Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit

"And they say recycling is good..."

Although I am a fan of the Dragonball anime, I have only owned three of the games, including the one I'm reviewing. The first being Ultimate battle 22 (no) and the overly complicated Budakai 3 (yes, I just said that it was overly complicated). I got this game as a gift from a friend after he saw how much I liked the demo. Too bad the game doesn't hold up quite as well.

For the game play, they've added in a new system called Drama Pieces, which are cinematics that pop up in battle, giving which ever character that is equipped with it a little boost in battle. But most of the time appear at the wrong time. Like I'll have my opponent stunned with solar flare and I'll be about to use Super Kamehameha but right before it hits, a Drama Piece will pop up and my opponent will have full Ki, and I will have nothing more than an empty Ki bar and have taken a little damage. While Drama Pieces aren't bad, they could have been done a lot better. And don't worry, if you don't like them you have the option of playing without them.

There is also online play, but it is often hard to find a room and where you do there is so much lag that it is often unplayable. But this might be my bad luck. The game also does a poor job of finding a fair opponent for you in Ranked Matches. More often than not I'm put up against someone who's Power Level (one of the ranking methods in the game) is vastly greater than mine.

In Burst Limit, the main story mode is called Z Chronicles, which is a very loose retelling of the Saiyan, Namek, Freeza, Androids and Cell Sagas. If you're new to the DBZ series and are interested in knowing the storyline then this isn't the place to check it out. For instance, at the start of the game Goku and Piccolo are fighting Raditz then suddenly we jump to Piccolo and co. fighting the Saibamen with no explanation on what happened in between. They could have thrown in a battle between Gohan and Piccolo to explain that Piccolo is training Gohan, or another battle in between there where Goku fights King Kai to explain where he is and why he isn't fighting with the rest of his buddies against the Saiyans. It should also be noted that you can fly though the entire story mode in about 3 hours.

As for sound and music, other than a neat main theme, there's nothing really there that you'll find yourself whistling/humming. It's too bad that the voice acting couldn't have been better, too. While yes, they do have the entire Funimation cast doing voices, only a handful of them sound like they're into it. Like Freeza's line, "What ARE you!?" sounds more like a statement than a question. And Android # 16's line "The birds, they flew away." sounds less like a thoughtful and meaningful statement and more like just something he casually noticed. Then again, I wouldn't be into it either if I had to go back and voice act the same scene every other year or so. Oh, and by the way, if you're one of those hardcore anime fans who like "sub not dub" there's the option to turn to voice to Japanese.

The graphics in this game are nice, some of the best cel-shading that I have ever seen. Glad to see that the once-popular style isn't dead yet. The animations are smooth and fluent, it's too bad that so many of them are recycled. Many grab animations are copy-pasted and the cinematic and Drama Piece animations are all copy-paste copy-paste. It's a big shame, because the game had some nice graphics.

Now onto less general stuff and onto more fighting-game specific stuff. The roster in Burst Limit is pitiful, especially in comparison to the last DBZ game, which had around 101 characters or somewhere within that range. Then again, 101 characters is just over kill as far as I'm concerned. However, in this game we only get 21 characters. And all they are are the more popular ones (Goku, Vegeta, Cell, ect.). I was actually really disappointed that there was no Buu in this one.

There are no real pretty looking attacks in this, which is a shame. All of the Ultimate attacks aren't as devastating as in previous games and are much easier to pull off (Up and Circle at the same time when your Ki bar is full) there is no more flashy animations or any neat quotes. Rather than "Welcome to Super Vegeta's BIG BANG ATTACK!" that was in Budakai 3 we get "Try out my SUPER BIG BANG ATTACK!" But this is Burst Limit, not Budakai 4. So on it's own, this is prefect. It doesn't stop or break up the frantic fast-pace action usually found in Burst Limit and keeps the game going.

So my final word for Burst Limit? Unless it's given to you as a gift, or you find it cheap, it's not worth picking up. If I were you, I would wait for the inevitable Burst Limit 2.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 09/02/08

Game Release: Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit (US, 06/10/08)