Unsung Marvels #1: Super Dragon Ball Z

 Is fandom the reason we can't have nice things?

 Dragon Ball games before the PS2/GC/XBox era have aged very poorly, Hyper Dimension, the SNES card-based RPG and Legends(My personal favorite, and another Unsung Marvel, but that is a story for another day) being the few standouts. Heck, I'd be willing to say that the first good Dragon Ball game was Hyper Dimension. Regardless, the PS2 era brought us Budokai and Budokai Tenkaichi, two different series of fighters, made by different developers, that fans still debate over which one is better.
 I always found the discussion a bit silly, Budokai is the better Fighting game, and Budokai Tenkaichi is the better Dragon Ball Z game. I say this because Tenkaichi has always been a fanservice game. There's over 120 characters, and the gameplay mechanics and character movements and attacks are made to simulate the highspeed flying battles of the show. Budokai fans accuse it of being a button masher, which is a bit true as it doesn't get as complex as Budokai 3, and the character balance is based on the series, rather than seeking every character to be on equal footing. Budokai, on the other hand, has a smaller roster, about to 30 or so characters, and plays more like a fighting game, the camera shows each character on the right and left side respectively(Tenkaichi's camera is on the back of whichever character is on the front, sounds odd, but it works). You have cancels, special cancels and the such, and characters are not overly stronger than others, although Super Saiyan 4 Gogeta is a bit cheap.

 Budokai fans and Budokai Tenkaichi fans hate each other, and they can't have both games coexisting. Either Budokai Tenkaichi is the best Dragon Ball Z game ever and Budokai sucks, or Budokai is the best Dragon Ball Z videogame series and Budokai Tenkaichi is a cheap mashfest. Sadly, one game got lost between these two titans, Super Dragon Ball Z. Released on Arcades first, unlike the other two series, and with the involvement of Street Fighter II's producer, Super was a game that meant to appeal to fans of Fighting games first, and fans of Dragon Ball second. And in the eyes of this Fighting Game fan, they succeeded.
 Super Dragon Ball Z is my favorite Dragon Ball Z game on the PS2. It's setup is a bit more similar to the Budokai series, with the camera having each fighter on both sides. Stages are a bit larger than most fighters, with uneven terrain in some cases, and you can move all around it, your character will be facing the enemy the entire time you move, mind you. Blocking is done by holding back, and you have two attack buttons: Weak and Strong. Interestingly, there's a jump button, a bit odd when you first boot up the game, but you get used to it eventually.

 Besides your life bar, there are two other gauges: Your three-tiered energy bar, which is used to unleash special attacks and an Action bar that governs dashing and flying. Flying is done by pressing jump twice, which will make your character hover(Chi-Chi uses Goku's cloud, Kintoun!(Yeah, Chi-Chi is in the game!)), and dashing is done by double tapping, you've also got universal dashing homing attacks. The biggest departure from the other Dragon Ball games of the era, is that Special and Super moves are performed with directional inputs, like traditional fighters.
 Then there's the presentation. While it's, on a technical level, not as good looking as the other games, featuring a pretty jaggy cell-shading coat of paint, but it aims for a handrawn look instead of the more universal look of the anime. Yes, this game focuses on the manga instead of the anime, so you may notice that character colors are slightly different. The stages look amazing and as if painted by hand. There's even Onomatopoeia's when really strong hits hit their mark. So while it may not boast the highest amount of polygons, it does have a unique look to itself, and in my opinion, the Dragon Ball Z game of the era that I find the most visually alluring. Oh, and I have to say that to this day, I find Cell's Muay Thai stance just awesome.

 The game also has some RPG mechanics. You can create a "Character Card", and every time you play using that card, you will receive experience points. Each character has a different maximum level, usually about 7-8. Every time you level up, you get to pick a skill from two different branches. These skills may be passive effects, or new moves, and some even change parts of your character, like Trunks or Gohan's Sword(Gohan uses a sword here!) or Cyborg Freezer's tail or you can give him a giant Cannon. You may also come across Dragon Balls, playing through Arcade Mode almost guarantees that you will get to summon Shenron. The Dragon is how you unlock characters and little extras, you may even unlock special Skills, like the Senzu Bean, or inherit one skill from any another character(I recommend Cell's), you also get colors and sometimes even costumes.
 So why was this game forgotten? I can see many issues why. First, the one that probably meant death in the Dragon Ball fandom: a 18 character roster. That's even less than Burst Limit(Which had less characters than Budokai 1). To be fair, they tried to get the most iconic characters, while also adding a couple of unique choices, that have never ever made another playable appeance: Gohan with the Z sword and teen Chi-Chi. Then there's the fact that 3 of them are almost clones: Mecha Freezer, Majin Vegeta and Piccolo Daimao play almost exactly like Freezer, Vegeta and Piccolo, perhaps with one different looking move or the such. I didn't play them extensively(I mained Trunks and Gohan!), but I didn't find many differences.

 Then there's the really few amount of modes, them being Arcade, Versus, Survival and Training. There's not much to do(Although I did create one character card for each character, and maxed their levels, unlocked every color and filled all their skill slots!). Oh, colors, yeah, you only unlock them for your Character Card, so if you want to use another color, you have to set it before going into the character select screen, which is a bit of a hassle. As for the music, it's on the blander side, very forgettable.
 As solid as I found the gameplay to be, most Dragon Ball fans wanted a Dragon Ball game and not a Fighting game. While it's a visually appealing game, it's not flashy enough for a Dragon Ball game. I remember going into the GameFaqs forum and making a thread about how underrated it was, one of the first responses I got? "The beams look like crap". Then there's the fact that characters don't zip around the screen or teleport behind each other, no, this game wanted to be a traditional fighting game with Dragon Ball elements, and not the other way around.
 Sadly, it seems that this game is destined to be forgotten. The Budokai series got a successor in "Burst Limit", which sadly received no sequels, and the Budokai Tenkaichi morphed into "Raging Blast", I tried the demo for Raging Blast 2 and.... it was not very good. For what it's worth, there's a "Battle of Z" coming out, and it looks really good, taking hints from the Dragon Ball Legends PS1 game, so I'm actually excited for it. It might not be another Super Dragon Ball Z, but since the Raging Blast series is not my thing, Ultimate Tenkaichi was awful and Burst Limit is discontinued, I'll have to take what I can get.