It's actually called Ultimate 27. Kinda
The good news? It's not the worst Dragon Ball Z I've ever played, it's actually playable. The bad news? It's still bad. Welcome to Ultimate Battle 22, or Ultimate Battle 27 if you input the code, a Dragon Ball fighting game released on the PS1 featuring 22(Or 27) characters from the series duking it out on a 2-D plane.The game offers an Arcade ladder('VS Cpu', that has you fighting all 22 opponents), VS Player, a Tournament Mode and a Build Up mode(make your character stronger), and that's pretty much it. Ultimate Battle takes after the Super Butoden games, and let me let you in a little secret... the Butoden series wasn't very good in the first place. You've got a punch button, a kick button, an energy attack button and triangle that lets you fly. You can charge lost energy by holding any of the three attack buttons, which takes a few seconds before it actually goes off. There're combos, special moves and energy-consuming super moves all done by different directional inputs.
Even Hercule wishes he wasn't in the game.
The game feels very floaty and fighting isn't much fun. It's all too easy to get a grab instead of a punch when pressing square while near an opponent, and the game's engine doesn't leave much room for creativity when it comes to chaining your attacks. It's basic, bland and lifeless.
But a mundane game I could do with, if only it didn't look so bad. To the game's credit, they tried making the sprites look like anime cut-outs, and they nailed it, but the animation is horrible and the sprites look very out of place, like the characters don't quite belong on the backgrounds. They are pretty inconsistent too, Recoome looks as if he's been shrunk so his head is tiny in comparison to others, while 18's head is enormous. And what about SSJ3 Goku's horrible walk cycle? The game, as a whole, looks horrible. On the flip-side, the music is pretty good... but a lot of it doesn't fit a Fighting game, like Dabura's theme or Mirai Trunks'.
What's up with Goku's leg?
The icing on the cake is that they removed a bit of stuff from the Japanese version, namely the pre-fight conversations... luckily, nothing of value was lost and having them in the game wouldn't have changed a thing about its quality. Also, they named Gogeta 'Vegeto', I swear to god...Dragon Ball Z Ultimate Battle 22 is bad, alright? It's not the worst Dragon Ball Z game ever, which is a very depressing statement to make, and is, in fact, quite playable. But it's simply bland and rather lackluster, why would you ever want to play it? Morbid curiosity?
3.0 out of 10
No comments:
Post a Comment