Entry #667: Super Dragon Ball Heroes - World Mission

 Gotta catch'em all!

 Known as that game with the badass commercials depicting what-if forms for a ton of characters, Super Dragon Ball Heroes - World Mission finally made it outside Japan, so we can finally see Super Saiyan 3 Vegeto duking it out against Gold Cooler. It's amazing.

 Dragon Ball is no stranger to weird games, so World Mission is nothing out of the ordinary. Based on an Arcade game that featured real cards, this port on the Switch makes everything digital. You don't play as the characters themselves, but rather, you make 7-card decks featuring known and unknown characters from the world of Dragon Ball and fight against another 7-card deck, in a five-turn mini-game extravaganza. It's not a game for everyone and it's definitely not a game for your average Dragon Ball fan, but it's quite fun all things considered.

 You won't find yourself out of things to do with this cart, as there is a lot of content packed in this little cart. The story mode is made up of five different chapters, with various sub-chapters contained withing, and most sub-chapters even contain 'alternate dimensions', which translate as another map full of fights. You can also fight in tournaments, 'puzzle fight's and even fight against other players(Sadly no single-console multiplayer), and if you are up to it, you can even challenge Arcade Mode, which is sort-of like Story Mode but without the story and less customization. Add to that that there's about 1000 different cards, and about 350 different characters depicted among those. The amount of combinations and strategies you can build around this massive stack of cards is staggering.

 While the game's tutorial is pretty bad, leaves a lot untold or poorly explained and does it in a very weird order. Honestly, you'll learn more about the game by partaking in puzzle fights and by experience alone. The gist of it is like this: Each of your seven cards/characters can fall on any of three classes(Berserker, Hero, Elite) each with different properties, and on each turn you can place your cards on different areas of the playing field, the furthest away from you the more damage they'll deal and the more stamina they'll consumer, while the closest area to you is the 'support' lane, in which characters can restore their stamina or trigger special abilities. Afterwards whoever player goes first gets to attack first, and attacking/defending is all about timing minigames. If the attacker wins the game he'll deal extra damage and, if available, perform a super move. If the defender wins, they'll receive less damage.

 Yeah, gameplay is pretty limited here. As a matter of fact, I kinda disliked having to go through timing minigames on every single turn. I mean, I learned to accept it on the long-run, but this is not my kind of game mechanic. That said, the game really shines in the strategy department, as characters come with all kinds of abilities and what not, smart players will be able to craft some really smart moves. For instance, you can even form your deck around a 'Round', like, for example, a deck surrounding Ultra Instinct Goku allowing him to win the game right on the first turn if you win the timing minigame. Since a few abilities can be use AFTER a certain round, you can even build a deck based on surviving the first four rounds and then laying waste to the enemy on the fourth. It's a simple game, and it's actually quite simple to understand after a few matches, but I felt awe at how deep creating a deck can get.

 On the other hand, the game desperately needed more animations. Every character shares the same 8-9 basic attack animations, and you'll see them play out over and over and over and over and over and over again. I know, it's crazy to expect them to create different animations for every single character, but they could've gone with different 'sets' of moves shared by different groups of characters, that alone could've gone a long way into making fights look more dynamic. Or at least add more animations, so that you haven't seen every single basic move by the fourth battle you fought.

 As for how you actually get your cards, that's done by winning fights and earning Gacha tickets. Those can then be used on the store to randomly get cards. Yes, it can take a while before you can get every character or card that you can, but I was using my most wanted 7 characters by the ten hour mark, so that's not to bad. And while there are rarer cards than other, the game does a good job of making cards useful in some way or another. You could make an entire deck built around Yamcha and still win because some of his cards can increase the speed of the timing minigame for your enemies, tied to the fact that 'weaker' cards have a lower cost for their super moves, so they can start using them earlier. Honestly, no card is entirely useless and there are a ton of ways you can play. You can also build your own card by collecting 'pieces'(The character, the aura, the abilities, etc) through playing the game and then use mix them together in the card-maker. There's a lot you can do in this game, trust me.

 If there's one major 'flaw' with the game is how Story fights completely break the game mechanics. Say, you build an entire deck built around depleting the enemy stamina? Too bad, most CPU enemies have unlimited Stamina. By the end, pretty much every enemy has a timing mini-game speed increase on you, and they seem to time their 'perfect's, well, perfectly.

 Here's the skinny: Super Dragon Ball Heroes - World Mission is good fun. There's a lot of tools you can play around with to create various different strategies, and there're a lot of different Dragon Ball characters you can toy around with. It's a bit lacking in spectacle, and a few CPU fights are a bit too cheap, but it's a fun game. Fights are so short(Less than 10 minutes each!) that, for a portable game, lends itself quite well to playing in a few bursts. That said, as fun as it was, now I wish Namco would take all these character models and make a new Tenkaichi game on the Switch.
 7.0 out of 10