Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi Review
Game: Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi
Developer: Spike
Publisher: Namco Bandai
Available on: Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3 (Reviewed on Xbox 360)
It seems a bit silly calling the latest instalment of such a prolific series “Ultimate”. It suggests that this is the be all and end all, the cherry atop the franchise, the best representation of Akira Toriyama’s vision that we are ever going to receive in videogame form. But you cannot lay the blame for this at the door of developer Spike or indeed Namco Bandai. You see, this, the newest incarnation of a series that has given us multiple different brawlers based upon the 25-year old manga and anime, was named by the fans following a poll to choose an appropriate moniker. This little bit of fan service shows that Spike are respectful of their massive, fervent fanbase. And hey, chucking in “Ultimate” didn’t do Capcom any harm recently, as our glowing Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom review attests. But can Spike’s new Dragon Ball Z game spruce up a series that was looking a little stale and repetitive on its last Raging Blast outing?
STORY: Dragon Ball and its many offshoots have been around for over twenty five years. Toriyama-san unleashed the first manga in 1984, and it proved so popular that it spawned a number of sequels and revisions, spinoffs, movies and indeed videogames. Dragon Ball Z was the first canonical sequel to the original Dragon Ball series, and ran from 1989 to 1996, taking in nearly 300 episodes of anime madness. As you can imagine, the volume of instalments means a pretty deep, heady plot, taking in a plethora of characters and locations. Rather than choose a specific plot to focus on, the wildly ambitious Ultimate Tenkaichi instead attempts to cram in the entire Dragon Ball Z saga. What results is a surprisingly accessible representation of what is an incredibly complex storyline; to the outsider at least. The tale is told with some impressive cutscenes, and at no point will you end up sat there, dumbfounded, like the Simpsons watching the Mr. Sparkle commercial in utter bemusement.
GRAPHICS: Akira Toriyama has been responsible for some iconic artwork over the years. Even if you are only vaguely familiar with Dragon Ball, you would probably recognise his style if one of his creations was plonked under your nose. Indeed, he has done other videogame work in the past too, most notably the character designs for Chrono Trigger, regarded as one of the finest role playing games ever, for the Dragon Quest series (his design for Dragon Quest XIII, and the way Level 5 implemented it, remains one of my favourite ever aesthetic accomplishments), and the popular Mistwalker RPG Blue Dragon. Other Dragon Ball games have tried to capture the over-the-top bombast of the anime – but always fell slightly short of the mark. I am pleased to announce that with Ultimate Tenkaichi, we finally have a game that comes close to recreating the beautiful looking cartoon in videogame form.
The characters are wonderfully rendered and animated, huge, vividly coloured combatants brawl in full 3D, with the trademark explosions, fireballs, and ridiculous moves pulled off with massive visual appeal. The beautiful environments are ripped and torn asunder in a landslide of craters and seismic activity, creating an epic sense of scale that just doesn’t hold back. It all moves along fluidly and at a breakneck pace, perfectly bringing to life the mania of the TV show. This is all bookended by some strong, high definition anime cutscenes and, while I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the in-game action actually improves on the cartoon, it really does look the absolute bees knees.
SOUND: Hironobu Kageyama is known to fans as “Mr DBZ”, and is a composer and musician who has become synonymous with the series. It was he who dreamed up the theme tune for the series, oddball J-Pop confection “Cha-La Head-Cha-La”, which of course turns up on Ultimate Tenkaichi. The rest of the soundtrack is your usual combination of Japanese-style riffage, sugary pop and crazy, barely tolerable voice acting and chop socky sound effects. Needless to say, the OST is not a classic one that is going to haunt your dreams, but it does match the in-game goings on to a tee.
GAMEPLAY: Not quite a wrestling game, not quite a standard one-on-one brawler, is the best way to describe this, and indeed many of the previous Dragon Ball games. Spike were formed out of the ashes of Human, who were previously famous for the Fire Pro Wrestling series, and their influence has always permeated the DBZ games to a degree.
The game places you in 3D vs action against a series of opponents. There are two attack types; strong and quick. Pull off a succession of quick attacks and you enter into “Clash” mode, which is essentially a button mashing exercise where you try and counteract your foe by pressing the exact opposite button that they do. If you succeed in out-button pressing your opponent, you get to see your fighter unleash a flurry of attacks upon the poor soul with a bonkers combination of ridiculously awesome moves. It looks superb and, for the first few times, it is exhilarating, unfortunately after a while it becomes extremely repetitive. The same can be said of the character set. There are lots of character, covering years worth of television and manga, yet they are all essentially interchangeable and behave the same way. Only their special attacks, which are unleashed after filling your “Spirit” meter, are different.
It isn’t all bad though. The nature of the combat does ape the confrontations from the source material very well, reversals and counter-attacks are intuitive to pull off and work very well, and the moves themselves, particularly the super attacks, look brilliant and feel extremely satisfying. The fighting engine is never going to be able to match up with the complexities of something like Tekken or Street Fighter; but fans of the series aren’t really looking for that. In terms of representing Dragon Ball Z, Spike have done a sterling, if repetitive, job.
LONGEVITY: There are plenty of modes to play around with, the main story mode alone will last for ages, and covers several different storyline arcs from the original series. You can play out tournaments or VS battles on and offline, and for the first time ever in the series you can create your own Saiyan hero in an excellent character creation mode, and then take your creation through story mode, levelling them up and undertaking training missions along the way. There are quite easily several dozen hours of gameplay here, and fans are going to be perfectly content with that. Whether the casual gamer will be as likely to persevere is questionable, however.
VERDICT: Ultimate Tenkaichi is, like its title, for the fans. It is an excellent representation of a much-loved anime, quite simply the best DBZ videogame you are going to play. So in that respect, the “Ultimate” moniker is entirely appropriate. That aside, there are some flaws that will prevent this from being a crossover hit, the lack of any real depth to the combat system and the repetition will put off some. As a technical aside there are also some horrific loading times to endure, some of the worst this reviewer has seen for aeons, which can make slogging through the chunky storyline mode something of a chore.
The game did capture my imagination, though, with its brilliant graphical style. If you ever wanted to know what it feels like to take control of an actual living, breathing, Dragon Ball Z dust up between two Saiyan baddasses, then this is as close as you are going to come.
