Dragon Ball Z: Attack of the Saiyans
There could be a joke here but there’s nothing funnier than the fact they think we need more Dragon Ball Z games
Tags: Dragon Ball Z: Attack of the Saiyans Categories: DS Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Mike "Two Tone" McConnell on Jan 22nd, 2010
The turn based RPG is far more versatile than people give it credit for. Though the action is limited to animations, it allows for stories to become much larger and the reliance on cut scenes detaches the characters from the player’s direct control, which allows the more cinematic attacks, that Square banked a franchise on. Dragon Ball Z: Attack of the Saiyans shows that versatility, but tries to force it into a shape unfamiliar to most RPG players.
Dragon Ball Z, despite having been out of production for two decades, has been rekindled with a HI-Def remaster, and three games released at once. Attack of the Sayians is the DS release, which for about the fourteenth or fifteenth time recounts the initial storyline of the Dragon Ball Z series. The episodic design of the series has been added to the narrative of the game, but it really breaks the game, as it tries to fit the format into a game style that is best suited to either an open world or an epic storyline. Forcing the player into short dungeons with boss fights and taking all exploration out of the genre is just pointless.
BioWatre’s Sonic RPG had a lot of warts, but it showed that you could easily makea n RPG about nearly any character. Dragon Ball Z got the look down, translating the marital arts into tight animations. Namco did something similar with the Naruto games, and its starting to get eerie how similar the two franchises are getting these days. The pacing may be off, but mechanically the game works.
It looks great too, as the DS may not be able to push the pixels of the consoles, but when you aren’t requiring real time rendering, and instead play animations, the characters can look a lot better on the hardware than they would in an action game. The dungeon design and enemy designs are generic, and other than the show’sS heavy hitters are just meant to be little more than filler between the cut scenes and boss battles. It shows off that pushing the action franchise into another genre doesn’t always work.
In the end this the umpteenth retelling of the same story, and a change in genre isn’t going to help anyone refresh the stale material. The new genre only manages to give the player a new set of cliché’s to deal with. There doesn’t seem to be any reason to continue to play these games, but they’ll keep coming. Like Elton John and reality TV, these games seem to exist solely as a punchline.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
| + Nice animations | 3.0 |
| What Doesn't | |
|
- Generic design - Same story as the last 100 Dragon Ball Z games |
|
| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| Sadly you know this isn't the last DBZ game you're going to see, and some of you are more than likely interested in this and more. STOP IT! | |
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Tags: Dragon Ball Z: Attack of the Saiyans
Posted by Mike "Two Tone" McConnell on Jan 22nd, 2010 and is filed under DS Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
