Written Review.
Hey everyone, here’s my latest Final Verdict. This time I’m looking at a game that came out very recently, it’s Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot. It’s a game that I’d been looking forward to since it was first revealed without a name, but simply known as Dragon Ball Project Z.
The Games story pretty much follows Dragon Ball Z from the Saiyan Saga and concludes with the Buu Saga. There are also intermissions. For example, after finishing the Saiyan Saga you are able to roam the world, looking for Dragon Balls, hunting for Sub Stories, and training to level up all before you continue the story and head to Namek. While the game is subtitled Kakarot, you spend more time as other characters than Goku himself, due to the fact that he gets injured and is healing up or, well, dead. The game actually starts with Gohan and Goku doing some finishing before heading to Kame House where everything really kicks off. It’s done as a tutorial, so you can get the feel for fishing, fighting, and exploring the world on foot and then in the sky via Flying Nimbus. The Flying Nimbus is a golden Cloud Goku uses and got in Dragon Ball as a child. It shows that the world is pretty large, but while it appears to be an open world at first, it’s not, it’s more semi-open world, to go from one area, say Goku’s home, to Kame House you need to go to the map and fast travel to the area in which the kame house is. The areas are rather large in general, and when you are able to fly using your Ki then you can get around really quickly, which you can do early on.
We can’t talk Dragon Ball Z without talking about the fighting. The fighting is rather good, the combat feels meaty and weighted where every hit seems to have an actual impact, it’s also fast-paced. You are able to use various Ki blasts, from simple shots of Ki to the Masenko, to the Kamehama and the Spirit Bomb and then you have a bar that fills called the tension bar. When full you can use that to do more damage and each punch and kick shakes the screen makes more impactful noises and increases the rumble of your pad to emphasise the power of the hits. While the combat is rather good, I’d say it’s just that. Rather good. It’s, going by my awful memory, very reminiscent of Tenkaichi and Xenoverse, and while the freedom to move around and have larger-scale battles makes much more sense and feels right with Dragon Ball Z the combat in games like Budokai series and Dragon Ball FighterZ just feels to be more versatile. The game, like other RPGs, has a Skill tree for each character, the skill try is used to unlock some attacks, or make them more powerful. Some abilities/upgrades are locked off in the tree until you reach a certain point in the game, and even some of them you have to go to a training ground to unlock them by fighting up to 3 other fighters. Sometimes it’s Piccolo and Gohan other times it’s 3 Goku’s. How 3 Goku’s it’s meant to be a ‘mental training all in the mind’… I think.
Visually the game is lovely to look at, the world generally is very pleasing to the eye. You have a wide variety of biomes so you can get some pretty lovely landscapes to see. There are desert-like areas, which while mainly are sand and dirt you get interesting things to see like dinosaurs or giant dinosaur bones, you have forestry with its lush green trees and grass, there’s a snowy area which has a big lake
surrounded by snowy hills and an area with the Kami house which is mostly the sea with a few islands nearby. You can also go underwater where it is deep enough for you to swim about, fight, and search through weeds and other things. On top of that, there’s Namek with its green seas and sky and purple grass, King Kai’s tiny planet and then Supreme Kai’s world are all interesting and wonderful to look at. The character models for the main cast of characters are all well done and detailed nicely and the animation is fluid and clean. The issue I have with NPCs is that they kind of look half-arsed. Even though they use the same eyes, or nose, and mouth as other characters, they just seem off. Not only that there isn’t that much in the variety of the people you speak to, as the same models are used all frequently. The battles are also a feast for those sexy eyes of yours, while the speed at which things happen and then all the various Ki blasts with the various colours and styles can look really interesting, to say the least.
The game audio is also good. You have music from the show playing at various points and the game even starts with Head Cha-la and its own montage version of a Dragon Ball Z opening. The music in the show from memory was different from the Western version and I think the music in the game is all from the Japanese version of the show. I’ll be completely honest and say that I am unaware of what music is new and what isn’t but it all suits the game and what is happening on screen at the time. I played the game with English Voice acting and it seemed alright. I watched Dragon Ball Z in English back when it was first on Cartoon Network, but I’ve watched all the Dragon Ball stuff in Japanese since and I found the voices jarring as I’m simply not used to them. The good thing is if you prefer one dub over the other you can change them, though oddly only in the menu on the games title screen.
All in all, I’ve had a good time with the game, I did have a few glitches in my 50 hours of playtime, but they were few and far between. It’s a game I’d recommend to people who enjoy open-world games due to traversal being enjoyable and quick and there’s a fair bit to see, even though there are not massive amounts to do as like most Open World games side missions feel a bit like busy work and this has that in there, just general generic side stuff, but overall the package is well done and while there is the generic side stuff here getting about as quickly as you do makes it feel less tedious than most open-world games.
My score for this game is 8 Puglseys out of 10