Worse than Burst Limit, and they still can't top Budokai 3.
I'm a person that's of the mind that the Dragon Ball games have failed to exceed Dragon Ball Z Budokai 3 since the PS2 days, and this latest title, Raging Blast, doesn't really do much to quell that thought. I've played Burst Limit, I've played the Tenkachi games, hell, I even played the Super one that was like an arcade fighter. They just haven't stacked up to Budokai in my opinion, and Raging Blast is certainly no different.
Don't get me wrong; what Raging Blast manages to get right comes in the form of the sheer fan service the game offers. The roster is huge, with tons of unlockable characters accompanying a sizeable cast that's available right out of the gate. The story mode plays out in a neat way, in the sense that you can tackle any of the individual Saga's in whatever order you choose, even so far that you can pick different fights in different orders, with more that can be unlocked. The optional "What if?" scenarios are pretty neat, letting you pair off characters like Bardock and Goku who never actually met in the series (well, not in the way they do here at least). On the surface, it looks like a Dragon Ball Z fan's wet dream, and I have to give the developers some credit for tossing in the sheer amount of stuff they do.
The other positives before I delve into the negatives comes from the other modes and customization options. There's a 16 man tournament that you can get into offline or online, basic vs. stuff, and the ability to change out special moves for each individual fighter, along with a storefront in game to buy additional extras from the points and capsules that you earn. Even the loading screens allow you to fly Goku's trust cloud Nimbus around the screen and collect capsules, insuring that even the smallest loads aren't entirely wasted time. There's nothing here that I'd consider exceptional in the realm of fighters or action titles, but at the same time it's the little things that the game does manage to get right that I appreciate.
It's a shame then, that I found the rest of the game to be downright atrocious. First and foremost comes from the combat system and the controls. Like most games, I opted to jump right into story mode, bypassing the tutorial system at first. I was summarily beaten to death in the game for this, which led me to realize I had zero idea how to pull of super moves and the only thing I could manage was flight, punches, and the dash. So I jumped over to the tutorial side of things, and immediately felt my mood change to boredom when I was greeted with the sheer amount of stuff I had to learn. I'm not sure why the game feels the need to be so ridiculously complicated, but you'll understand what I'm saying if you ever have the chance to check out the tutorials in this game. It takes you from the basic stuff, movement, flight, Ki meter usage, and so on, into more complex moves and attacks, Ultimate Supers, etc. There are different levels of the tutorial to complete, and really, it's just a ridiculous amount of stuff you need to learn before you can even really compete against the AI in the single player story mode.
Once you manage to get all that down, and jump back into the story, you figure that you've got to be ready to whoop some ass, right? My experience wasn't quite like that. I had no issues pulling off specials and the appropriate moves within the training segments, regardless of how goofy some of the button set-ups were (left trigger and left bumper press at the same time? Ugh!), but in an actual fight I had an extreme amount of difficulty pulling off the most basic of super attacks, much less an Ultimate attack. I realized that I needed Ki energy, and that I was supposed to hit the right stick in a direction to pull off the assigned Super, but half the time I'd get no response. I kept trying to figure out why, and then I realized it often had to do with the fact that I was attempting to move, or currently within a move animation, when I pressed the right stick. Basically, to pull off an attack, even a simple melee punch or kick, you need to be completely still. You can't approach the game from a fighter mentality, in that pressing a button is going to cancel out the last thing you were doing and override it with the new, instead you need to let one action play out before you attempt the other. There's no queuing up attacks or anything like that, and it's just a needlessly frustrating system to implement. It's really no fun to play, and I ended up loathing the experience by the time I finished up the lengthy story mode. The real kicker comes from the AI, which has little trouble transitioning movements and attacks, seemingly not needing to pause in between the two like you often have to do.
The other big issue I have with the game comes from the camera, and it's lack of ability to follow the action, or to give you an idea of where your opponent is when you often lose track of them. I get that it's probably hard to make a decent camera for a 3D title that offers up a large arena with two fighters that can virtually move anywhere within the space by introducing flight, but there's got to be a better solution than this. Oftentimes my opponent would fly high overhead, or possibly under me (or underwater) and I'd have no idea, making me fly and move aimlessly about until I manage to re-find them on the map. The camera would also get hung up on objects pretty often, obscuring my view quite a bit until I moved away from buildings, mountains and so on. It was a very frustrating thing to get around, and it just compounded the issues I had with the gameplay making the entire experience very frustrating and annoying.
Visually the character models in the game look damn good. They give them a cel-shaded look much like previous DBZ games, but they're just displayed really well here. It's a shame that environments you fight in don't tend to match up as well, there's some really poor texture work in particular with destroyed objects, like buildings, that just stands out as blurry junk by comparison. The voice work is fine though, and while I haven't had a chance to check out the cast list, it definitely sounds like the English voice actors I recognized from the TV series and DVD releases.
Still, even with the excessive fan service employed here, Dragon Ball: Raging Blast is a far cry from a good game, or even a good Dragon Ball related game. It gets a couple things right in the multiplayer and mode sense, but the actual gameplay is horrid, featuring a busted and too complicated combat system that really bogs down the experience. I'd advise fans to avoid this release, and hope against hope that we see a good Dragon Ball title on current gen systems in the near future.
