As you may or may not know, I am a huge fan of Dragonball Z. I am less so now that I have aged a bit, but when I was younger, DBZ was a big part of my life. I had shirts, action figures, trading cards, and of course all the DBZ video games that I could get my hands on. I think that I've played most, if not all, of the DBZ games that have been released, even the ones that were SNES exclusives and released only in Japan with few imports. Those were extremely difficult to understand, but still fun as hell. I'm not going to talk about those today, though it would be fun to do a huge mess of quick reviews for all of them, and instead I'll be talking about DBZ: Ultimate Tenkaichi on the Xbox 360.
 |
| I personally love this title shot; that badass crackling energy is awesome. |
Right off the bat when playing this game you realize that it's not your typical fighter. I don't know exactly what it is about the controls, but they just feel alien to me. There are two ranges that you can be at, and each range specifies what type of attack you can use: Melee or Blast. No matter the range you are at, you can string together three normal hits, or a charged up strong hit, to start a chain. If you succeed at a short Rock, Paper, Scissors; without the Rock; you can continue to attack your enemy until the chain has finished. To move between the two ranges, you double-tap the dash button and you'll rocket towards or away from the enemy while performing another attack. During this time you play another Paper vs. Scissors with the left stick to determine if your attack hits or if the opponent hits you. Either way you end up in the range you wanted to move to. To perform a super attack, you can be at either range while tilting the right stick either up or down; an ultimate attack is done by pushing in the right stick. Along with all of that garbage, you can also move in three dimensions. It's hard to explain how it feels, but like I said above, it just doesn't feel right. I'd rather stick with a 2d fighter and "normal" controls all the way.
 |
| This is in Japanese I guess. |
The main draw to this game for me is the Hero Mode. You can create your own character, from unlockable clothing and skillsets, to fight in a parallel DBZ universe. This mode is pretty fun, but it's repetative. You always seem to battle the same combatants while you attempt to level up your abilities. As for the Story Mode, it's so short that you'd never realize that the show had so many seasons. There are a lot of characters to choose from for the battle modes and the World Tournamen, but both of those are basically just time filler. Where the hell did all of the story content go? I don't want to fight against random online opponents, I want to play the frickin' story!
 |
| A giant boss...In a fighting game. This isn't Shadow of the Colussus, people. |
The developers included a few giant boss fights in the game, I think that's where the energy went for the Story Mode. They seem to take up most of the time while you're playing; they take a few tries to beat and can last for up to half an hour if you don't memorize the patterns quickly enough. Why in the hell would a fighting game include giant boss fights? Shouldn't these be reserved for adventure games? For each of these giant bosses, I could see more fights included that actually affected the story and weren't edging up on ridiculous.
Despite the massive amount of characters that you can play as and the huge variety of super attacks to choose from, this game falls pretty far from the DBZ tree. The lack of a significant Story Mode really made me feel like this was far too rushed. Hell, there's another DBZ game coming out in short order anyway, DB Raging Blast 2 is already on the way and Ultimate Tenkaichi isn't even a year old yet. They pump these games out so fast that the quality ones are hard to find. Overall, Ultimate Tenkaichi isn't necessarily terrible, but it's far from great. In my opinion, stick with DBZ Budokai Tenkaichi 3 and avoid this game unless you really are a die hard fan and need to play all of the DBZ games.
No comments:
Post a Comment