Dragon Ball Z Hyper Dimension

"Hyper Dimension is the most grossly over rated DBZ game of all time"

Ahh, Hyper Dimension how doth I describe thee? Well, you fooled about 95% of the DBZ loving population into thinking that you're a good game, you made your price on eBay skyrocket and you were even featured in a professional combo video. I guess the best way to describe thee would be as a conniving doppelganger.

Hyper Dimension is a horrible fighting game with character unbalances that make DBZ look like Virtua Fighter and graphics that'll make your eyes bleed. That's how one should really describe thee!

Graphics: 2/10

HD's graphics are truly vomit inducing. It's hard to believe that this is a SNES game because it looks barely above a MSX game, and that's a compliment. The animation in this game is so broken that it makes me wonder how much time the animators spent on it. When hit, opponents have about one constipated-looking reaction and then completely move to an attack frame in the following second. Transition be dammed! It's hard to put in words, but it looks bad.

And this might even be okay if the color palette wasn't formed out of about 10 colors for the background and another 7 for each of the characters. Everything looks washed out, amateurish and low-res. The backgrounds of DBZ: HD are rendered in such a pathetically low resolution that some might just find themselves sitting there, starring at why exactly didn't anyone bother to update them from Butoden 1 which came out 5 years before Hyper Dimension.

Sound: 4/10

DBZ:HD's sound is decent. The music is acceptable, although it's drowned out by the sound effects and battle cries and the sound effects are also fairly good packing a decent punch. HD also has some voice recording that's just about as laughingly bad in quality as the sound effects. This is where HD loses monodo points: The quality of the sound is incredibly bad. It just simply is some of the worst sampling I ever encountered in a video game in my life. For shame.

Gameplay: 3/10

Hyper Dimension is a mess of a fighter. It has a bunch of canned combos, a horrendously slow pace and about 9 characters. It really offers nothing to fans of fighters and/or fans of DBZ alike!

Where does one start here? Hmm... Let's talk characters. DBZ: HD has a grand total of 10 characters which are all unlocked from the beginning. What's worse is that some of these characters are just different versions of each other (Majin Buu, Kid Buu) and they're ALL from either the Freeza, Cell or Buu Sagas. There are no characters from previous sagas. No regular Goku, no SSJ Vegeta, no NOTHING! The battle arenas are equally as pathetic except that, unlike the characters, they get in the way of your game. The "flying stage" is so atrociously bad that it took me some 40-50 tries to get past it in the story mode because your character apparently ascends and descends through molasses. Landing a hit in this environment is a luxury! The rest of the stages, all 3 of them, are more functional but they're ridiculously small and under detailed.

All of this would be passable however if DBZ: HD would've had a decent fighting system. Well, it doesn't.

Hyper Dimension is so painfully slow that it'll bore you to tears to get from one side of the screen to the other. All of the characters handle as if they're training in 500 times the gravity of the Earth. They all have chopped up reactions and unblockable, unbreakable combos that slow this game down to a crawl.

And let's talk combos. They're all canned to death. You enter in a series of commands and then you sit back and watch your character spring into action. Sure you can jump or duck and try going for a sweeping kick but it's utterly useless as it does so little damage that you're stuck to using HD's horrible list of canned combo moves. And this would even be passable if each character had more than 5 or so moves and if they all weren't nearly identical to each other. Oh, but let's not forget the “Desperation moves” which are activated when your character is getting his ass kicked, are limited by absolutely nothing, and kill off about a 4th of your opponents health bar! Go balance!

What's probably even more insulting though are the characters and the AI. Let's start with the lesser of the two evils, the AI. The AI in Hyper Dimension can see where you're coming from, it can read all your controller movements, it cannot be made easier or harder and it can get cornered worse than in Street Fighter. So while you might experience a string of AI beatings initially once you learn its trick, the AI becomes a nuisance. It can easily be beaten by button mashing as long as you keep switching from duck, to dash, to jump moves so that it can't "guess" what you'll want to do next.

The bigger offender is the characters however since they are PATHETICALLY unbalanced. Veggito can blow to smithereens everything else that moves in the battlefield. He is easily the strongest, most comboable of all the characters and it becomes utterly pointless to even try to fight him since 5 Veggito kicks are the equivalent of 1/4 of your health. Oh, and while we're speaking of health, HD's concept of "health" is synonymous with it's concept of "Ki". Therefore, when using KI you actually LOSE health. This is just simply the most idiotic system I've ever seen in a fighter.

Hyper Dimension does offer a few modes of play. It has a ludicrous story mode which acts like a parody of DBZ with horrible dialogue choices and one liners such as "Cell I will defeat you because it is my duty to defeat all evil" (Gokou) or, my favorite, "****! We're all useless, we can't defeat him!" (Piccolo towards Freeza). There's also a versus mode, a practice mode and a Tenchaichi Budokai mode. There's also an option menu but it really is there just for show as Hyper Dimension doesn't let you choose a difficulty, pick a stage, a speed or any other things that you might actually want in an option menu.

Multiplayer: 5/10

Well, it's bad in two, but it's more manageable this way especially if you have a friend with a sick sense of humor.

Overall: 3/10

I don't exactly know what got DBZ: Hyper Dimension this sadistic following but it doesn't deserve it at all! If you want a good DBZ game go buy a PS2 and Budokai 3. There isn't and there will NEVER be a better, more complete, DBZ game than Budokai 3 ever.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 10/11/05