illynilly
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This game wasn't very good. Like, I remember playing it as a kid and loving it and more specifically, I remember playing the demo over and over while I waited for it to come out and being like extra excited.
I believe this was the first "Next-Gen" Dragon Ball Z game at the time, and in a lot of ways this was the new Dragon Ball Z Budokai 1. Ended in the same place, featured a lot of the same characters, and was one of the only titles in the series at the time to actually have cutscenes for its story mode which is a weird thought. In the same vein, I think it's one of the few games where I think it was just "good for the time." Less as a game in general and more as a Dragon Ball Z game.
The opening's banger. Random to just plop that here but like HAVE YOU HEARD IT? It's like genuinely the most Dragon Ball opening I've heard since cha la head cha la. Listen to it thanks.
I think this game succeeds in basically being what Budokai 1 should've been in a lot of ways, what with its more fluid combat and beam struggles and just generally being much prettier (since 3D anime aesthetics were incredibly experimental at the time), but also never really stuck as much with me because it didn't have the flavor B1 did. The cutscenes were good, but they'd also sometimes reuse animations which felt kind of underwhelming. It didn't have the charming aesthetic that B1 had either in the way of its UI or how the modes were presented. It felt like it just wanted to be cool and I mean it kind of pulled that off, just not in much of a memorable way.
More than all of that, though, is that it just didn't have that much content, and because it never got a sequel and was its own series (since it isn't really a Budokai game), it was really only good on the basis that it was all we had and it was the only DBZ game that was doing what it was. Just really felt like this victim of "Next-Generation Syndrome," a term I'm making up literally right now to refer to something that a game that ultimately was harmed more from the jump in hardware than anything else. It wanted to be pretty, it wanted to be cool, but it really wasn't much more than that and that's why we only went up to Cell. That's why there weren't many modes.
I'm never really surprised that this game kind of got buried in time and I'm not trying to make it sound completely awful. It was a neat game with cool ideas but I just don't know how much it was interested in being a fun and memorable experience.
I believe this was the first "Next-Gen" Dragon Ball Z game at the time, and in a lot of ways this was the new Dragon Ball Z Budokai 1. Ended in the same place, featured a lot of the same characters, and was one of the only titles in the series at the time to actually have cutscenes for its story mode which is a weird thought. In the same vein, I think it's one of the few games where I think it was just "good for the time." Less as a game in general and more as a Dragon Ball Z game.
The opening's banger. Random to just plop that here but like HAVE YOU HEARD IT? It's like genuinely the most Dragon Ball opening I've heard since cha la head cha la. Listen to it thanks.
I think this game succeeds in basically being what Budokai 1 should've been in a lot of ways, what with its more fluid combat and beam struggles and just generally being much prettier (since 3D anime aesthetics were incredibly experimental at the time), but also never really stuck as much with me because it didn't have the flavor B1 did. The cutscenes were good, but they'd also sometimes reuse animations which felt kind of underwhelming. It didn't have the charming aesthetic that B1 had either in the way of its UI or how the modes were presented. It felt like it just wanted to be cool and I mean it kind of pulled that off, just not in much of a memorable way.
More than all of that, though, is that it just didn't have that much content, and because it never got a sequel and was its own series (since it isn't really a Budokai game), it was really only good on the basis that it was all we had and it was the only DBZ game that was doing what it was. Just really felt like this victim of "Next-Generation Syndrome," a term I'm making up literally right now to refer to something that a game that ultimately was harmed more from the jump in hardware than anything else. It wanted to be pretty, it wanted to be cool, but it really wasn't much more than that and that's why we only went up to Cell. That's why there weren't many modes.
I'm never really surprised that this game kind of got buried in time and I'm not trying to make it sound completely awful. It was a neat game with cool ideas but I just don't know how much it was interested in being a fun and memorable experience.