"If you are looking for a fun, different fighting game... look no further!"

Battle Stadium D.O.N. is a game we don't see every day. Just imagine the characters from 3 popular anime series fighting each other? What's even more surprising is that the result of this mix worked out much above average.

Graphics: 8/10
The graphics on D.O.N. are up to today's graphic standard for the PlayStation 2; not bad but nothing that will make you scream for it. The character models are cell-shaded, which made them look very close to their anime versions. The stages are very diversified and most fans of the series will recognize, with kind of original additions. One example is the valley stage which there are rocks under a waterfall. The water flowing makes it hard to see, thus encouraging only the best players to risk fighting there. Aside the fighters and landscapes, the other sections are beautiful too. The menus are well detailed and the game is very colorful overall.

Sound: 8/10
The music on the game is not that noticeable, mostly because the battles are a rampage most of the times. Lots of punching, kicking, shouting and other sound effects may hid the music, but aside from this the sound effects are good and represent exactly what they mean. talking about music, it is actually good and I highly recommend leaving the music volume higher that the sound effects volume so you can listen to the songs. Each stage has a music that has much to do with the actual stage, or the series where it came from. I particularly love the menu song, which seems to prepare you for the tension of the soon-happening fights; and the character selection song, which is not exactly associated to any of the three series but has a feeling that would fit any of them. And the character voices are great, although there aren't much lines for each one.

Story: ---/10
The game doesn't really have a story. It's just like a fighting tournament is happening by, and characters from Dragon Ball Z, One Piece and Naruto are coming to compete. The ending is the same no matter which character you beat the story mode with, which confirms this.

Controls/Gameplay: 7/10
Well, this is where the game has some flaws. The fighting itself works just like Super Smash Bros, you can jump all over the landscape and find the best place to attack your opponent. The innovation here is the life gauge: instead of having a bar for each character, it's only one bar for them all. Each character has a different color which is part of the bar. When you hit an opponent, it will release orbs. If you collect those orbs your bar will grow larger, while your opponent's will decrease.

There are pits in the stages and when a fighter falls into one, it will lose lots of orbs. The cool addition here is that the player may choose where in the landscape he will respawn. And here there is no stock system: when you fall in a hole you will always respawn and continue fighting. The winning method for this game is pretty unique: the winner will be the player that reduce the other 3 players bars to zero. The catch is that if two characters are zero'd and one still has his life gauge, the three of them will keep on fighting! No character loses the fight until all of them have their gauges depleted. In other words, one character wins when they have filled the whole bar with his color.

Add this to the orb system and what you get? If one character is almost winning, the three other might make an alliance to take him down. If a character has no more gauge, he can attack the other characters to get their orbs and refill his gauge. No matter how one player is losing, he might change the tides! Overall it's like a normal fighting game. Each characters have their own moves. You can jump by pressing up or a button dedicated just for is (X, in the original config). Pressing directional buttons together with the attack button will result in different combos or moves. And so on.

I was talking about flaws, right? Okay. The ones in this game refer to originality. If you have played other games of this genre, like the Smash Bros series mentioned above or One Piece Grand Battle, you may feel like you had already played this game before. Also the number of characters and game modes is just decent. You have your regular arcade mode, survival, time attack... but nothing really new. And most of the combat might result in button mashing, as there is only one button designed for normal attack (there are two buttons for special attacks, but they are limited to a special bar) and the move variety isn't that great. At least the controls are very responsive.

To break the monotony, however, there is the custom battle mode. In this mode, you may add special conditions to the battles, like all players being giants, or all players being attached to iron balls, which make them slower and with limited jumping abilities! This is pretty interesting. The only other thing that's bad in this game is the unlock system (a slot machine) which is really hard.

Fun/Replayability: 10/10
Like any fun game, the replay factor in Battle Stadium D.O.N. lasts for long. For one, you will be playing a lot if you want to unlock every character, stage, difficulty level and game mode. For two, as long as you have a friend to play with, you can have fun for hours! You might change the battle as you want in the custom mode to add variety if you get bored of the normal game mode. And things might be even better with four players! I haven't tested it, but the game supports 4 player games, which might only mean four times the fun.

And that's it. This game will be more interesting to the series fans obviously, but that doesn't mean other players shouldn't give it a try. It's like few titles in the PlayStation 2 and it's fun, nonetheless.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 08/09/06