The first alarm bells ring at the title. Actually, you’ll only hear these bells if you’re a long time fan. Up until this game, each of the titles started with Dragon Ball Z, while this time around we have Dragon Ball: Raging Blast, which is distinctly Z-less. You might assume that this would mean that the game encompasses all three Dragon Ball series, so Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball GT. If you did, you’d be wrong. Why did the developers go Z-less when this game only contains Dragon Ball Z material? We probably will never find out.
As with all Dragon Ball Z fighting games, you’ve got an assortment of story modes mixed with traditional fighting game modes. The story mode, known as Dragon Collection this time around, is a terribly disjointed affair. For those who aren’t fans, there is pretty much no chance for them to know what’s going on, let alone pick up what’s going on. Heck, even fans might be a little dismayed. Dragon Collection is divided into a set of fights, and you can pick and choose them in just about any order. Sure, this allows it to be bit more accessible and bite-sized on the surface, but it kills the story… or whatever semblance of a story Dragon Ball Z had. The brief text introductions don’t cover enough and there are just too many inaccuracies enforced by the disjointed structure when compared to past games.
RAGE!?!?!.
Still, Dragon Collection does let you play through the Saiyan, Freiza, Android and Buu sagas with relative sense of recreation. As a bonus, you’ve got the Bardock and Broly sagas to blast through as well. The What if scenarios have the potential to be interesting though. Some of them are fun, such as seeing Super Saiyan 3 Vegeta, while others come off even more contrived than usual. Yes, that is possible. Still, it’s the least we could have asked for from the usual generic retelling of the same damn story. It’s another reason that Dragon Ball games need a serious rethink, that the story has already been told too many times by now. Unforunately though, you need to play through if you want to unlock all the characters.
While Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit was the HD follow-up to the original Budokai titles, where battles were fought on a 2D-ish plane, it felt as if a lot was being held back for the inevitable Burst Limit 2. Similarily, Dragon Ball: Raging Blast builds off the Budokai Tenkaichi titles, that had you fighting from a third person perspective. As odd as this may sound, it actually did a much better job of recreating the look and feel of the show, despite some control and camera idiosyncrasies. Again though, Raging Blast feels like it’s holding back for its inevitable sequel, which means that it doesn’t really evolve much over its predecessors. In fact, it's almost a devolution.
Apart from a few minor tweaks in the controls, the game pretty much plays the same as the Budokai Tenkaichi titles. Played from something of a third person perspective, the focus was more on using light combos to knock your foe before charging you special and ultimate attacks, which did a lot more damage. The big difference here is that the developers have tried to further simplify things. Special attacks are performed using the right analog stick and a few of the subtleties in the system have been taken out. There are a few problems caused by this.
Goku's tossing up between landscaping and demolitions.
Firstly, the camera hasn’t adapted. Previously, if you lost your opponent, you could scan for their ‘ki’. This allowed you to locate the foe if they sped off somewhere. This time, it’s too easy to lost your opponent and the camera can’t cope. As such, you spend a significant portion of the fighting without being able to see your opponent, because they’re either directly above or below you. Around ledges and walls, you’ll have a fair bit of trouble as well. Secondly, the controls are unresponsive. This doesn’t really help for what is essentially a fighting game. In particular, the controls seem to have a very small margin for error, which makes the more complicated techniques useless and often the special attacks won’t register.
DBZ games are notorious for their erratic AI and difficulty levels. Raging Blast is no exception, with the AI on hard being on the borderline of cheating. Sure, it’s not too bad on easy most of the time, but the aggression and speed of the AI on hard makes the game laughably futile at times. Worst of all, the AI will almost always win the ‘clashes’ where you try to get in the most hits with turns of the left analog nub, as they seem to have the jump on you. In order to retell the story as accurately as possible, the game often interrupts a fight for an interlude or switch, but often the enemy comes back with more health than before, which can get really frustrating. Quite frankly, the above flaws are all aspects that were done better in the previous games.
While lacking in comparison to the latter Budokai Tenkaichi titles, particularly as there are only 43 base characters in the game, Raging Blast does pretty well in terms of content. Despite being completely disjointed and making the story even more non-sensical than usual, the Dragon Collection has a lot to get through. There are a heap of other modes to tackle, such as Arcade, Survival, Time Attack and a couple of unique ones that you need to unlock. There are also Tournaments and Versus modes that can be played in single or tag teams, on the one console or online. The online mode itself is fairly smooth, particularly as you don’t need to be putting in complicated combos. Finally, you’ve got the Dojo to learn about the game’s mechanics, the option to customise the special attacks on your characters and a rather deep and informative encyclopaedia.
Owned.
Graphically, Raging Blast isn’t much of a system pusher. The characters are well recreated and nicely animated, but are hampered with very noticeable aliasing. The environments are nicely destructable and have great potential for chaos, but severely lacking in detail. Thankfully, you can switch from the awful, awful English voices to the serviceable Japanese voices. Still, the soundtrack actually manages to do a pretty good job. Overall, you can say that Raging Blast does at least manage to recreate the look, feel and sound of the show.
The problem with Dragon Ball: Raging Blast is not necessarily that it’s a bad game on it’s own, but it’s significantly lacking when compared to it predecessors. From the controls to the telling of the story to the content, everything has been done better. While it’s mainly the fans that will get anything out of this game, they’re not really getting any more than what they have already had. The fact that what is essentially the game is fundamentally worse than it's original predecessor on just about all levels is either a damning indicment on the developer or cynical attempt to continue milking the cash cow with an improved sequel. And unless the fundamental game is improved, this cash cow might soon run dry.
Don't think I'm the same as I was back when I was a Sony fanboy.
and ai hard mode isnt hard at all even the extreme rank matches werent that hard with 3 bars of hp.
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