Dragon Ball Z Battle of Z review: They really dropped the Dragon Ball on this one

Bandai Namco (formerly known as Namco Bandai) has been mass publishing and developing pseudo-competitive games based on popular anime series at a rate that would put the automobile industry to shame. Just off the top of my head, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle, One Piece Pirate Warriors, and Naruto Shipuuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm were some of their latest offerings, and all of those games have one thing in common: while they accurately captured the feel of the works they were based on, they were pretty terrible games by traditional standards, having little to no appeal to anyone not already familiar with their respective series.

Sadly, Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Z (DBZ: BoZ) is no different from its predecessors, and that really is a letdown because the game has a lot of potential to be something great, but is chained down by repetitive and wonky combat mechanics, artificial difficulty and an A.I. that will have you raging so hard you might just go Super Saiyan.

The good: It’s bad, but not ugly

For real, this game looks great. The character models and backgrounds look pretty darn accurate in comparison to the anime and manga, and while the graphics are not cutting edge or next gen-level, the game looks, and – more importantly – feels like how a Dragon Ball Z (DBZ) game should. The sound effects and music are also spot on, and everything combined really helps to create an immersive experience. You know, if being immersed into a game that isn’t very enjoyable is your kinda thing.

There are, however, a few core parts of Dragon Ball Z that are sadly missing in this game. One of the big ones is the ability to transform. In the DBZ games of old, transforming was a gimmick, where you had to fulfill certain conditions during battle in order to perform, and every time you powered up your character would be noticeably stronger and, even more noticeably, cooler looking.

In this game, each character form appears as a separate character, and there is no way to transform in the middle of a fight. I’m pretty sure the reason is so that they can boast about having a larger roster by having six different Goku forms, but it’s really a bummer, because everyone knows that transforming in front of the enemy is cool. The Power Rangers do it all the time and they are pretty much the coolest people ever.

Also, in this game you can’t do the DBZ signature ‘Power squat while screaming’, to raise your ki levels and make the pebbles around you shake violently. To people who don’t follow DBZ, this may seem ridiculous, but every DBZ fan knows that deep in their heart they want nothing more than to scream for ten minutes, while onlookers gape in awe of their incredible power while sweating.

Squats and oats, every day.

All that glitters is gold, but gold isn’t always better

You might be thinking, if Super Saiyan 3 Goku and regular Goku are both on the roster, why would I pick the original Goku? Bamco’s answer is that there is a penalty system for using more powerful characters, where ‘weaker’ characters are allowed to respawn more times during a fight as compared to the more ‘powerful’ ones. Why am I using inverted commas? Because after playing the game for eight hours I came to the conclusion that the power difference between these various forms is negligible, and in fact, sometimes I found that the ‘weaker’ character forms had better movesets and utility than the supposedly more powerful ones.

I say that the difference is negligible because, although being initially a breeze to play through, the game quickly becomes excruciatingly difficult, regardless of which character you pick. Playing through mission mode, there were some enemies who I had to combo over 15 times just to kill, and that isn’t even the worst part.