Review: Dragon Ball Z - Battle of the Z (360)

Dragon Ball Z (DBZ) games are the anime equivalent to the seasonal release of Madden and 2K sports franchises. At this point, there are more DBZ games than seasons of the television show. That's not necessarily a negative as the Dragon Ball franchise is fertile ground for fighting games, plus who doesn't get a kick out of Goku screaming Kai-o-ken or for the Kame-hame-ha wave.

Just like Jell-O, there's always room for another good fighting game.

Battle of Z takes a bit of a different tact this time around. The battles are no longer the one-on-one power-up fests. Now the action is arena-style team warfare, with you trying to press your team on to victory. Most battles will have you with up to three allies taking on assorted enemies.

In true DBZ action, the battles utilize all three dimensions exceptionally with attacks coming from all directions. The use of the vertical dimension paired with the frantic switching of opponents means that not only do you have to be aware of your surroundings, your attention is drawn in a lot of directions at once. The battles in later levels become not only more difficult, but even faster. You'll have to make quick assertive decisions to keep your team alive and give them a chance at winning.

The targeting system is easily the most important feature of the game – it allows you to move in relation to your selected opponent, and even more importantly, to switch between targeted enemies with a controller flick for a seamless change up of attacks.

The combat is very bare-bones; which will keep most of the avid fighting game fans at arm's length, but instead you get a game with an accessibility that is not usually found in most fighting games. Each character is reduced to a handful of moves easily executed from the controller button instead of the "pop quiz" method of character combat most games use. You'll find that you've can master the move set for a new character in a few minutes compared to most games where you'll spend an hour or two trying to work your way through a tutorial mode of impossible-to-complete actions.

The big pet peeve is on the ally AI, to which I was unaware that they actually did anything for the first ten missions in the game. I heard them chirping amongst themselves to help re-create the story-lines but I can't recall them doing much other than help set up a few combo-attacks when we reduce the enemy numbers down to the point where we outnumber them. Playing with actual living/breathing allies makes the result take a 180-degree spin: your team mates either actively support you, or better yet, actually defeat more than just the rank-and-file enemies on the field. The ratio of times that I revived my downed allies to where they successfully revived me would be around 20 to 1. So, on the higher levels prepare to swear at your TV after your allies decide that perhaps winning wasn't the best plan going forward.

The visuals, sound-effects, and voice acting are exactly up to par as to what we've come to expect from a Namco-Bandai anime-game release. They take the care to match the source material and they do an exceptional job of recreating the character designs as lovingly as possible.

The negatives?

Collectables… while the concept of "gotta catch 'em all" works for some anime, the time sink of grinding for collectable drops is downright tedious. Why have a levelling up system for characters if you're going to negate the point of growth and instead use collectables to raise character stats? Better tactics and fighting skill get negated and ablated by people who have nothing better to do than grind for better kit. While you can freely move the best power-ups to any character without much trouble, you'll find that even with some of the auto-assign features, you'll spend a fair chunk of time trying to balance the kit for your team mates.

Online gameplay is a mixed bag also. The match-making is a little too thin for what it should be. More often than not, you'd end up with an incomprehensible blend of hard-core players and neophytes which ends up about as well as you'd expect. I found that the lag and time investment to get into a game, just to get my backside handed to me to be a little disconcerting. The online-mission play is night-and-day in comparison with actual human (or what-ever you'd classify online denizens) you'll find that it brings a life to the mode that the single player mode just didn't have. Especially now that you're not restricted to using just the canon characters for each mission (Really now? Who wants to be Yamucha? Nobody, that's who.)

All in all, I enjoyed playing Battle of Z. It was one of the better DBZ games that I've gotten to review, and will keep it in my personal rotation until my next fighting game fix comes along.

- Tazman
Follow @Tazman6666AE

The Good:
- Targeting system doing an excellent job of allowing you to keep your character aimed in the right direction in frantic battles
                       
The Bad:
- Never has a game's AI made it more relevant that you play with other players.
- Uggggg? Collectables? Which gamers crave this nonsense?