If there is a recognizable manga-anime around the globe, that is Dragon Ball Z. The work of the immortal Akira Toriyama has more than thirty stories behind him and, some of them, spinoffs from the main franchise. Another of his great successes was Dr. Slump who tells the crazy adventures of Arale, a robot girl with enormous strength but somewhat reckless. The appearance of Dragon Ball depended on its subsequent success .
The work of the mangaka is also very present in video games since he was the creator of the entire Dragon Quest universe, especially he worked on the design of characters whose influence is very palpable.
Dragon Ball and the jump to the video game
For its part, Dragon Ball has had countless adaptations to video games, going through almost all consoles (NES, SNES, GBA, NDS, PS1, PS2, PS3, Xbox, new generation consoles, among many others) . Gone are unforgettable classics like the DBZ Budokai and Budokai Tenkaichi franchises that introduced a combat system that, for many, including the server, was the ultimate Dragon Ball combat system on a console.
There was also an underlying aspect more focused on adventure such as Dragon Ball Origins , a 3D Nintendo DS game that told us the first adventures of the infant Son Goku and the already mythical story of his search for the Dragon Balls with Bulma , basing almost everything control on the stylus satisfactorily and very similar to that of the award-winning The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass .
However, DBZ Kakarot’s proposal takes us through the entire installment that unveiled the most famous pure-hearted saiyan in the world and narrates Dragon Ball Z in full. This ranges from Raditz’s arrival on Earth to the awakening of the evil Monster Bu .
On this occasion it has been the good people of Cyberconnect2 in charge of trying to adapt the vast world of Dragon Ball Z to our consoles. If the name of this study does not tell you anything, it may be the fact that they were the architects of the Ninja Storm franchise that perfectly adapted the intense fighting and the spirit of another of the great manga-anime franchises. , Naruto . Due to his good work, we were more than one and more than two who were crying out for his vision of Dragon Ball in video games and finally we have it in our hands.
The procedures as a promissory note for enjoyment.
Before starting the analysis properly, we will start from the following premise: Dragon Ball Z Kakarot is a game full of procedures .
The displacement is something tremendously satisfying , it is feeling like a true Z warrior flying through the air, there is no place for discussion. It is very vibrant to go through some of the most mythical scenarios in the history of Dragon Ball and see how the hair of Goku or the character that we are handling at that moment moves according to the displacement, listen to the descent sounds extracted directly from the anime or go quickly to face the threat of turn while Vegeta, Piccolo, Krillin or the corresponding character follows us.
And if we say this, it is because Dragon Ball turns out to be a less permissive game than it might seem in those E3 trailers, since it spends most of the time putting a stick between the wheels in a pernicious way.
We have before us an open world that is not open , but is the result of several medium-sized scenarios that are not interconnected with each other. In order to move between one and the other, we must access the world map and select where we want to go. With its corresponding loading screen.
A tremendously absurd example is Kami’s watchtower, a scalable tower that becomes a three-story section : at the base we have the village, in the middle the Karin tower and at the top the temple of Kami. And yes, to access each of them we must go through a loading screen.
This bloated feeling is further hardened by side quests, which are a punch to the face for any player . In truth they are as criticizable as those of many JRPGs and any other genre with missions of this style; They are missions of going to point A to pick up an object and return to point B and others that consist of defeating an enemy “putty” (generic enemy) but little else. Yes, there are secondary schools that try to delve into the lore or that try to fill one of the many gaps in Toriyama’s story and it is a pity that they did not want to focus more on that aspect since it only meant adding lines of text and a real incentive to complete errands .
As we just mentioned, this title bets on the RPG approach, but it does so in such a languid way that it takes more than adding to the game. We can handle a few characters such as Goku, Vegeta, Piccolo, Son Gohan or Trunks and we will have others that we can only carry as support in combat such as Krillin, Yamcha, Tenshinhan among others. All of them have their own branch of skills where we can improve and unlock new techniques.
To unlock them we will need Z orbs , which will be distributed by all mapped and will also grant us a few when meeting certain requirements. The concept distributed by the map results in something that borders on the grotesque , especially due to their reappearance. Let me explain: the orbs are distributed in such a way that you travel a series of itineraries and they are even distributed by color (green for fields, red for desert places and blue for aquatic places) but the fact of constantly seeing orbs on the map stains the decoration , downplays it; reduces the environment to the background. This is not FighterZ , here the stage is not a simple place to be freaked out, it is the mythology of a series, it narrates us through its most iconic locations or winks to its universe .
The fading or evanescent movement is by far what shines the most in its combat system , we can move in any direction and get closer to or away from the enemy, emulating the sensation of the anime with enough success; the rest of the controls in combat are similar to what has already been seen in Dragon Ball Xenoverse . I think this is too ambiguous a topic to discuss since DBZ Kakarot is not a normal fighting game, and it bases its proposal on the RPG that usually stands out more for turn-based combat.
While we explore the world of Son Goku, enemies that swarm the map may stalk us and what should be an intense and dynamic experience turns into a repetitive and irritating one . Not only because of the scarce variety of enemies (Red Ribbon robots, Saibaman and some other generic Freeza soldier, fundamentally) but because they constantly interrupt any livid moment of exploration thanks to the large number of them scattered throughout all areas and throughout to his persecutory desire. If you end up going into combat you can run away from it, but the chain of exploring, being chased, dodging, and repeating these three steps over and over again is exhausting .
Light! Fire! Disappointment…
There is an approach that has been going around in my head since the analysis of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Both this and Dragon Ball Z Kakarot are saddened by the fact that they are video games .
Naughty Dog titles have had their detractors as they sometimes turn out to be more interactive adventures than actual games, from which I can tell. But when you see in Dragon Ball and Star Wars how the concessions of being video games do not allow them to develop their full potential, that is when you begin to understand why they should abandon this aspect a bit and materialize more as a one-way experience.
If in Fallen Order the enemies did not reappear each time we rest, that they change their location each time we return to a planet, that they advocate one proposal and not fifteen; if DBZ Kakarot did not use characters that have appeared two or three times in the anime as recurring enemies, if every time he has to introduce an intermission he would introduce us to one of the films in two or three missions instead of bringing Chichi ingredients or pieces to Bulma … On occasion, and it is something that some of the great titles in the industry have shown, it consists of materializing a single idea , focusing all your attention on one point and from there developing the lenses that your narration needs.
The process to build a stained glass window is tremendously complex : first of all, the drawings and symbols of the composition are designed by hand. When arranging the glasses that would form the colorimetry and depth of the drawings, glasses of different thickness were used, which allowed them to have different shades of the same color. In turn, the glasses were arranged according to the previously sketched design. The motifs were varied, from representation of guilds to religious scenes, with special attention to the rose windows where images of the cosmogony were exposed in a circular shape and whose center of the composition was Christ.
In DBZ Kakarot we see Son Goku and his well-defined choral voices, but as we move away from that center we also see how the rest of the elements (the orbs, the missions, and the JRPG elements) are distorted more and more until that we realize that this game is a really nice window but composed without any care .
Needless to say, I’m not pointing out or criticizing anyone who likes DBZ Kakarot , I finished the story and I’m still strengthening my characters and unlocking the rest of the secret bosses and techniques. Where I see the big problem with this proposal is in the same place from which many of the titles based on the franchise are established, in the abuse towards the fan community .
An example of this is in Dragon Ball Xenoverse 1 and 2 , titles with cheap mechanics and graphic finishes that border on the archaic ; These games had an almost infinite secondary mission system and consisted of facing all kinds of enemies with a couple of variants in each combat. And so on all the time. But in both I have accumulated dozens of hours. Both of them ( Kakarot and Xenoverse ) have very slavish and ancient reward systems, and despite this I have been very hooked on both . As they say, a guilty pleasure or guilty pleasure.
We fans usually go through the hoop as soon as we get a little bit of what we ask of Dragon Ball Z as a video game entity . We forgive repeated textures, unambitious gameplay , and other compromises. However, this DBZ Kakarot becomes much easier to forgive because it still makes it exciting to collect dragon balls over and over again, defeat an enemy in a Super Saiyan state, crash a Kamehameha and a Galick Ho while pressing square like a madman to see what attack will win and live once again that story that has been told so many times.
There are brilliant ideas, like that Z encyclopedia that is full of information and details for the most fans of the franchise . The pre-rendered cinematics are vibrant and take us back to our childhood, one does not tire of scrolling the map, except for the enemies, and a handful of moments when DBZ Kakarot shines with its own light.
Hence the empathy I feel for the fans and detractors of this Dragon Ball Z Kakarot: many forgive him for the list of mistakes he makes in pursuit of nostalgia and thanks to how and when Cyberconnect knows which key to press, activates that already so quoted “mechanism of nostalgia”. But you cannot escape the obvious, it is a game with an ambitious approach and a poor execution that, it is normal that it irritates a large part of the fans since Dragon Ball deserves much more.
It is where the grounds of our thought converge from where we must carry out the criticism and analysis of this type of products , expressly prepared from the fan and for the fan. It is a tremendously complex exercise to carry out and we cannot stay in our ivory tower or Karin’s tower, positioning ourselves on one side or the other; we must get away, dispossess of our memories and feelings to be able to recognize the stitching that we have been tolerating for so long in the adaptations of Son Goku to consoles .
Dragon Ball Z Kakarot is far from being the definitive game about Akira Toriyama’s great work, but its punctual successes may be the necessary ones so that between so much fire and destruction, some light is glimpsed.
