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Review: Dragon Ball Z Budokai 2 |
I just put down my PS2 controller and MAN! I feel like JESUS! No, not because I’m black, wise and don’t know who my father is. But because I played Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 2 so that you don’t have to.
You already know where this review is going, don’t you? Good. Then let us begin.
Rather than go about this like a faggot and look for a technical fighter in this game, I decided to look at from the point of view of a fan. That is who this game was aimed towards, right? Well then, as a fan, I can honestly say that this game has far too many shortcomings to please even the most diehard of Dragon Ball Z fans and even the most forgiving and casual of fighting game fans.
The game starts off with a very engaging animated introduction that immerses you right into the center of the DBZ Universe. After that, you’ll notice a couple of immediate changes. Firstly, the story mode has been completely abolished. Secondly, the graphics have changed dramatically and there are A LOT of load times. Other than that, if you have played the first game, you should be very familiar with all of the other game modes. The mode consists of Dragon World, Dueling, World Tournament, Training, Edit Skills and the standard Options mode.
Let’s start with Dragon World since this is the main feature of the game. Dragon World is the replacement for the fabulous story mode of DBZ: Budokai. Personally, I thought that if there was any selling point to this Dragon Ball series, it would have to be the liberal, but highly enjoyable recreation of the DBZ saga in story mode. Well, they took that out. I’m sure that everyone here knows that when you build a building, if you don’t have a strong foundation, that building is sure to crumble even before it is complete. That is analogous to what seems to have happened here.
Dragon World is a board game. Dragon World is a mandatory board game. Dragon world is a mandatory board game that must be completed several times to completely unlock the game. Dragon World SUCKS! It starts out with a very weak storyline (no weaker than DBZ’s actual storyline, mind you) in which all of the bad guys team up to defeat Goku before you find the dragonballs. Dragon World is about ten stages long and depending on what you do in the board game, there seem to be alternate outcomes for each stage. Your goals vary from board to board, and you move around the board in teams of two, three, or four, which you can choose. After about the second stage, the story completely falls apart and it becomes the most inane, repetitive, unfulfilling, frustrating, and just plain upsetting act of tedium that has ever been assigned the monicre “game.”
Here is the cycle of degeneration. No exaggeration, no jokes;
It begins ambitiously, with you fighting characters the likes of Nappa, Raditz and eventually the Ginyu Force. Your job is to beat each character between 1 and 5 times, depending on how many stocks of life that they have. They summon Saiba Men and you have to beat them.
Next, replace Nappa and Raditz with Vegeta, Frieza and the Ginyu Force, and you fight them between 1 and 5 times depending on how many stocks of life that they have. Then two boards of all of the Android Saga characters and a bunch of Saibamen and Cell Jrs.
Next, you do the same thing for 6 more boards with Frieza, Cell and Buu REPEATEDLY. In each stage, Babidi, Buu, someone, and in some cases NO ONE resurrects Cell and Frieza. The cool part about this is that they just make it artificially hard by adding extra life gauges to each character, increasing their damage and making it just take longer to beat them. Not only that, but in the later stages, Cell and ‘Whoeverthefuck’ repeatedly summon Saibamen and Cell Jrs. no matter how many times that you beat these things. They can also move around the board and they steal all of the money, items, capsules and power ups that are available to you on the board. They do it quickly, precisely, and everytime too.
Each board takes at least 45 minutes to complete. I got to what I think is the last board and then quit. By this time, I had totally lost interest in this aspect of the game.
I’m not going to talk about the other modes, as there is literally no reason to play them unless you have unlocked all of the necessities from Dragon World.
The thing that the most time was put into on this game, and the shining feature in this edition is the graphics. The game looks really nice and it falls in line with the stylized look of the later episodes of the series. It really brings the first game together too, because I wondered why they didn’t use Cel-Shading before, and to me, it seems like the most obvious reason is because of how drastically the look of the cartoon changed between the Saiyan Invasion Saga and the Buu Saga.
I don’t think that this game makes the most high tech use of Cel Shading, but this is definitely how a Dragon Ball Z game should look. Everyone looks totally true to their DBZ counterparts and no punches were pulled in making this game visually appealing. You can even see that vagina-looking wedgie thing that the Z fighters have on BOTH THE BACK AND FRONT of their pants in the series. That’s a nice touch.
The fireballs, and backgrounds look like they were ripped directly from the cartoon too. The colors are perfect and the stages are vibrant and have some interactive elements to them. My favorite thing in this game has to be the randomly generated effect of knocking your characters through buildings, mountains and over enormous bodies of water that seem to go on forever. This effect was taken straight from the cartoon and it was implemented seamlessly. The only problem with it is that you can’t control when it happens and it takes off extra damage when it happens to you.
Huh? What’s that? You wanted to know if the game had any lighting effects? … Moving on.
This game has no shortage of characters. Almost all of the favorites from every saga are here. When you start the game, you only have about 15, but by the time you are finished with Dragon world Mode (LOL) you are probably going to have about 30 characters to choose from. Even when you are done finding characters, you can find a ton of fusion capsules throughout the game which allows you to form new, better characters like Gotenks, one of the many forms of Buu and if you’re lucky, BLACK NAPPA (Blappa for short). There are also some joke fusions in the game, in which characters who would never fuse are fused together (such as Goku and Satan). Unfortunately, to do this all, you have to get the items in Dragon World mode, which you unfortunately can’t do sometimes because it is the job of DW opponents to stop you from unlocking these secrets and then automatically saving THEIR progress.
The cast is comprised of almost everyone from Budokai and a bunch of new people such as Dabura (AKA Deborah), the Samuel L. Jackson of evil funk, or Android 20 (Dr. Gero), Teen Gohan, Adult Gohan and GREAT SAIYAMAN! There are several other characters but the distinctions are scarce. Everyone shares the same moves, aside from exclusive signatures, so there is nothing different about any of the characters to address.
The gameplay in this game is attrocious. This is what made me have to give up on it, despite how much I looked forward to liking it. Every character in the game starts out with a single special combo. The only way to make your characters stronger is to go through Dragon World and earn abilities for them. The abilities that you earn are random, and there is no filter in the game that prevents you from getting the same capsule ability over and over again. I went two hours once and got about 5 Destructive Waves with Piccolo, and I can only use one. The cool thing about gaining that move so many times is that that’s the move that he begins the game with.
Not only that, but if you want to get stronger, then you have to sacrifice other abilities, as each character only has so much space. Many abilities take up to 3 ability slots, so you can’t equip that many. For example, say you want to have Goku go all the way up to Super Saiyan 3, or if you want him to have the Halo, then first, it is mandatory that you equip King Kai Fistx20, Super Saiyan, Super Saiyan 2, and Super Saiyan 3, now you only have four more spaces to work with. That is one of the most lenient examples I could come up with. I can have a character with no special abilities at all, and a lot of characters that you unlock start out with zero special abilities that you have to randomly hope for since you also can’t use them in Dragon World mode.
The controls themselves are among the most unresponsive I’ve ever touched. For one thing, there is no jump, dodging (Guard +UpUpUpUpUp/DownDownDownDownDown) is impossible. You have to jerk the joypad off to get dodging to work, and since the game pauses as soon as a fireball is thrown, there is almost no way to dodge it. Doing combos is hard, because many attacks don’t link to each other and you literally HAVE to mash to get shit out. The recovery times on the computer are lenient, but your recovery times are AWFUL. All you can really do is attack, as blocking doesn’t work very well in that game either, and the computer can block you and dodge you flawlessly. Eventually, you are just relegated to mashing on the P button and hoping that the computer doesn’t counterattack as winning a battle is decided almost entirely before the match begins (as some characters have twice the life gauge).
The best combo in the game is PPPPE. Remember it. Every default character starts out with this and only this, there are about three different fighting styles in teh game for all of the characters, and even then, they all play exactly the same and have the same combo commands. Unfortunately, this is all you will ever have to work with when you play it with your friends in two player mode, and believe you me, they will NOT be impressed. I had a friend over the first day I bought this game, and after playing it, he slapped me in the face. HARD. This was a soap opera slap, people. The thing is, I derived more pleasure from that slap in the face than I did from the other slap in the face, known as DBZ Budokai 2.
The sound and music in this game are great. This game is really heavy on the hilarious trumpet music that made DBZ the series so great and that was peculiarly missing from the US series. Coming into the game and hearing the music made me really excited for what was in store for me. Almost every track in this game feels like it came from the series and brings a smile to your face. The voice samples are well done and are apparent throughout Dragon World and in the game as well. The only sound flaw, which to me, serves as a good example of how little time was put into upgrading anything aside from the graphics; Perfect Cell. In the scenes, Perfect Cell has his awesome voice, but in DBZB and in DBZB2, he has his Imperfect Cell voice during the matches. This is just AWFUL, how could they not fix this glaring flaw? It is almost as if they didn’t play the game before they decided to release it.
The extras in this game are comprised of several mandatory features that you have to unlock to make the game even remotely enjoyable, thus they are deemed extras. The extras include, regular moves for every character, various capsules that do stupid shit like raise your defensive stats, and a few hidden characters. Extras are earned through beating World Tournament, Dragon World and buying them from the Skill Shop. The average price of Skill Shop spoils are 1,500 dollars. You get money that you find in Dragon World at a rate of about 100 to 500 bucks a stage. I’ve seen 100 dollar icons and 500 dollar icons. I’ve played the game for about 10 hours in that mode exclusively, and so far, I have earned a whopping 2700 dollars. Cool, now I can buy, “LIFE VEST” which makes SOME character 5% stronger and takes up 3 ability spaces. HOORAY FOR ME!
In closing, I went into this game with an accepting, forgiving eye, and even that couldn’t save it. It is an irredeemable pile of crap and there is nothing that it does better than Budokai 1 aside from the graphics. I didn’t expect a great game, or even a good game. I thought it would be mediocre and entertaining. Instead it is frustrating and boring. I had wondered why, the day after the game came out, there were already three of them that had been returned to the place I worked at, and now I see why. Everyone was expecting a game that was made for the fans. Instead, we got a game that seems more like it was made by the fans. On the back of the instruction manual, it says that Budokai 1 went Greatest Hits. That means that the game is now 20 dollars brand new. Just buy that, it is a superior version and the story mode is very engaging and they left all of the fan pleasing in that issue of the game. There is also some fun to be had. As for Budokai 2… well let’s just say that I saved my receipt. The only time you’ll ever hear ‘Kamehameha!’ coming from my household from this point on will be from me… while I’m firing those ‘jizzums’ at the girls from Final Fantasy X-2.
