Dragon Ball Z Collectible Card Game

"Adjectives of 'terrible': abhorrent, atrocious, beastly, dangerous, disastrous, ghastly, gruesome, odious, repugnant, vile..."

Hopes and dreams are often difficult to replace once they've been dashed against the rocks. So when I finally sat down and played Infogrames' atrocity "Dragon Ball Z: Collectable Card Game", I knew I was going to be in for an emotional ride of epic proportions. Hey kids, let's have fun with math: take an absolutely terrible Game Company (Infogrames) and add in the Dragon Ball license (already notorious for turning out less-than-par games). What do you get? Drivel at best. Just when I hoped that a Dragon Ball game would come out and NOT be a waste of time, this game comes out...and continues the trend as if they never stopped making DBZ games.

DBZ: CCG doesn't even screw around with you, it goes from start to suck in 20 seconds. Based around the once-popular card capture games, such as Magic: The Gathering, you take turns throwing random cards about in a strange attempt to "win". How do you win? Each character has a certain amount of life, which you can reduce by succeeding in "attacks" on them, or You can win by reaching your "maximum personality power level". To reach your Max. Personality, you have to pray for a miracle and hope the game doesn't screw you over (actually, it has to do with raising your "anger level", which changes so often it's too difficult to pay attention to).

Each round, both characters draw 3 cards. Each card has a different set of nonsensical attributes to it - Anger Level + 2, Blocks Physical Attacks, Uses a Ki Blast that drops your opponents' Power Rating by 3, grills a mean steak, etc. From there, the game would be simple strategy - pick a physical attack that increases your anger, so you can get stronger while (hopefully) damaging your opponent, or take up a defensive card (or two) to protect yourself from the incoming attack. The game allows you to see what card your opponent is playing, so you can plan accordingly...

...except for the fact that you actually can't. See, you are given 3 random cards from your stockpile, so your ability to attack and defend are entirely up to the computer. There's only so much strategy you can implement when the game is randomly giving you things.

Let's put this in perspective - let's say you're playing Final Fantasy for the NES. You get into a battle with Garland, and your Fighter steps up to attack. However, instead of simply beating him senseless with his longsword, the Fighter is presented with 3 options he can go with. He selects what he can, depending on what his opponent uses, but he is unable to see when his opponent is blocking and when they are simply attacking, so ultimately it is if he will even be able to HIT his opponent. If they attack him, and he doesn't have a card that allows him to defend, then he'll lose even more precious health. Heck, he even has to have a card that allows him to defend the STYLE of attack, or else he's going to get pounded again. The next round, Fighter doesn't even get any offensive cards, forcing him to sit around and wish he could attack. Worse yet, let's suppose White Mage is fighting Tiamat, and she sees that Tiamat is going to attack her. She has no defensive cards, so all she can do is become Tiamat's punching bag. Heck, the game would probably only give her physical attacks, not giving her the chance to defend OR use her healing spells.

...and let's assume that she DID stack her deck with healing utensils? Wellsir, she might not even get the chance to use one, having to sit and wait until the necessary restorative play is revealed for her to persue. The rest of the time, you are being quite thoroughly stomped on. I'm sorry, but what planet does this pass for "fun" on? Because here, on Planet Earth...I gotta side with no.

And the randomness only gets worse. The Computer seems to enjoy cheating, just to make sure you were frustrated enough. The character Guldo can repeatedly draw the same card over and over, giving him 2 more cards while attacking you. Once you've run out of your allotted 3 cards per round, you have no way of defending, attacking, ANYTHING - this irritating little goofball has free reign to trash you like you were a legless dog. Literally, I watched as the first match started with myself at full health, only to immediately LOSE because the computer thought it would be funny to repeatedly draw cards, knowing full and well I couldn't.

Oh, sure, you can customize your own deck so that you MIGHT get better cards, but it's still a big pool of randomness versus a computer that is VERY biased against you. Heck, they didn't even bother getting things in the game right! Power Levels were used in this game to limit which cards you could use at which times; you could raise your level with certain cards, while other cards would drop you levels at a time while making an attack. The problem with this, of course, is that there is absolutely no consistency between levels. You will always do the same damage with your character, regardless of what your power level is at - and, what's worse, is that characters
who have a Power Level of 10,000 can easily thwomp someone with a Power Level of 1,000,000 - it's all in the cards.

Heck, the game didn't even bother trying when it came to the sound or graphics. The majority of the graphics are simply stills from the show, paste on top of the cards and packaged as a cheesy game design. What remains are low, low-quality menus with no style or feel to them. The sound is even worse - the same terrible music looks in the background, while irritating sound effects play whenever it's convenient to annoy you. Heck, the game even swiped sound effects from other games and/or TV shows! They can't even bother making their OWN sounds, they have to use stuff from Starcraft to get the job done! LAME!!!

And you know what drove me up the wall even worse than the graphics and sound? The shoddy, shoddy control and layout. The game has a tutorial section, which offers about as much help as an illiterate gerbil, so you're much more likely to figure the game out by simply playing it. Each card in the game has a "view" ability, so you can see what attributes it possesses, but the game takes the time to flip the screen around before sending you the picture. Sure, it might not seem like much time is taken, but when you want to browse through cards and instead find yourself sitting through the tedium of rotating imagery over and over and over, you'll want to hurl the game into something damaging. It drags what little gameplay there is even lower, making you wait just to get back to the boring game itself.

So you have a game that looks bad, sounds terrible, and plays on a level of enjoyment much akin to hurling your grandmother down a flight of stairs. Any effective strategies you could hope for are immediately dismissed by the game's random card-giving factor, multiplied by the computers' willingness to cheat oh-so-often. Yes, you can stack the deck in your favor, but the game just doesn't seem to care too much and will still deal you the same putrid sludge while your opponent - a person whom, by all rights, should crumple lifeless beneath one well-placed blow - runs amok all over you. Congrats, Infogrames, you succeeded in making me bash a Dragon Ball game. To anyone who bought this game, I apologize for not warning you sooner.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 08/12/04