Dragon Ball: Raging Blast Review

Buncha’ dudes… some balls… camera issues… there’s gotta be a joke in there somewhere.

Well, here we are again, another substandard fighting game based on an animé about flexing muscles and grunting.

For the uninitiated, the story for DBZ involves a bunch of pricks hunting for a bunch of balls sorry, ballz, so that that another bunch of prickz don’t get their handz on the ballz (but in a totally not gay way), so that one or more wishez can be made to bring one or more dead prickz back to life, or to grant them eternal life, or to make underpantz or whatever, repeat ad nauseam until the ratingz tank. Why those moronz don’t just wish for this endless stupid cycle to stop happening after their third or fourth wish is a question that goes unasked in favor of more grunting and flexing.

Raging Blast is the same reiteration of the same fights you’ve probably already seen, read, or played through in the last version. I swear these gamez come out with such frequency that GR should just have a template made up for DBZ (and Naruto) to save time. The controlz are copy-pasted from the last game as well so if you’ve been with series for a while, your skillz will give you an edge when fighting other playerz, though sadly that is all your DBZ bitch-slapping talentz will get you. (Note: The 'z' joke endz now.)

The big improvement to this particular version is the vastness of each fighting area. While each area is (sort of) varied and great-looking, you need to be within arm's reach to really hurt the other guy, so the enormity of the levels is kind of a waste. Especially when you get blasted halfway across the damn planet by some cheap-ass hadoken kamehameha from one of the perplexingly large number of children in the game and then spend the next 30 seconds chasing that child down. At that point, the large levels become more a hassle than an improvement.

Another new addition to this latest installment (and by “another”, I mean “only”) is the “dynamic” camera (and by “dynamic”, I mean “shitty”). In nearly every fight, the camera passes through some of the scenery and completely obstructs the view, and if the other fighter is above or below you (and there is no way to tell which it is), the camera starts having fucking seizures trying to keep both fighters in frame and still stay behind you. It will inevitably fail to do both and freak the hell out and start pointing all over the place.

As with some earlier games in the series there are “what if” scenarios you can play through, but since the story for Dragonball is about as deep as a fucking spoon, the what-ifs are only more convoluted versions of the fights in the main story mode.

The online mode is there as it is with nearly every fighting game to come out in the last five years and it serves its purpose just dandy. Unfortunately, the broken gameplay immediately removes any gold starz DBZ would have eared for online functionality.

Give Dragonball Raging Blast a shot if you feel the fanboy need, but you would be better off buying another, better game.