Dragon Ball Z: Budokai

"I waited two years for this?"

I find myself disgusted with the entertainment industry more and more, folks. That's probably an odd statement, given that I am - at heart - an entertainer (I am a musician and a writer, as well as the occasional comedy and acting expeditions). However, that doesn't mean I can't express my feelings on the matter at hand, eh? The entire basis of the entertainment community is that is works to entertain you. It ENTERTAINS, and is there to provide you with enjoyment on some level (be it aesthetic, visual, mental, or what-have-you). Thus, the continued degradation of such entertainment to maximize profits seems detrimental to the very cause...I feel that I shouldn't have to be wary of my purchases, for fear that they will showcase a lower level of effort or production values than I should expect from said item. As such, however, I find that I can only trust certain companies to provide me with games that meet the expectations (and hype) that we hear and create for these games. Some games I have learned to expect less-than-par productive values, which is a sad state of affairs to behold...after all, we do not go to a 4-star restaurant and order the Mostaccioli in Shitake-Sake sauce, only to get something that tastes like old pasta covered in Campbell's Cream of Mushroom, now do we? There are expectations to be met, and to see a company fall short of these expectations feels like a loss.

And for games that lack high expectations to begin with, the loss is almost too great.

This apparent quest for money is not often bereft of cut corners, as seems to be the case with Dragon Ball games in the past. The world has been subjected to over 30 DBZ games now, with a scant few even being arguably decent. As per usual with marketing jumps from one facet of entertainment to another, the high-point of the selling would be the name attached to the product, already carrying a fanbase of its own to (hopefully) boost the video game's sales. While some Dragon Ball games have had innovative touches to them, they still feel like those touches were created simply to keep the game within the realm of the series, without actually striving to break the mold itself...and thus, we can reasonably surmise that the programmers focused more on using the name ''Dragon Ball'' as the main point of selling, rather than producing an excellent game that happens to bear the title of Dragon Ball. Due to this, the Dragon Ball games are often woefully low on creative programming and high on providing bare-minimum standards for gamers to purchase while retaining similarities to the license. This sort of cross-cultural marketing is almost always doomed to failure, as demonstrated by video games being turned into movies (''Super Mario Bros.'') and vice versa (''Wayne's World'' the SNES game), not to mention musicians trying to become actors or the subject of games (''Revolution X'' anyone?).

Who are the makers?

Cut to the game, and the company at hand -- Dragon Ball Z: Boudokai, Infogrames' latest attempt at making money off of a licensed title. For a company such as Infogrames, known for such stinkers as ''AD&D - Eye of the Beholder'' and ''N*Sync - Get to the Show'' (both of them being cross-genre games, mind you), you do not want to be caught creating a game for a series that has slowly become the proverbial dead horse to video game endeavors. Infogrames continues to wind up, bat in hand, clubbing this poor, dead quadruped as if their efforts truly meant something meaningful. These guys don't know video games well enough to make independent games that work, let alone producing titles that have bad reputations pre-attached, so it all adds up to being a bad idea right from the start. You don't see companies like Capcom, Konami, or Squaresoft screwing up movie or television licenses such as these...their own original games have set great standards, proving that - even if they decided to produced a licensed game - they would still be able to turn out an enjoyable, well-produced game. Capcom displayed this with their Marvel comics fighting games, and Konami (in conjunction with Ultra) had several hits with their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games, if you needed proof...

DBZ: Boudokai is a fighting game, programmed by the Japanese group ''Dimps'' and sold into the unwitting palms of DBZ fans through Infogrames. It's funny enough that a relative unknown in the gaming industry (Dimps) is creating a fighting game for a huge title, but having a company known for bad RPGs, average survival-horror, and bad card games (Infogrames) to be the production group? It kinda leaves you with the feeling that the game is not going to be constructed in a manner akin to other fighting games, nor is it going to be handled and marketed well...and you would be correct in this postulation. Boudokai seems to lack the most basic, fundamental attributes that games of the ''Fighting'' genre carry high above their shoulders. Let us dissect the game and find these individual points that purport such a preposterous production.

The basic game.

You take control of one of 23 different combatants from the DBZ Universe, using a variety of moves to wear your opponents' stamina down and ultimately forcing them to succumb to unconsciousness from your beatings. Standard fare for fighting games, to be sure. The fighting game comes in the 3-dimensional flavor, giving you the ability to punch, kick, block, or throw a Ki blast, as well as throw, dash, and sidestep left or right. Ultimately, that's the full length of your mobility, which I find a tad trite: in this day and age where fighting games give your character(s) the option of a bevy of moves strictly for maneuvering, Boudokai already feels lacking. There is only so much you can do by dashing back and forth, sidestepping, throwing, and hoping to land a combination of moves to inflict damage on your opponent. Thus, the game is automatically relegated to the characters' individual abilities to set one another apart.

DBZ fights are known for 3 things: high-flying action, ultra-fast battles, and energy blasts the size of buildings being hurled at one another. Boudokai seems to ignore the first two portions of the show, instead having your characters battle as if they are on the ground, and only being able to throw those large ki blasts if you manage to connect a certain combo on your opponent. It is frustrating to have a show where flight and fighting go hand in hand, then play a game where no manual flying exists whatsoever. If you knock an opponent upward above you, then you float diagonally towards them instead of flitting about on the X/Y axis. It’s just like being on the ground again, and feels like they shunned one of the best parts of the show (and possibly a wonderful twist to the fighting genre). You only have regular punch and combos, and can only use your characters’ special moves if you land the right combo…and even then, the hit that initiates the special move has to connect, or else you’ll simply waste a bar of meter. That’s right, you are trying to combo your opponent into a cutscene wherein you can damage them even more, as opposed to having a variety of special moves at your disposal. There is very little zoning and strategy involved, since mindless rushing is all you need (and all you can do if you want to inflict more damage on your opponent).

The game incorporates the fast-action fights, but these are actually counters to your opponent trying to perform the same move on you instead of controllable actions at your disposal. When these segments happen, you have little role to play...revolving the left analog stick as fast as you can, hoping to strike your opponent more, is the full extent of your ''hyper-speed attacking skills''. Even then, this segment feels as if it goes on, especially since it is a simple counter-move. Yet again, another perfectly good idea wasted.

You want to know what’s worse? Each character plays the same way. The same way, folks. Granted, not EXACTLY the same - there are a few differences from player-to-player, such as which kick they use at each point of their combination attacks - but the number of similarities from character-to-character are marginally greater than Ryu and Ken's from Street Fighter II (meaning the differences were almost entirely visual). The simplicity of the game is too much for even fighting game fans of my caliber to take it seriously, too. Normally, in a fighting game, each character has a diverse set of moves that are (mostly) wholly their own, and these are what set their individual fighting styles apart. Boudokai not only sports the exact same movement style for each character, but even most of the special moves are exactly the same, with only the person performing them and the name(s) of the move(s) being different. Everyone has the same ''hit them into the air, then hit them 3 times before they are sent groundward'' combo, and most everyone (save Mr. Satan, of course) has a special where they pelt their prone attackers with several ki blasts. It's bad enough that there is little originality per characters' specials or the fact that you have to start a combo just to use them, but these bland specials are carried over to other characters as well. What happened to distinct fighting styles?

It's not THAT bad...

There are some improvements this game holds over its 3D Fighting predecessor, “DBGT: Final Bout”. Probably the focal point of the game is its story mode, where you progress through the storyline of Dragon Ball Z. From the first arrival of Raditz to SSj 2 Gohan’s final showdown against Perfect Cell, the game does have an interesting twice on the “story”...and that twist is that any/all important plot points have been taken from the show and very, very closely recreated in computer-animated format. Slap some accurate 3D backgrounds and voice acting from the show, and you have a great conceptual style for retelling the plotline of the show. ...almost.

Ok, so maybe it is.

I wouldn’t have much of a problem with the story mode, aside from the fact that it still holds true to the 2 biggest problems that DBZ succumbed to - bad American voice actors, and slow pacing. Granted, the first is more of a personal preference, but I just can't stand the U.S. dub actors. Their vocal stylizations irritate me, and their acting certainly isn't up to par with a wide variety of other animated shows on TV. As if this wasn't insipid enough, the animations actually progress SLOWER than the show! The introduction for the game is a near-direct rip of the opening sequence from the series and movies, yet it takes twice as long due to extremely slow (comparative) animation. Finally, these time-consuming sequences have rather excessive loading times, times I get the feeling could have been shortened much more if they'd just ripped the cartoon animations themselves and copied them to disk. Final Bout had an animated opening sequence created specially for it, and I thought it looked great, not to mention the speediness of its appearance...Boudokai's intro is not only something I've already seen before, but when I previously viewed (on TV) it had less loading time AND it progressed faster.

I found the down time this game exuded to be rather bothersome as well. The load time between fights was eventually missed, but the odd pause between the Announcer's mentioning of the character's name got on my nerves, as did the frustrating inability to quickly rise from being knocked down. In the heat of a battle, not arising in an expedient manner breaks the flow of the game, and is yet another thing I felt should have been handled better through play-testing...and let's not even get into the fact that your characters can hover listlessly in the air (apparently to simulate the same effect as being knocked down while on the ground). Why shouldn't we get into this? Because it means free combo time, and for a lot of characters that means tons of damage or even infinites. Play-testing is a must for games like this, and it seems like it didn't get the attention it desperately deserved.

Let's also throw in how easy it is to lose at the Tenkai-Ichi Boudokai (getting knocked out of the ring after thoroughly pummeling your opponent royally sucks), and also the ability to easily block certain special moves' initiation hit (even if the rest of the combo connected), and you tend to lose faith in the programmers' ability to make a good fighting game. Oh, and did I mention the absolute brokenness of the fighting itself? Some characters can land 1 good hit and take off 75% of your life, while others have infinites that start off of 1 hit or even a combo that FAILED. That's right, I blew the combo, but I can still control the match by continually pummeling you. It's this sort of thing that makes me wonder just how thoroughly Dimps played their own game before handing it over to Infogrames.

Innovative jargon for the kiddies.

It sounds like I'm making this game out to be really terrible, and I can understand that - the previous points have really gotten underneath my skin. This is not to say that there are no positive points to the game...as I already stated, Dragon Ball games are notorious for having innovative ideas that allow them to be set apart from other games of the same genre. Granted, they are usually suited more towards making the game fit in with the Dragon Ball universe, but Boudokai does not suffer this fate. The idea this game purports is the E.S.S. (Exciting Skill System). Each character has a series of skill capsules they can gain, some privy only to them, which allow them enhanced attacks or access to new abilities. These skills come in 3 flavors: Special (new transformations or kill moves), Physical (new attacks/throws), and Support (enhancement abilities), and you have 7 slots with which to customize your chosen warrior with. Although you have to earn and/or purchase these (which is another time-filling matter, earning money via placement in the Tenkai-Ichi Boudokai so you can afford them), they allow an interesting level of personalization for the Z-Senshi (and villains). If you manage to collect...er, purchase all 7 Dragon Balls from Mr. Popo, you can summon Shenlong to grant you a wish. This wish is, of course, the gaining of a special ''Breakthrough'' capsule. This capsule takes up all of 1 characters' Capsule Slots, but allows them the use of all their Ability and Physical Skills (the 3rd Category, Support, is not gained). Handy, although troubling to get for everyone...

...but does anyone else find it funny how I have to spend a good deal of time to earn an item, which THEN allows my character to use all of their special moves? C'mon, Jin didn't have to spend a bunch of time earning the EWGF in Tekken!

Anywho, that's my review. I might as well summarize it for y'all, since I tend to ramble too much.

~~~Pros~~~

~Interesting Story Mode, retelling the series through compute animated recreations of the show itself
~Extensive Voice acting
~E.S.S. System is creative and enjoyable
~Any game with Mr. Satan can't be all bad

~~~Cons~~~

~No true flight
~No independent specials (must be comboed into, and even then they are not guaranteed to hit)
~Most special moves are shared by everyone
~BAD voice acting
~Quick loss of hard-earned powerups makes for a frustrating bout
~Too easy to lose at the Tenkai-Ichi Boudokai (granted, this works both ways, but the computer seems to be too good at it for it to be fair)
~Irritating Load Time and Down Time
~I have to spend all this time to get a Breakthrough Capsule, and only THEN do my characters get all their moves?
~Graphics show quite a few moments of bad clipping (polygons pass through one another)
~1-button infinites? Yeah, THIS game was tested extensively...

Rent or Buy?

Please, NEVER purchase a game unless you've played it beforehand. You don't know whether or not you'll be getting a gem or a stinker, even if the game has the most astounding hype ever. Therefore, rent it and THEN make your own decision. I've already made mine.

Conclusion

Honestly, I rate this game on a par with Final Bout. While FB had the broken gameplay, at least it made the efforts of flying, and had the fairly interesting ''Meteo'' system that alotted for real skill from player to player. This game may have tighter controls (somewhat), it lacks the number of moves or abilities per character. It also has the story mode, but is a retelling of the show really necessary when we have to wait so long, and we have to listen to Christopher Sabat voice everyone? Badly? And how about the gameplay, where you have to combo into whatever special you want to do (provided you have the right transformations and meter to do so)? I could rant for days on any number of topics on this game, but I think I'll part with these final words:

''I told you this wasn't going to be good, and even gave reasons why. Is this not proof enough?''

---Final Score: 3/10---

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 12/18/02, Updated 12/20/02