Dragon Ball: Raging Blast — It’s Good Because It Sucks » 30ninjas

Dragon Ball: Raging Blast — It’s Good Because It Sucks

Share on Facebook posted 12-17-09 by Angelo D'Argenio

If you are an anime fan you will have, at some point, watched an episode of Dragon Ball Z. Like the Power Rangers, Pokemon, and Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z was just one of those guilty pleasures that made it to the good old USA from Japan through a process of slaughtering the plot with bad localization companies and ruining the characters with uninspired voice actors. Hell, ruining is really subjective when you think about it, because the plot from all of these series, and especially DBZ, wasn’t all that good to begin with. It featured big burly muscled monkey men who could fly and shoot laser beams out of their hands, each with the power to destroy the world, nay, the whole universe with a thought. It was crony and campy and features lines like “I will send you to another dimension!” that kicked in whenever characters talked about killing each other. Still, we loved it, and Dragon Ball Z continues to be one of the most popular animes of all time, no matter how bad it continues to be. We gave it a lot of free passes just because it was a staple of our childhood days, especially since, for many of us, it was what introduced us to anime in the first place. As much as I love ragging on DBZ, if it didn’t exist I wouldn’t be here writing this review in the first place.

Now, ever since there was a console to play it on, there has been some form of Dragon Ball videogame. I’m not joking here; the Dragon Ball series goes back as far as the NES, even though those never really made it to America. However, even though a new episode of Dragon Ball hasn’t come out since the last episode of Dragon Ball GT back in November 1997, the popularity of the series has continued to allow for more and more Dragon Ball themed games to hit the market, making the franchise able to rival Mario in its scope. The latest title in the franchise is Dragon Ball: Raging Blast for the PS3 and Xbox 360. It is a fun game that most Dragon Ball fans can enjoy, if only because it inherits the free passes that the series itself has been getting from us for years.

… that was a long introduction.

Anyway, Dragon Ball: Raging Blast is basically a sequel to the Tenkaiichi series of DBZ fighters that were so popular on the Wii and PS2. Fans of those games will be happy to know that not much has changed. The core gameplay is basically the same, with some balance tweaks thrown in to make the game less cheesy. As before, the game is controlled via an over the shoulder point of view, and most of the fighting is centered around quick combos, over the top special moves, and lots and lots of positioning. As is the case in Dragon Ball Z, many of your attacks will be knocking your opponents every which way, and you have to repeatedly dash after them to continue the hurt. You have full freedom of movement no matter what character you play, and you are able to fly through the air at massive speeds and will do so regularly during the fast paced fighting. Movement and fighting itself feels smoother, and the controls are very responsive, and while projectile attacks have been seriously weakened to address the issues previous titles had with camping and terrain abuse, the camera glitches that made camping and terrain abuse possible in the first place are still present.

The camera in Dragon Ball: Raging Blast is shit-tastic, but this isn’t anything new with the franchise. Since you have such freedom of movement, your only way to tell where your opponent is, is via the use of a “lock on” button. This should work, except all that it really does is point you in the right direction toward your opponent. If your opponent is behind a wall or down a cliff, he can keep you running near indefinitely by taking cover behind It, because the lock on function will point you right through the obstacle. Sure you can chase him down, but this is where the game’s crappy vertical controls come in. Keep in mind that the lock-on function basically only faces you toward your opponent on the horizontal plane. If you are above or below your opponent, you will find the camera spinning wildly as you try to approach your foe, eventually to find you are turning around in circles and getting nowhere.

Still, as I said before, this is nothing new to DBZ fighting games, and fans have learned to ignore the shitty camera for a while now. As I said before, the gameplay is still basically all the same. All your special moves and projectiles still use Ki, which you have to charge up periodically during the fight. While you are charging you are basically standing still and helpless, so make sure to create some distance before you take a breather. Transformations are still there, and characters become more powerful as they undergo them. The massive imbalance between characters is also there, but no one ever liked DBZ games for their balance. The health and Ki meters have been reduced to tiny circles on your screen now, which is a give or take affair. Though they take up less space and allow you to see the action more clearly, they also make it hard to tell just how much health or Ki you have left, which is frustrating.

So the gameplay has not been overhauled, but to make up for it the game really scores on the presentation front. The slick cell shaded models look more like the anime than ever before. The lips still don’t match, but the body movements are totally believable. Special moves and other attacks are fast and stylized with manga like speed lines and after effects that really pull you in to the experience. In past DBZ titles, it felt like you were playing an approximation of the character you selected, while in Raging Blast, it almost feels as if you are watching the anime play out at your command, which is just great. The attention to detail is almost unheard of for an anime game that could pretty much get away with some run of the mill colors and textures. You will be enjoy watching every bit of this game, right down to the subtle lightning cracks around characters who have gone Super Saiyan 2.

The sound in Raging Blast is abysmal, however, this is actually par for the course for the DBZ series. The unfathomably shitty American voice actors are all there, and they are all delivering the same horrendous dialogue that made us fall in love with the series in the first place. The soundtrack is filled with hokey eighties thrash guitar, just like the series has always had, with the happy addition of some tunes reminiscent of the original Japanese series for the hardcore purists out there. It’s not that the sound quality is bad. On the contrary the sound is very crisp and clear, and characters make a habit of talking to each other both before during and after battles, making the whole experience more believable. Even so, none of these sound clips are actually good or well executed, but once again that is part of DBZ’s charm..

The game spans pretty much the entirety of DBZ, or at least the important stuff. The full Saiyan, Frieza, Cell, and Buu sagas are all represented, as well as the Bardock and Broly side stories. There are even cute little “what if” storylines, which feature some of the best and worst ideas you have seen in DBZ fanfiction. As you can imagine, this means that there are tons of characters, and as I said before not a damn one is balanced. Still, there are more than enough modes to take these characters for a spin in. There is tournament mode, versus mode, story mode, survival, time attack, score attack, arcade mode, knock out attack, and hell even a customization option! For those of you who can look over the fundamental imbalance in characters, you can take your fighters online for ranked and unranked matches that, unlike most fighting games with online support, don’t suffer even a bit of lag (at least in my experience).

There is a lot to like about Dragon Ball: Raging Blast. Like the Tenkaiichi series before it, it manages to be a fighting game that doesn’t feel like any other fighter on the market. Still, while innovation is good, there are some serious flaws to fix before the Dragon Ball formula is perfected. However, once the camera and the fundamental character imbalance issues are addressed, this series has serious potential to appeal even to people who have never heard of DBZ before (yeah like those people exist). Until then, this game is good enough for hardcore or even casual fans of the series. It’s not a game I would rush out to get as if my life depended on it, but there are certainly worse things you could add to your collection. Hell, if you have ever practiced throwing your own Kamehameha, it is at least worth a rent.