Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot Ranking: A
This game follows the anime from Raditz’s arrival to the defeat of Majin Buu very faithfully – honestly, if you’ve never seen the anime, you could probably just play this game and you’d know the plot pretty well by the end. Graphically, this game is amazing and definitely captures the atmosphere of the show from the world to the characters. You explore the world of Dragon Ball open-world style and, to add to the immersion and nostalgia, you can find items and memorabilia scattered around that call-back to moments in the series. For instance, you can visit Grandpa Gohan’s house, where Goku grew up, and nearby you can find a card depicting where Goku first meets Bulma at the beginning of the original Dragon Ball, an event that kickstarts the entire series. There’s a Z-Encyclopedia that fills as you play the game, giving you all sorts of information on the Dragon Ball universe. Completionists (like myself) are going to have a field day with this thing. In the overworld, you can do all sorts of optional things like hunt/forage for food to make meals with or collect minerals to upgrade your car, which you can race with. It’s all somewhat silly, but it’s all optional and fits in with the show’s often silly moments.
On the other hand, battles are a mixed bag. They look and sound great, capturing some of the epic scale from the show…when the camera is doing its job properly. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case much of the time. Suppose an enemy knocks you into the ground. The camera will pan behind you, meaning you’re now staring at a bunch of broken rocks and dirt and can’t see anything that’s going on while you’re continuing to get attacked. Battle control is also very clunky and unresponsive, meaning I often struggled to get my characters to execute their attacks before the enemy knocks them back. Oh, and the enemy has a bunch of abilities that knock you back and stun you, so if you’re fighting multiple enemies, you’ll spend much of the time stun-locked (while also staring at a screen full of dust clouds, broken rocks, and flashy effects rather than being able to see the battle itself).
Luckily, the game is pretty easy, so this isn’t a game-breaking problem, even if it’s really frustrating. During the main story, the game gives you plenty of experience to keep everyone leveled appropriately, following the in-universe increases in power (e.g. Goku gains a bunch of experience right before fighting Nappa as a result of his story training with Kai). This means level grinding on overworld enemies isn’t necessary, but if you want to, the game makes it pretty fun with one of my favorite features – instant victories. If your character is at least 5 levels higher than is an overworld enemy and you fly into it at boosted speed, the game will resolve the battle immediately (with a satisfying slow-motion collision) and give you the items/experience you would’ve gotten if you’d beat the enemy manually. Also, enemies beaten this way tend to respawn faster, meaning you can grind experience by simply flying back and forth into enemies repeatedly. If you find it boring, you don’t need to do it. If you find it fun/satisfying, the game makes it easy and efficient. As a bonus, this means you don’t need to deal with the clunky battle system.
…And here comes my first big gripe. In the post-game, overworld enemies now scale to your level, so instant victories become impossible, or at least much less common. The post-game is also the only time grinding is anywhere near necessary, as the story is over and you aren’t getting experience from story events anymore. They took one of the best designed features of the game and inverted it into something maddening. Let’s also not forget the idiocy of now having generic Saibamen stronger than Majin Buu all over the place. Now…there is a way around this, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is a rock-stupid design decision.
Next: the game is buggy. For me, each time I went to upgrade my car with Bulma, the game would crash within 1-2 seconds of entering the menu. I spent so much time trying to enter the menu, apply the upgrade, and exit before the game crashed (and having to restart the game if it crashed before I could do it). There’s an infamous glitch where the game would freeze after completing a training room mission with Android 21. I had a few sidequests bug out and necessitate I use the time machine to redo them in the post-game.
The controls are pretty poorly designed as well. Some menus require using the keyboard whereas others use the mouse. For instance, in the Community Boards, you can’t mouse over to a slot and click it; instead, you need to use the WASD keys to position the cursor and then click the mouse to select it. When upgrading skills in the skill tree, the same sort of thing happens, though sometimes the mouse works and sometimes it doesn’t, so it might just be another bug.
In the end, this game’s a great visual treat and a wonderful nostalgia trip. Some of the design choices and bugs are frustrating, but they ultimately don’t cripple the game too much.
PS: If you’re a Yamcha fan, this game might anger you. It’s actually somewhat saddening.
Here’s maximum level Goku at the end of the game. I’d comment on how ridiculous a battle power of 26.6 million is, but I don’t think the BP values in this game mean anything at all.
This game follows the anime from Raditz’s arrival to the defeat of Majin Buu very faithfully – honestly, if you’ve never seen the anime, you could probably just play this game and you’d know the plot pretty well by the end. Graphically, this game is amazing and definitely captures the atmosphere of the show from the world to the characters. You explore the world of Dragon Ball open-world style and, to add to the immersion and nostalgia, you can find items and memorabilia scattered around that call-back to moments in the series. For instance, you can visit Grandpa Gohan’s house, where Goku grew up, and nearby you can find a card depicting where Goku first meets Bulma at the beginning of the original Dragon Ball, an event that kickstarts the entire series. There’s a Z-Encyclopedia that fills as you play the game, giving you all sorts of information on the Dragon Ball universe. Completionists (like myself) are going to have a field day with this thing. In the overworld, you can do all sorts of optional things like hunt/forage for food to make meals with or collect minerals to upgrade your car, which you can race with. It’s all somewhat silly, but it’s all optional and fits in with the show’s often silly moments.
On the other hand, battles are a mixed bag. They look and sound great, capturing some of the epic scale from the show…when the camera is doing its job properly. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case much of the time. Suppose an enemy knocks you into the ground. The camera will pan behind you, meaning you’re now staring at a bunch of broken rocks and dirt and can’t see anything that’s going on while you’re continuing to get attacked. Battle control is also very clunky and unresponsive, meaning I often struggled to get my characters to execute their attacks before the enemy knocks them back. Oh, and the enemy has a bunch of abilities that knock you back and stun you, so if you’re fighting multiple enemies, you’ll spend much of the time stun-locked (while also staring at a screen full of dust clouds, broken rocks, and flashy effects rather than being able to see the battle itself).
Luckily, the game is pretty easy, so this isn’t a game-breaking problem, even if it’s really frustrating. During the main story, the game gives you plenty of experience to keep everyone leveled appropriately, following the in-universe increases in power (e.g. Goku gains a bunch of experience right before fighting Nappa as a result of his story training with Kai). This means level grinding on overworld enemies isn’t necessary, but if you want to, the game makes it pretty fun with one of my favorite features – instant victories. If your character is at least 5 levels higher than is an overworld enemy and you fly into it at boosted speed, the game will resolve the battle immediately (with a satisfying slow-motion collision) and give you the items/experience you would’ve gotten if you’d beat the enemy manually. Also, enemies beaten this way tend to respawn faster, meaning you can grind experience by simply flying back and forth into enemies repeatedly. If you find it boring, you don’t need to do it. If you find it fun/satisfying, the game makes it easy and efficient. As a bonus, this means you don’t need to deal with the clunky battle system.
…And here comes my first big gripe. In the post-game, overworld enemies now scale to your level, so instant victories become impossible, or at least much less common. The post-game is also the only time grinding is anywhere near necessary, as the story is over and you aren’t getting experience from story events anymore. They took one of the best designed features of the game and inverted it into something maddening. Let’s also not forget the idiocy of now having generic Saibamen stronger than Majin Buu all over the place. Now…there is a way around this, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is a rock-stupid design decision.
Next: the game is buggy. For me, each time I went to upgrade my car with Bulma, the game would crash within 1-2 seconds of entering the menu. I spent so much time trying to enter the menu, apply the upgrade, and exit before the game crashed (and having to restart the game if it crashed before I could do it). There’s an infamous glitch where the game would freeze after completing a training room mission with Android 21. I had a few sidequests bug out and necessitate I use the time machine to redo them in the post-game.
The controls are pretty poorly designed as well. Some menus require using the keyboard whereas others use the mouse. For instance, in the Community Boards, you can’t mouse over to a slot and click it; instead, you need to use the WASD keys to position the cursor and then click the mouse to select it. When upgrading skills in the skill tree, the same sort of thing happens, though sometimes the mouse works and sometimes it doesn’t, so it might just be another bug.
In the end, this game’s a great visual treat and a wonderful nostalgia trip. Some of the design choices and bugs are frustrating, but they ultimately don’t cripple the game too much.
PS: If you’re a Yamcha fan, this game might anger you. It’s actually somewhat saddening.
Here’s maximum level Goku at the end of the game. I’d comment on how ridiculous a battle power of 26.6 million is, but I don’t think the BP values in this game mean anything at all.