Another Echo for a Timeless Legend: The ‘Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot’ Review
Though the story of Dragon Ball Z has been told countless times, I never grow tired of experiencing the tale. However, even a story as golden and beloved as Dragon Ball Z cannot carry a game that isn’t at least attempting to be something more than a button mashing arena fighter with flashing colors. Thankfully, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot doesn’t take the source material for granted. Instead of riding the coattails of Goku and friends, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is a lovely celebration of the series of Dragon Ball, including many throwbacks to the original series as well as Dragon Ball Z. This is a game that knows its fans and treats its world with respect and the lighthearted humor I grew up with. Not without its flaws, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is mostly an enjoyable arena fighter with pseudo-RPG mechanics and visuals that are both suspect and spectacular. This is a game that deserves as much praise as it does criticism.
Quite possibly the most important aspect to nail when making a Dragon Ball game is capturing the way the series presents itself in both action and character’s personalities. Yes, Dragon Ball has mostly been viewed as a series about characters yelling and hitting one another for hundreds of episodes, but there is a lot more that recent games have ignored through the years – a disservice to the series as a whole. Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot distinguished itself from past games by acknowledging the happenings between the fights and surprisingly allowed me to even learn more about various characters’ relationships with one another that I wasn’t even aware of. The game may be called Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, but it highlights much more than just Son Goku.
Upon startup, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot makes its declaration that this will be an experience that capitalizes on my evergreen nostalgia by recreating the original intro from the anime almost shot for shot with Hironobu Kageyama’s legendary performance of “CHA-LA HEAD-CHA-LA” roaring along. I could barely contain my smile, all of my prior excitement paled to what I started feeling after watching an animation from my childhood in a new vision. The game presents itself like another episode in the anime with title cards for current scenarios, clips of upcoming events, and an occasional recapitulation during the moments in between the more involved moments.
When the gameplay starts up I watch as Goku’s son, Gohan walks up to a meditating Goku who is image training against Piccolo. Image training is when one of the characters goes into a mental state during mediation and recreates an entire fight in their mind. In this case, Goku is training against Piccolo who at the time was the strongest opponent he had ever faced. This fight was the first taste of gameplay I got and it started off with a simple diagram of a DualShock 4 controller displaying buttons and their functions. It was exactly as I had expected, a fighting system based off of Dragon Ball Xenoverse which is the arena fighting game series from the same source material. I’ll get more into the way combat and its mechanics work, but I’m much more inclined to talk about what happens after the fight.
Once the fight is over, a cutscene plays which sets up the current arc and has Gohan calling out to Goku, telling him that they’ll be late if they don’t hurry up and grab ingredients for dinner on the way home. The next thing I know, I’m walking around an open landscape with a lush forest and running river located conveniently around their home where Chi-Chi, Goku’s wife, is readily waiting for us to return home to prepare dinner. I was tasked with grabbing some apples which required me to just walk or jump near a tree with a glow in its leaves. After a few apples Gohan walked up to me saying he was tired. As Goku, I picked him up and started walking to the fishing spot with my beautiful boy resting on my forearm. It was a beautiful moment that I had never experienced in a Dragon Ball game before and it would’ve lasted forever if it weren’t for what happened right when I made it to the fishing spot.
Being the upcoming scholar that he is, Gohan comments on the fact that neither of us have fishing rods. To my delight, Goku makes this declaration that tails are the perfect substitute for rods and then whips out this makeshift tail that our old friend Bulma created for just this occasion. Goku then somehow puts the tail right on his backside and makes that familiar arch as he droops that tail into the water, hauling up gigantic fish for dinner fit for saiyans. Kakarot took that magic and atmosphere of this loving moment between a father and son and traded it for this downright odd action that I know I’ll be doing to some monotonous tedium. I find this decision hilarious and fitting for that Dragon Ball setting that I was looking forward to as I booted this game up. Not once had I ever broken my smile. The only complaint I had was that I wished that Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot had opened up with this adorable moment with Goku and Gohan rather than the random tutorial fight with Piccolo that I had completely evanesced from my memory.
After collecting all of the required ingredients, the game truly bares its open world fangs and lets me fly around the area on Goku’s iconic magic cloud, the Flying Nimbus introducing the landscape and how boundaries are set. The game also introduces different colored orbs that are scattered everywhere around the world. It quickly explains that these orbs are what I am to use to buy upgrades for each of my characters’ attacks and abilities. After spending a few minutes flying around grabbing orbs I pretty quickly noticed a giant pillar of red light indicating where the waypoint was set, Goku’s home. After exhausting all of the dialogue fluff, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot begins to start walking down the narrative path gifted to us by Akira Toriyama and the familiar steps of greeting all the old friends from the series at Master Roshi’s Kami House to introduce Gohan.
After Gohan gets kidnapped by Goku’s long lost brother Raditz, a Saiyan from Planet Vegeta, I get a brief explanation that Goku is part of the alien race from Planet Vegeta and watch as Raditz flies away with Gohan leaving me to prepare for a fight to get him back. From here I am able to truly fly around the world, which is separated into different sections as part of a World Map that I can navigate and select to fast travel to. Each area has all kinds of materials and ingredients that tend to be more distracting than fulfilling, as well as speech bubbles sprinkled around different spots where I could talk to people. One of my favorite additions to Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is the fact that a lot of these speech bubbles belong to characters from the original Dragon Ball manga and anime that have never before gotten representation outside of the source material or any mention altogether for decades. They each have different side quests that both introduce themselves and even sometimes bring some added depth that may have never come to light if it weren’t for the game supplying these nice quiet moments of menial fetch quests or fights.
Flying around the world of Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot never really became more than just that for me as I played through the game. Whether I was Vegeta or on the Flying Nimbus it was never more than just another movement option. Flight was how I got around from one quest point to another but even collecting the orbs for my upgrades had no real point after the game introduced the Dragon Balls. Once I collected all seven Dragon Balls the game allowed me to wish for items like money, items, and even those orbs for my upgrades, leaving me no need to fly around for those orbs. At the very least, each section’s size felt just right and never became a drag when I had to fly towards any point from any point.
The gameplay on the other hand was an aspect that I kept having back and forth feelings about throughout my playthrough. Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot had a couple mechanics that I imagine were the checkmarks they tried to meet in order to get that RPG genre tag. Among these mechanics was the Community Board tab where certain characters that you meet in the game are associated with certain aspects of the game and give added effects for their respective communities. For example, Chi-Chi is the representative of the Cooking Community and her board can grant better effects when eating food or cause the effects to last longer. Yajirobe is the representative for the Adventure Community which makes recovery items more potent, and there is even an Adult community headed by Master Roshi which gives better deals in shops when selling items. Each board has slots where you can put different characters and some characters are better fits for other boards; the more characters in each board, the better the effects. The idea of the Community Board system sounded cool at first, but as I was playing I rarely felt a need to use any of these effects simply because the Dragon Balls are overpowered and provide all the difficulty padding I could have ever hoped for. There was only one Community Board that I worked to max out which was King Kai’s Training Community which boosted the amount of experience I would gain from battles. It was the only effect that felt like it meant something because a lot of the difficulty in the game came from being underleveled in fights.
Outside of getting a couple of characters for a community board and maybe a conversation or two with a legacy character, I never found a compelling reason to pursue side quests. Especially when the few that I have done were nothing but fetch quests that required me to load in and out of different areas of the world map for an item that had a low spawn rate. Because of this I went into a fair number of fights underleveled, especially in the sequences that threw me into a string of maybe three or four fights against an opponent that was gaining levels along with whatever I would get from the previous fight. There was a moment during the Namek saga that had me use Vegeta for the first time at the general level of my other characters. But instead of looking for an opportunity to gain additional levels, I opted to progress the story because that’s honestly all I was concerned with at this point of the game. Unfortunately that decision turned into a gauntlet that ended in a fight against a Dodoria that was five levels ahead of me which doesn’t sound terrible, but in this game that sort of gap feels very real. Any super attack landing on me meant I was going to lose at least a quarter of my health. On the other hand, whenever I found myself at a higher level than my opponent, the fight would wind up feeling like a joke and I would destroy them after only three melee strings followed by a Kamehameha or Big Bang Attack.
Even with power levels making no real sense when paired with these volatile experience levels, the combat itself is pretty solid. Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot follows the same sort of gameplay that is found in the Dragonball Xenoverse series where the fight takes place in an open arena pulled from the open world where there is full freedom in the movement, flight included. There is a melee button that mostly just gets mashed, a dodge button that can also be mashed, and a Ki blast button that is tied to the Ki gauge. The Ki gauge is what allows the use of special attacks like Kamehameha, Masenko, Final Flash, and even the Super Spirit Bomb, as well as some other movement options like a super dash where I fly straight towards my opponent and event a vanish attack that triggers when I’m blocking a string and hit the dodge button. The last addition to the combat is the fact that companions can help during battles and fight almost completely autonomously except for their assists, which are two set special attacks from their move set.
There is a particular assist that is hilariously overpowered and it’s not anything like Goku’s Spirit Bomb or even Vegeta’s Final Flash, instead it’s Krillin’s Solar Flare. During the fights an opponent can start doing a super move that can swallow a good fifty percent of the immediate area in the arena. Instead of actually playing the game by trying to avoid it with all of my movement options, I would just be able to call for Krillin’s Solar Flare and suddenly my opponent would not just be stunned, but their giant wave of destruction would be cancelled out as well as any worry I may have had. Considering the combat as a whole package, so long as I wasn’t totally underleveled, the fights were pretty fun and gave me a lot of freedom to do almost anything I wanted to do during a fight. However, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot shines best when it recreates some of the most iconic scenes of the anime in fantastic detail.
CyberConnect2 has had a fantastic track record in regards to the games they’ve developed and how they have handled the source material, especially in animations and cutscenes. Some of their most notable work is found in the Naruto Ninja Storm games as well as Asura’s Wrath and the recent 3D Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure games. I believe Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is their biggest project and their efforts most certainly show throughout the game, for the most part. The most fun I had was watching how CyberConnect2 recreated not only fantastic moments in the anime through cutscenes, but also some of the best impacts during combat that put these character models to the absolute limit. After so many years since my first time watching the anime on Toonami, I still get hyped whenever Gohan breaks through that Super Saiyan barrier in his fight against Cell, I still get teary eyed when Gohan musters all of his strength in his final bout with Cell as Goku supports him from King Kai’s Planet after he died, and I am one hundred percent about my man Gohan fighting crime in his Great Saiyaman outfit.
I love Gohan. And each of these moments are done more than enough justice in the game. However, there are moments where the quality takes a dramatic dip, leaving me awestruck at how this game just had a beautifully choreographed fight between Super Buu and Vegito only to follow up with dialogue between Goku and Vegeta where the character models had a facelift conducted by a shovel. I felt that maybe the designers were trying to recreate the original rounded anime style Akira Toriyama used in the original manga, but in practice it looked like a joke or some high budget parody.
For someone that is a fan of the series, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is that giant package on Christmas Day hiding beneath a hoard of more modest gifts, all with similar wrapping, but not this one. Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot was wrapped by a team of savants that knew exactly what I wanted, practically screaming through the wrapping that there was anime goodness ready to be played. In short, I believe most of the enjoyment to be had in this game comes from already being a fan of the series rather than being some sort of entry point for anybody new. I wouldn’t call it a demerit, that’s just not what this experience is geared for. Even when writing this, I kept questioning whether or not it would be worth explaining who Master Roshi and Bulma are, or just what in the world is a Kamehameha, but in the end I decided that would be a waste of all of our time – a sentiment Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot echoes in practice throughout gameplay. The only explanations I received were just about gameplay, not about the characters. In short, this is a blessing for fans of the anime to enjoy, and as such I had a most wonderful time.
Thank you for reading. Your Patreon support keeps our community entirely Ad free.
