First and foremost, this is a game for Dragon Ball fans. I don’t think it’s enough to make someone care about Dragon Ball who didn’t before and I don’t think it’s enough to change the mind of someone who doesn’t like Dragon Ball. Fanservice is the aim here and it can hit that very well in places but some express disappointment at certain moments not given the treatment.
This is from CyberConnect2 so I definitely got ahead of myself hoping for a fun video game to play. I don’t like saying it but I think the gameplay here is actually worse than Xenoverse. You’re not going to find a whole lot of depth here given the bottom left corner of your screen is saying “press circle to fight” for the combat portions of the game. The best you’ll see when it comes to any depth or variety is choosing your super attacks, which are split fairly simply into ranged and melee attacks and they behave very similarly to the others in its category, alongside some simple dodging and blocking. Enemies are often very annoying to deal with, most just being unflinching brick walls where the only test of your skill is if you were smart enough to buy or earn enough healing items and if you found the right gaps to charge your Ki, if there’s any challenge at all. And my heart goes out to you if you ever have to fight more than one enemy at a time without any other characters in your party to help you, it’s mind-numbingly frustrating. Shout out to Krillin and Tien though, Solar Flare is by far the best assist in the whole game, teaming up with them made what could have been really infuriating fights bearable. The side missions, one thing I was looking forward to so we could see more of the relationships between characters that aren’t highlighted in the series proper mostly boil down to monotonous fetch quests that felt more like work than a game. I also had this ridiculous bug where Goku’s “Unbridled Power Aquire” training mission at Capsule Corp was completely bugged. There were no sound effects, I couldn’t charge ki, and if I got stunned the stun was permanent. That training mission could be avoided though, what couldn’t be avoided was constant frame drops and hitches that could leave the game frozen for a full 3-4 seconds. I’m baffled the game never fully crashed in my time with it.
What I was not disappointed with was the real reason to play a CyberConnect2 game in great display throughout my playtime. I’ve said it since they were making Naruto games that CyberConnect2 really needs to realize their true calling is making animation because in Ninja Storm and Dragon Ball Z Kakarot the cutscenes are gorgeous. Enough to keep me playing a game I wasn’t really enjoying is how pretty these games are, even if the character models in this particular game can look pretty awkward if they’re standing still.
If you’re a big Dragon Ball fan like myself and you’re willing to slog through a mediocre game and a couple of bad takes of voice acting used by accident to see some really beautiful renditions of not just the key moments but surprisingly some unnecessarily faithful subtleties, I actually recognized some of Goku’s landings after a flight in some cutscenes as directly out of the manga, you just might get some value out of this.
This is from CyberConnect2 so I definitely got ahead of myself hoping for a fun video game to play. I don’t like saying it but I think the gameplay here is actually worse than Xenoverse. You’re not going to find a whole lot of depth here given the bottom left corner of your screen is saying “press circle to fight” for the combat portions of the game. The best you’ll see when it comes to any depth or variety is choosing your super attacks, which are split fairly simply into ranged and melee attacks and they behave very similarly to the others in its category, alongside some simple dodging and blocking. Enemies are often very annoying to deal with, most just being unflinching brick walls where the only test of your skill is if you were smart enough to buy or earn enough healing items and if you found the right gaps to charge your Ki, if there’s any challenge at all. And my heart goes out to you if you ever have to fight more than one enemy at a time without any other characters in your party to help you, it’s mind-numbingly frustrating. Shout out to Krillin and Tien though, Solar Flare is by far the best assist in the whole game, teaming up with them made what could have been really infuriating fights bearable. The side missions, one thing I was looking forward to so we could see more of the relationships between characters that aren’t highlighted in the series proper mostly boil down to monotonous fetch quests that felt more like work than a game. I also had this ridiculous bug where Goku’s “Unbridled Power Aquire” training mission at Capsule Corp was completely bugged. There were no sound effects, I couldn’t charge ki, and if I got stunned the stun was permanent. That training mission could be avoided though, what couldn’t be avoided was constant frame drops and hitches that could leave the game frozen for a full 3-4 seconds. I’m baffled the game never fully crashed in my time with it.
What I was not disappointed with was the real reason to play a CyberConnect2 game in great display throughout my playtime. I’ve said it since they were making Naruto games that CyberConnect2 really needs to realize their true calling is making animation because in Ninja Storm and Dragon Ball Z Kakarot the cutscenes are gorgeous. Enough to keep me playing a game I wasn’t really enjoying is how pretty these games are, even if the character models in this particular game can look pretty awkward if they’re standing still.
If you’re a big Dragon Ball fan like myself and you’re willing to slog through a mediocre game and a couple of bad takes of voice acting used by accident to see some really beautiful renditions of not just the key moments but surprisingly some unnecessarily faithful subtleties, I actually recognized some of Goku’s landings after a flight in some cutscenes as directly out of the manga, you just might get some value out of this.