's mechanical attachments.

These sort of creative risks and a focus on the manga are rare to see in Dragon Ball games - and so I hope this isn't the last we see of it.

Underrated DBZ action. It plays like Street Fighter, but with a 3rd axis to shimmy or dash around the opponent. There’s a medium sized character roster with some neat choices you don’t see playable often; like Chi Chi and King Piccolo.

Hardly anyone has mentioned the impressive customization cards in this game. Where u pick a character, level up, and earn dragon balls to summon Shenron and wish for more characters, costumes, special moves, stat advantages, and other bonuses. Very satisfying progression for a game with only ‘arcade mode’ (where every character unfortunately sees the same ending) or ‘survival mode’, which is so damn hard i doubt anyone can beat it without maxing out your chosen accrued skills on a custom character.

The raw combat here is real engaging, and I find the customization is a decent enough draw to play more and more. You gotta appreciate that they ported this hardcore tournament fighting game to consoles and bothered to throw in more content than Capcom would back then. This game does a lot with a little

Man... This is definitely a game made for the wrong audience and possibly at the wrong time.

This is a fighting game co-developed by Arika and Crafts & Meister. But people mainly associate it with Arika because of their Street Fighter EX titles, Fighting EX Layer (known by niche fg enthusiasts) and one of the creators of Street Fighter 2 spearheading the company. Being a fighting game and how motion inputs work, yeah. You can feel the Street Fighter here minus the 3d elements like sidestepping and terrain.

I mentioned motion inputs for special moves like kamehame-hadoukens, but the rest of the game is unique by fighting game standards.

Instead of 6 buttons laying out 3 strengths of Punch & Kick, you get Light Attack and Strong attack you can use for some basic Dial-A-Combo then continue to do whatever after that. You get a guard button like your VFs and SoulCals. Now the REAL unique part is its Jump button, Up + Jump for a super jump, and pressing the jump button twice to fly in the air for a certain time. Another unique thing is that you have no crouching. Only ground and flight modes which isn't unlike most DBZ games.

Now the last unique thing is the Action meter (size is character dependent) that drains in chunks when you side step, dragon dash (which is FAR less annoying here than in DBFZ) and drains slowly when flying in the air so regular jumping is fair game. I wouldn't have it drain during side steps but it comes back VERY quickly. You can argue that doesn't excuse it but I don't really mind.

It really is a robust combat system despite its unique quirks. Content sadly isn't going to keep you seated unless you're a lab scientist and like playing online with emulators. But the content is there and I feel flesh out the combat more.

You got your usual arcade modes, survival and training mode. The usual fighting game package is there (which compared to others at the time isn't much) but there's customization to put as much garbage as the developers limit to you like canceling special moves to Supers, items that give you a temporary buff, gain a move from an entirely different character, LOTS of possibilities and buffs that make it like SFII: Rainbow Edition but requiring more brain power. With your custom character, you can collect Dragon Balls during arcade to unlock characters, moves and other junk you can also transfer on a memory card. Can I just say, whatever high level play you can find is absolutely fucking nuts?

Music is great but I wouldn't put it past the SFEX composers. The visual styles is as DB manga as you can get right down to emulating the palette of the full colored pages and it aged pretty well.

Cartoonishly underrated! Good ass game! Borderline kusoge FG elements!

かべ is god