The child who was once beaten up by both Yamcha and Tien is eventually depicted as powerful enough to fight gods. The three Dragon Ball shows conspire to put Goku through the proverbial ringer as his character grows exponentially, with Goku unlocking new forms throughout the franchise. The original Dragon Ball focuses on the adventures of a young Goku, while Dragon Ball Z instead centers on a later point in Goku’s life after the character has started a family of his own with Chi-Chi and Gohan. In all this time, the franchise has taken the Saiyan hero and the Z-Warriors to all sorts of different places, from the Saiyan homeworld to King Kai's planet. Fun though that may be, it won’t take long until you’re craving more, and unless you’re a hardcore fan, Battle of Z doesn’t have that to offer.The Dragon Ball universe's canon has encompassed over 30 years of stories for Goku - and his age in each saga has changed quite a bit. But that all goes back to my first point: unless you really know that stuff, all Battle of Z has to offer you is a bunch of guys with insane hair flying around and whaling on each other (which, come to think of it, actually sounds totally awesome). Again, this may all make perfect sense of you’re a DBZ devotee (and if it does, I fully expect to be schooled on the finer points of Dragon Ball Z lore down in the comments). In other words, this is where some semblance of a story would’ve come in handy. You can modify them slightly to make them a little more powerful or more accurate - but even then, they only change the attacks into slightly more supercharged punches, kicks and laserbeams. There’s one button for melee attacks and one button for long-range attacks, and even if the names of those attacks may vary from character to character, they don’t change all that much. Of course, even in bite-sized chunks, the game’s combat limitations are noticeable. Sure, it gets a little repetitive after awhile, seeing as a) the environments don’t change all that much and b) there’s no apparent rhyme or reason for why, exactly, you’re flying around punching bad (or, possibly, good?) guys, but it’s still a heck of a lot of fun in small doses - and, thankfully, for the most part small doses is what Battle of Z offers, with even the longest levels being over and done with in about fifteen minutes. I’m a bit of a sucker for superhero games, and it’s hard to think of something more superheroic than flying around, punching people through rocks and firing laser beams out of your hands. This lack of story is kind of a shame, because the game itself is kind of enjoyable. (Or, alternatively, it really is just a bunch of random characters thrown together, and none of it makes any sense even if you are a fan of the series…but seeing as I’m the novice here, it seems wise to give the game’s developers the benefit of the doubt.) At the risk of stereotyping, I get that fan service is big for anime-centred games, but Battle of Z seems to take that to an extreme, in that, as far as I can tell, it’s nothing but fan service. Occasionally they say a few things to each other, but if they’re saying stuff that’s advancing some kind of story, it’s totally lost on me. Every single level plops you and a few other characters down, then some more characters show up, and you fight. In Battle of Z, by contrast, there’s none of that. I mean, even if I didn’t totally get all the nuances of that aforementioned One Piece game, it still had some nods towards a plot structure that meant I could more or less get a handle on what was going on. Ordinarily, this probably wouldn’t be an issue. I loved Asura’s Wrath, I enjoyed One Piece: Pirate Warriors 2, and I have vague memories of watching Astro Boy at some point in the mid- to late-’80s, but if my life depended on telling you a single thing about Goku, Vegeta and Co., I’d be a goner. And by “people like me”, I mean people who have little to no experience with anime in general, or Dragon Ball Z in particular. Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Z really isn’t meant for people like me.
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