The “Break it Down” Blog

Summary [7.5 out of 10]

Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit is an amazingly detailed translation of the Dragon Ball Z universe into a fighting video game. The graphics, sound effects, voice acting, animated styling and most important, myriad of fighting moves make this a must-get for any Dragon Ball Z fans out there.

General fans of fighting games will find a very entertaining game in here, but may be better served by the upcoming Street Fighter IV title instead due to more universal recognition/appeal.

Outline

• Story
• Graphics & Effects
• Sounds & Voice Acting
• Gameplay
  • Controls
  • Drama Pieces
  • Unlockables
• Online Multiplayer
• Training & Practice
• Conclusion
• Areas of Improvement

Story

Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit retells the story of DBZ (using fight sequences and cutscenes) from the first three DBZ Sagas:

• Vegeta Saga
• Captain Ginyu Saga
• Frieza Saga

One thing I really liked about how the story was told from this perspective is that during a Saga, you might start off as say Goku, but then after a fight and another set of cutscenes, you might have to play as the person you just beat, say Vegeta, because of the introduction of another Saiyan like Recoome.

I thought this gave a nice natural feel to progressing through the story but also let you participate in more of it without just sticking you to playing as a single character and fighting through his life only during the Saga.

Graphics & Effects

Generally very good. The team did an excellent job giving the game the cell-shaded/anime look, but not quite as polished as say the PS3-exclusive upcoming title, Naruto: Ultimate Ninja. The cloth animation of clothing is a bit static feeling, not very fluid and you will see repeated skeletal animations applied to different characters models… like the “just got punched in the face, but am going to look back at you slowly” animation, and the “surprise-super-punch-in-the-gut” animations… you’ll see those more than a fair share.

The character models and skins were again excellent. Some of the cell-shaded-esque outlines on the characters that give it the drawn look are sometimes a hair rough, but unless you are being ultra critical and looking for it, the transition of 2D anime characters to this 3D fighter was done really well. The art team nailed the proportions of all the fighters, so for example, you never feel like Kid Goku is too short or not big enough or that Recoome was too tall or anything like that.

The visual effects of the game for special attacks like the Kamehameha are beautiful and exactly what you’d want to see. Big, bright explosive visuals with touches of bluring and powerful energy lines. Also smashing two energy beams into eachother and battling out who’s will win is just awesome that they even got that into the game.

Super-move scene-cuts are brilliantly done and perfectly timed. For example, kicking someone up into the air and issuing a “chase” attack as well will do a 3-scene cut of you first kicking them, then a cut, then you zooming in from the side, kicking them again, then a cut, then you zooming in from under neath and finally punching them down. All animated and sounded out just like the show would be done. I was really impressed with all of these sequences ever time either I or my opponent pulled of a super move of some kind.

Sounds & Voice Acting

The sounds and voice acting in the game were excellent. From what I heard the voice acting sounded like all the original cast from the show so as far as I could see there: “spot on”.

This also includes super-bad lines like “DARN YOUUUU!” that I’m guessing you love by this point. This is definitely a PG title (don’t expect any F-bombs or blood).

NOTE: This game does contain dubbed English voice acting, so if you were hoping for subtitled voice acting you might not like what you get.

The sound effects were solid, clear and had plenty of pop to them. Smashing someone in the face or breaking their spleen with a super-punch had that beautiful mechanical/powerful/sheen sound that is straight out of the anime.

Across the board the fidelity with which the team brought the Dragon Ball Z world into the video game was excellent. I really can’t complain about anything in this category.

Gameplay - Controls

Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit is not a button masher.

That’s the first thing I’d have to say about this game. If you are not the type of fighter-player that wants to learn combos and just wants to hop into a fight and start mashing buttons and pulling off sweet moves, you won’t enjoy Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit. This game is intended for people that are patient and will take the time to learn the moves.

If you hop into this game and try and button mash, you will likely make it through the first 4-8 fights and then hit a brick wall and just be unable to continue unless you bump the game down to Very Easy. You just cannot hang in a fight with a player that is executing sequences and taking off 1000hp per attack while you are dolling out 75-150hp of damage yourself each time you try.

There is also a strong dependency on chaining moves. In Street Fighters for example, it’s usually pretty easy to combine any number of punches and kicks and make up some long-running combo. In Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit, if you just try and button mash, you will find yourself firing off the exact same 2 or 3 move sequences over and over and over; even if you don’t intend to.

You really need to take the time to learn the combos in this game and if you do, you will be rewarded with not only a deep and satisfying fighting system where fraction-of-a-second combos are easy to pull of but you will be constantly rewarded with awesome-looking moves as you beat your opponent to death.

I would point out that it can be daunting to learn these combos as almost every single button on the controller can be used and some used in certain contexts with each other, but it’s still surprisingly easy to pull off some badass looking moves if you just take the time to learn say 2 or 3 special moves and then try and add 1 move to your repertoire per day even.

I’m basically saying “yes it can be really deep and look daunting, but it can also be pretty dang easy to look like a badass with about 10mins of practice”.

Gameplay - Drama Pieces

I’m adding this section because these things confused me until I learned what they are. They are basically special events that can occur during a fight if certain criteria are met.

As an example, if you select a protection drama piece, and you start a fight and your enemy unleashed some big attack on you, if that triggers that drama piece, a quick cutscene will trigger where your partner will come flying out of no where and kick your enemy across the face, breaking his attack and issuing some damage against him. There is a certain limit to how many drama pieces will trigger during a fight.

There is a whole slew of drama pieces and some of them are pretty cool. One that Recoome has is if an especially powerful attack is executed against him, he has a drama piece that will cause him to instantly dodge it and during that cutscene that is trigger he just laughs and says something like “Is that all?” or “I’ll just dodge that”.

They are kind of clever anime-esque touches to a typical 1 on 1 fighting game I thought that introduced some interesting twists to a fight.

Gameplay - Unlockables

As is getting popular with fighters and racing games, Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit features unlockables in the forms of new characters, new levels, new special attacks (drama pieces) and even moves.

The way unlocks work is at the end of each fight you are giving a quick breakdown of everything awesome you did during the fight, a star-score and finally a letter score for your battle. Then you are giving a list of notifications of things that you have unlocked as a result of that fight.

I found the presentation to be really satisfying, giving you some compensation for making it through a stage and making you want to keep playing through more or replaying the same stage to get a higher score and unlock more.

Online Multiplayer

This was one portion of Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit that disappointed me.

While the menus, features and matching function/flow of multiplayer was fairly good, the seeming razor-strict synchronization code made multiplayer matches on anything less than perfect 3-bar/Green connections unplayably frustrating. And there also didn’t seem to be a way to search for another low-ping game to join, you could only match against game settings and it was a crap-shoot to see what speed the person you were playing with was.

When you connect to another person to play an online match, you are shown the person’s PSN ID along with a 3-bar, Red/Yellow/Green latency (ping) indicator. I played multiple matches online and this was the summary of my experience:

• Red: Completely unplayable. The actual frames of animation seem to be synchronized. Meaning the game plays “choppy” and jerky trying to keep you and the host in sync.
• Yellow: The animation was smooth, but fight movements were dropped from time to time. For example trying to pull off a triple-punch and then a kick would result in maybe a punch and a kick, or more likely just the kick. It wasn’t a lag issue, it’s just that the commands were simply dropped and never played out. At one point I actually went 10 seconds without successfully firing off a single attack because each time I tried they were dropped.
• Green: Plays fine

I was really surprised by seeing such poor multiplayer net code, either by not implementing some sort of prediction algorithms or attempting so strictly to synchronize both the host and the remote player without any consideration for lag that will exist between the two.

Unless you can bag a 3-bar/Green connection, I’d say online multiplayer is a no-go.

One thing I did really like about the online presentation is that at any point you can make a choice (like a character, or to replay the person or quite) you are shown both your menu and your opponents menu and you can see their choice in real-time which made the online experience more personal and made coordinating with someone you liked playing with a bit easier after a fight was over (as opposed to blindly saying Continue or Quit and waiting to see what happens based on what they agreed to, you can watch them pick one or the other).

Training & Practice

I had to add a section for this because the game is brilliant in this regard.

Out of the box Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit provides a 3-tiered, unlockable training regiment that is meant to train you in all ways Dragon Ball. As you pass each class you unlock the next; with any class you have passed easily returnable to individually if you just want to practice 1 aspect at a later date.

The training was not 1-dimensional as I expected, is was actually laid out in an extremely intuitive way (the progression is very natural), instructions are completely voiced-over by the DBZ characters and instruction screens before each training excercise clearly spell out exactly what you have to do to clear that stage.

I’ve played a lot of fighters in the past that give you a practice mode and let you lookup combos yourself, but not one with as much detail and purposefully-designed training before.

Continuing from the previous section, I think the Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit designers knew that the fighting system was deep and required a good understanding of the combos so they developed this training mode directly into the game.

Lastly, as mentioned, you of course have a Practice Mode where you can get into the ring with a CPU character and wail on them indefinitly, looking up combos as you go and either turning their AI on or off (so they either fight back, or stand there like a sack of bricks).

The combination of the two modes makes for an excellent ramp-up experience for first time players and folks that just want to brush up on their fighting if they find themselves in a rut.

Conclusion [7.5 out of 10]

Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit is a great game that is a must-buy for Dragon Ball Z fans, a safe-buy for avid fighting-game fans and a great rental for fighting game fans. While it won’t be converting any gamers that generally avoid fighting games, watching some of the more over-the-top attacks and anime-style presentation can be pretty entertaining.

If you like fighting games but sometimes find yourself on the fence, we might suggest waiting to see the reviews on Naruto: Ultimate Ninja or Street Fighter IV before making a final decision on which fighting game to get.

Areas of Improvement

As with all our reviews, we try not to criticize unless we can provide feedback on how to improve something. So we’ll outline those below:

• Better online multiplayer gameplay experience. Less jerky, more fluid.
• A bit more button-masher friendly. I felt the barrier to executing cool moves was a hair to high to make this a blind-pick-and-play title, which I believe most fighters should be.
• A bit longer or clearer presentation of the portion of the DBZ universe that is being covered in the game’s story mode. Maybe a lead-in, lead-out to the place in the story where the game takes place to give non-DBZ fans some more context.
• Less repetitive character animations and more fluid story presentation. A few times we saw cutscenes play that didn’t really make sense given the outcome of a fight or a cutscene would cut to a character that wasn’t even involved in the scene saying something, then cut back to the real scene… that was odd.
• An option for sub-titled, original-voiced material for folks that don’t like the cheesy English voice overs.