review
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POSTED 9/2/14


DRAGON BALL Z: BATTLE OF Z

Bandai
PS3 (also on Xbox 360, Vita)

As any serious collector knows, to truly succeed at your chosen pastime you need to assemble as complete a set as possible.

If you’re an obsessive, collectory fan of Dragon Ball Z, you might be feeling a tad short-changed. Sure, there are rip-roaringingly funktastic figurines, ace comics, more DVDs and Blu-rays than you could poke a laser at and even super-spherical crystal bally thingummies. But there’s also a history of predominantly average videogame translations.

So to Battle of Z, with its single player campaign, oodles of collectible power-up cards, arenas aplenty, online multiplayer and graphics that do the animated series justice.

That’s the positive spin. We could have gone with...

So to Battle of Z, with its incomprehensible single player campaign, incomprehensible menus, incomprehensible controls, crazy camera and mind-meltingly manic online play.

OK, so that last one might appeal to some.

While we’ve become accustomed to fairly typical one-on-one brawlers from the series, BoZ does change things up. No matter which character you choose from the convoluted menu system (note: if we select ‘Start’ don’t ask us whether we’re sure, for if we weren’t we wouldn’t have clicked on ‘Start’, ‘k?), it’s more of a you against the weirdo power-sucking waves of mutie blue thingummies deal. Well, in single player. In multiplayer four versus four it’s just, well, you know that ‘i’ word we keep using? We know what it means.

If you’re hyper-dedicated you’ll get to grips with the control scheme, but as a pick-up-and-play game BoZ is scarcely welcoming. It’s nice to fly and all, but we’d rather concentrate on not having our energy constantly zapped than trying to get our character’s fucking feet back on the ground. As for targeting...

The problem with being a completeist collector is that for every Darth Vader there’s an Elan Sleazebaggano.

take me back to the start...

 



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ALL WRITTEN CONTENT COPYRIGHT © AMY FLOWER 2008-2018. GAME IMAGES COURTESY OF RESPECTIVE GAMES COMPANIES.