Fighting Games To Play: GC

Showing posts with label GC. Show all posts

Thursday, April 5, 2012

One Piece: Pirates Carnival Review

The great thing about Japan's entertainment industry is that it quite often seems like the people making it are completely out of their minds. Case in point, Shonen Jump's One Piece, a manga-turned-anime that is all the rage in Japan and has seen a few not-so-great fighting-game translations in North America. This isn't the place to get filled in on the epic 430-plus chapters of the manga series--but to put you in the right frame of thought, a little boy chases his dream of worldwide acceptance and recognition, there's some non-FDA-approved fruit involved, face faulting is played out in barbaric proportions, and the world's most inoffensive pirates go about their business. It's nonsensical by nature, and developer hand uses this backdrop extensively for its party game based on the series, One Piece: Pirates Carnival. Unfortunately, the minigames themselves aren't that great, and more often than not, the overabundance of Monkey D. Luffy and his crew drag on an otherwise interesting design like an anchor in the mud.

You can have it all laid out for you in a tutorial, but Pirates Carnival's primary mode of play is far easier to comprehend on a hands-on basis. On that note, the One Piece-themed minigames are bundled up in an overarching game that somewhat resembles Reversi (or Othello, for you sophisticated types), played with four players instead of two. Pirates Carnival is best served as a party game, and up to four human players can jump in and take control of any one of the current Straw Hat Pirates, sans Franky. However, solo play is also an option, and you can select up to three CPU players on four different difficulty settings. The initial square board comprises 25 panels, with each player calling one corner home. After battling it out in an initial minigame to see who controls the center panel and goes first, each player takes turns flipping panels to reveal variously themed One Piece cards, which have a corresponding monetary value. Panels come in four different varieties: minigame, event, captain, or davy back fight. Minigame is the most prevalent variety, and flipping one of these gives you a choice of three minigames to compete in. The winner of the game takes control of the panel, regardless of who flipped it. Event cards are freebie panels, and they usually come with a beneficial side effect, such as commandeering one of your opponent's panels or giving you an extra turn. Captain panels have the highest value and are actually twofers, with the catch being that they are a three-on-one game. Davy back fights let you contest a panel controlled by an opponent, potentially letting you make off with the sweet booty hiding underneath. The Reversi element factors in when you surround an opponent's panel or panels with your own, effectively letting you plunder an opponent's hard-earned winnings in true piratical fashion.

Even though many of the minigames skew toward the absurd and get massive style points in that respect, their core mechanics lack the depth and variety necessary to give them any substance. One of the more enjoyable minigames involves skydiving 10,000 meters to land on a tiny boat in the middle of the ocean, with an octopus acting as parachute to measure your descent. It isn't overly complex, as you'll only be using the thumbstick to aim your descent and one button to unfurl the octopus, but it creates a highly competitive situation and is utterly ludicrous in its presentation. However, most of the other minigames only share this one's simple control scheme. In fact, a large portion of the minigames can be controlled with just one or two buttons. In one sense, this could be good, because it stays away from overly complicated controls for these short games. But in another sense it is bad, because a lot of the games end up feeling very similar from one to the next, and they have a tendency to devolve into button-mashing affairs, though there are a few decent timing-based games. Plus, even though there are supposedly 30-plus minigames in the package, you'll have access to only about two-thirds without having to undergo some hardcore frustration unlocking other boards, which isn't exactly ideal for a party game. And even then, you tend to see the same minigames appear time and time again, so the variety that theoretically should be here simply isn't. Plus, you'll have easy access to only three boards, all of which are square, which seems to miss the opportunity of adding a unique twist to the Reversi strategy.

Aside from the lackluster minigames, Pirates Carnival has several frustrating elements that further run it aground. Board games can swing in and out of your favor in an instant, and it's possible to lose the game even though you've won the majority of the minigames. Losing on a lucky draw of a no-contest event card when you're squaring off against difficult opponents to unlock a new board can be annoying, to say the least. Luck also plays too large of a factor in many of the minigames, and again, it can be infuriating to lose a crucial panel in such a way. Also, despite being able to select the difficulty level of your opponent, the overall difficulty level seems to be more dynamic than static. For instance, it is entirely possible to get inexplicably trounced by an easy opponent if you're leading the board by a healthy margin, and harder opponents will occasionally lighten up if you're well behind in total panels. However, regardless of whether you're winning or losing big, at least once per game the board will instantly change hands, so the Reversi strategic layer tends to lose a lot of its appeal.

Pirates Carnival delivers big-time on the fan service, but the frequent interruptions kill the pacing of the game. Namely, voice work has been crammed in to the brim. The English-version voice actors deliver their shtick in context with which character revealed which card, and it's actually quite impressive considering all of the various permutations that are available. Most minigames are also prefaced by fully voiced short intro cutscenes or hand-drawn manga-style stills, all featuring the same gratuitous amount of face faulting that One Piece is known for. Graphically, the game features a mix of the aforementioned stills and cel-shaded animation, and the crew appears as caricatured sprites in the minigames, which all look decent enough. Also, Luffy's exuberance apparently extends to each board's backgrounds, as windmills and small islands defy their facticity as inanimate objects and bounce with mindless glee. It's really quite perplexing.

The downside to the extensive use of the license here is that it really drags down the pace of the game. Between Luffy making claims to the pirate throne, a rules-explanation screen, Buggy the Clown brandishing his cutlass before a minigame, and a loading screen, you're in for a lot of sitting and staring, waiting and wishing to just do something. Add in that most minigames are in the neighborhood of 60 to 90 seconds max, and there's proportionally very little gameplay in the board game mode as a result.

In a party atmosphere, Pirates Carnival will occasionally offer the kind of fun that causes people to absolutely freak when they lose in a tight match. A party atmosphere will probably go a long way in making the game's quirky sense of humor a bit easier to swallow, as well as helping you overlook some of the game's ho-hum minigames and agonizing pacing. However, the minigames lack the depth necessary to keep the game entertaining for very long. And though they have a lot of character, none of what's here is particularly compelling or enjoyable. In fact, without the board game premise, you really won't find a strong reason to go back to any of these games just for playing's sake. And that's where Pirates Carnival ultimately fails.

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

One Piece: Grand Battle Review

Shonen Jump's One Piece: Grand Battle lets you play as the Straw Hat Pirates or their enemies in an arena fighter that's very much inspired by the Power Stone games. Were One Piece also a four-player party game, it might be entertaining. One-on-one confrontations don't pass muster, as they basically become a race to see who pulls off a ludicrously damaging special attack first. There are 14 characters in total, but they play almost identically. A great cel-shaded graphics engine is the game's best feature. As a single-player experience, One Piece is inadequate; as a two-player romp, it won't hold your interest for long, even (and almost especially) if you're a fan of the One Piece anime or manga.

The increasingly popular One Piece show follows the adventures of Monkey D. Luffy and his ragtag crew of Pirates as they quest for the ultimate treasure. At best, Grand Battle is a footnote in their adventures. Story mode comprises five short matches, which take place in four or five disappointingly diminutive arenas. If you play as any of the series' protagonists, you'll find that all but one of these bouts pit you against your shipmates.

The justifications for these confrontations are invariably ridiculous and amount to domestic squabbles among the pirates. Most of these revolve around the distribution of food. Luffy will, for example, ask Nami (the ship's navigator) if he can borrow some of her tangerines. She'll then attempt to stifle Luffy's legendary appetite by besting him in deadly combat. In another instance, Usopp is attacked by Sanji, the ship's chef, after it is discovered that he has eaten the last of the eggs from the galley's fridge.

The fifth battle in the series finally lets you fight a baddie, but not toward any major goal. They just show up, and you have at it. No overarching mission unites the story mode. Your reasons for fighting are petty and are fueled by self-interest. Completing this game gets Luffy no closer to being the king of all pirates, and Zolo no closer to being the world's greatest swordsman.

As if to drive this point home, the ending cinematics--if they can even be called such--are three-second clips from the show and have nothing to do with the five battles that preceded their playing. The game then insults you by unlocking these character endings for playback in the game's treasure room. Who in his or her right mind would want to replay three seconds of anime?

After you complete a difficulty level with all of the initially available characters, you'll unlock four baddies. Complete the game with these guys, and you'll unlock four more. All characters are selectable in grand battles and grand tourneys, which are really just multiplayer modes in which you can, if you so choose, fight the CPU instead of a buddy. Grand battle is a single confrontation or exhibition, while grand tourney is, as the name would imply, a ladder-style tournament involving the characters and stages of story mode.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Bloody Roar Extreme Review

As if the idea of beating people up using exaggerated martial-arts combos weren't enough of a draw, the Bloody Roar games also let you transform into anthropomorphic animals that, according to the games' fiction, are even better than humans at beating people up using exaggerated martial-arts combos. The fifth game in the series, Bloody Roar Extreme, is mostly a straight port of Bloody Roar: Primal Fury for the GameCube, a game that's over a year old and is itself based on 2001's Bloody Roar 3 for the PlayStation 2. So Bloody Roar Extreme isn't exactly a fresh take on fighting games, though it looks good and controls well enough. It also inherits its predecessors' rather simplistic fighting system, though this first Bloody Roar game for the Xbox can nonetheless provide some fast-paced button-mashing fun for a while.

Bloody Roar Extreme is best suited to those who aren't too serious about the fighting genre, though there's at least some level of depth. The controls are simplistic--there's a punch button, a kick button, and a button that makes you instantly change into your character's beast form, if you can do so at the time. Alternately, when your beast change meter is full, you can hyper-transform, which puts you in a powered-up beast form for a little while. You can also use the shoulder buttons to sidestep left or right, though such tactics are usually unnecessary. You'd do just as well to jam on the punch or kick buttons rapidly in order to produce long strings of dazzling attacks.

You might think that varying up your punches and kicks, or using throws or counters, would be a good idea. In practice, though, you don't really have to. Not against the computer, anyway. The computer can be easily beaten by using the same moves over and over. At higher difficulties, and especially toward the end of the arcade mode, the computer starts fighting cheap. You probably won't mistake this for a challenge, though. At any rate, if you've ever wondered what the pejorative expression "button masher" really refers to, you'll find out when you play Bloody Roar Extreme. It's unfair to say the game's fighting system is totally superficial, since there are a few complex tricks that can be learned. However, you could get by more easily without bothering. The difference between an excellent fighting game and a game like Bloody Roar Extreme is that Bloody Roar offers little reward or advantage to players who bother to learn all the moves. As if to discourage you from even trying, there's no in-game move list for the fighters.

The combat is very dynamic, at least. Many attacks send the opponent on the receiving end flying backward, fast and hard, sometimes into walls, and sometimes straight through them. Other attacks send opponents skyward, letting you follow up with juggle combos. Every character has a couple of devastating supermoves that turn the screen into a porridge of hit sparks as a gratuitous combo meter racks up dozens of effortless hits. These supermoves, though toned down somewhat from Bloody Roar 3, are still really powerful, letting you easily shave off about a third of your opponent's health. Meanwhile, transforming into beast form, as in previous Bloody Roar games, is just as much a gimmick as a gameplay element. Actually, if you've played previous Bloody Roar games, it's far less of a gimmick by now. At any rate, characters in beast form gain a few new moves and abilities and regenerate some of their lost health, but they otherwise aren't too different from their standard forms. The characters aren't too different from one another either, once you get past their looks.

Bloody Roar Extreme has some secrets that can be unlocked, including a hidden fighter who wasn't in Primal Fury for the GameCube. Since it won't require much effort for you to beat the game with any of the characters, it's nice that the game at least throws in some bonus stuff for variety's sake. Even so, since the computer won't pose much of a long-term challenge, you probably won't get much value out of Bloody Roar Extreme as a single-player game. There are more than a dozen characters, but you could finish the game with all of them in a sitting or two. As a two-player game--and fighting games are always better when you play them against a willing human opponent--Bloody Roar Extreme can be fun, though it can also be frustrating because of the punishing supermoves and easily performed chain combos. Still, if you don't take your fighting games too seriously, you'll probably enjoy playing the game against a friend for a while.

For some reason, Bloody Roar Extreme replaces Primal Fury's anime intro and ending sequences with prerendered CG cutscenes that look OK at best. Bloody Roar's in-game graphics are actually better--the character models look good and animate smoothly. You'll notice the fighters' facial expressions changing and nice little details in their clothing, plus the whole game runs at a smooth 60 frames per second. The background scenery isn't quite as well done as the characters, though it still provides plenty to gawk at. The graphics of Bloody Roar Extreme hold up surprisingly well, and for better or worse make this as good looking as any other fighting game on the Xbox.

The audio hasn't stood the test of time quite as well. The characters' voices fit them well enough, though they repeat the same sound bites over and over, and when they shape-change to animal form, they sound pretty generic. The game's upbeat soundtrack, which consists of completely uncool guitar riffs, is perhaps a suitable match for its anime-influenced character designs, though it can also get rather irritating.

Overall, Bloody Roar Extreme isn't as good as any of the latest installments in the major 3D fighting game series out there, though it's certainly competent and appealing in some ways. It'd make a decent rental and a fine way to kill some time, especially if you have some friends who'd be willing to try it. Even if they're not into fighting games, you wouldn't be lying if you told them it's easy to get into and get good at Bloody Roar Extreme.

Friday, March 23, 2012

Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Review

Dating back to the 1950s, Godzilla is the undisputed king of movie monsters. This radioactive lizard is a world-renowned icon who may be campy but certainly deserves every ounce of his fame, and Japan's Toho Studios has created literally dozens of films with him in the starring role. In this day and age it's sometimes painfully apparent that proud Godzilla is really just a man in a rubber suit, but even after all these decades, you still can tell that tremendous effort and artistry must have gone into the making of these classic sci-fi films. The most well known of all of Godzilla's appearances has to be 1968's Destroy All Monsters, sort of a battle royal for Godzilla and his many terrific adversaries. It's this movie that was the inspiration for a 3D fighting game that hit the GameCube last year and has now been ported to the Xbox with few noticeable changes. In it, players can assume the roles of nearly a dozen giant monsters and try to defeat all their opponents, with little regard for the cities in which the battles take place. It's a great concept, and Godzilla nuts will find it irresistibly appealing. Unfortunately, Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee turns out to be quite shallow, and while it could easily tide over Godzilla fans for a while, it ultimately relies on the strength of its license to compensate for its weakness as a game.

Destroy All Monsters Melee is simple and has elements in common with other multiplayer-focused beat-'em-up games like Capcom's Power Stone series or the recent Kung Fu Chaos. Generally speaking, though, it lacks these other games' smooth frame rates, its controls are pretty clunky, its collision detection doesn't look quite right, and the pacing of the action is a bit slow. Then again, none of those other games had Godzilla in them.

A number of different modes of play are available in Destroy All Monsters Melee, and while you might be inclined to cut straight to the four-player melee mode with a group of pals, you'll probably need to spend some time in the single-player adventure mode first. That's because initially just four monsters are selectable (which is one more than on the GameCube, actually): Godzilla (the '90s-era version), the spiny Anguirus, the buglike Megalon, and the evil cyborg Gigan. The rest must be unlocked by repeatedly slogging through the adventure mode, in which you'll always take on the tough Mecha Godzilla as the final boss. Beating him, much less getting to him, may prove to be overly difficult for those who aren't very experienced with fighting games. Unless you're playing on the easy setting, the computer fights dirty, often making a beeline for offscreen power-ups. Plus, you have only three chances to get through the adventure mode, and if you don't make it, you'll have to start over. There's also a versus mode for two players, a survival mode that puts more time pressure on you to defeat AI-controlled monsters, a team battle where you're only trying to defeat opposing team members, and a destruction mode where you try to wreak more havoc within a city than your opponent.

The Xbox version adds a single-player destruction mode that's pretty pointless, hooks for downloadable content, as well as a couple of new levels to fight in and another unlockable monster. While the game has a good number of modes, your goal in most of these is to pound your enemy (or enemies) into submission using your monster's various attacks. Battles generally take place in urban environments that look boundless but in fact have artificial borders that confine the action to a relatively small area. You're otherwise free to run (or in some cases fly) about the area as you see fit, knocking down buildings as you go.

Beyond giving you some freedom of movement, Destroy All Monsters Melee functions like a conventional, rudimentary 3D fighting game. There isn't a ton of variation between the different controllable monsters when you get past their distinct appearances, and a few of them are essentially identical. As any of the monsters, you can execute several different attacks at the touch of a button, and you can also block, fire a beam weapon, and pick up and toss your opponent. Throws, overhead hits, and sweeps can all be used to crack an opposing monster's defenses, and each monster also has a number of special moves that are extremely easy to execute just by moving the analog stick in a direction while pressing a button. Many attacks in Destroy All Monsters Melee cause the monster on the receiving end to go flying, and should you find yourself knocked down, you can execute a couple of recovery moves to keep the opponent from pursuing his attack. The frequent knockdowns add some drama to the proceedings, but since the game is filled with lumbering creatures that aren't exactly quick on their feet, you may find yourself annoyed at spending more time flopping around on the pavement than standing toe-to-toe with another monster.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

One Piece Grand Adventure Review

Just shy of a year after bringing One Piece Grand Battle to the US, Namco Bandai delivers its follow-up, One Piece Grand Adventure, and you have to wonder what the developers spent that year doing. The additions of an adventure mode and support characters to the brawler gameplay model are somewhat notable, but the majority of Grand Adventure has literally been copied verbatim from Grand Battle. Even if you weren't disappointed by the shallow, repetitive nature of last year's model, Grand Adventure gives you little incentive to invest in this year's One Piece.

If you're not already familiar with the piratical exploits of Monkey D. Luffy and the rest of the Straw Hat Pirates, turn back now. One Piece Grand Adventure simply isn't for you. Fans, however, should have no problem leaping feetfirst into the grand adventure mode, which initially casts you as Luffy--though once you complete his grand adventure, you'll unlock new quests for other characters, like the clown pirate Buggy the Clown. The grand adventure is spread out across a series of isolated island chains, and each one features a number of conflicts that you'll have to resolve before you can move on. Unsurprisingly, that resolution usually involves you punching a bunch of guys in the face. There's a little variety to the action; sometimes you'll just be punching one guy in the face, sometimes you'll have to eliminate a field of guys with your face punching, and occasionally you'll be given odd, non-face-punching-related tasks like destroying a number of boxes, using your fighting prowess to clean all the snow off a building's roof, or racing another character while riding what appears to be some kind of Chocobo knockoff.

Succeeding in these challenges gives you experience points that you can invest in your main character or in any of the other fighters that join up during the course of your adventure, though there's little reason to switch your focus midstream once you've already invested experience points in a particular character. You can earn additional experience by meeting certain bonus conditions, which change from fight to fight and include finishing the fight with a special move, never jumping during the course of the fight, or beating your opponent within a certain time limit. The bonus conditions add a bit of novelty to the action, since it's easy enough to just mash your way through most fights. Still, the grand adventure mode is pretty thin, and even though each adventure is relatively short, the combat is simple and repetitive enough that you likely won't be inspired to play past the first few. Outside the grand adventure mode lays the grand battle mode, which is a handful of stock fighting modes, including a regular one-on-one versus mode, an arena mode where you have to fight your way through the ranks of increasingly challenging opponents, a custom tournament mode, and a training mode. If you want to play with a friend, this is where you'll do it, though the absence of any kind of four-way action seems like a pretty glaring omission.

Keeping with the One Piece feel, the combat in Grand Adventure is frantic and over-the-top, and different characters have unique suites of moves that suit them. Luffy's fighting style, for example, usually involves him testing the elasticity of his rubbery frame, while Zolo primarily fights using his array of swords. Each character has a good dozen different combos he or she can pull off, as well as a throw and a handful of special attacks that can be activated only when you have enough of your skill meter filled. You can also tap in to your skill meter to summon a support character for a short while. Depending on which support character you choose, they can attack your enemy up-close or with projectiles, restore your health, or even be ridden into battle. The support characters are a bit clumsy, and they're more effective at creating more onscreen chaos than they are at pitching the odds in your favor, a sentiment that applies pretty well to most of the combat. Each character's moves may be unique, but the button combos used to pull them off are all but identical, making it easy to switch from one character to another but eliminating the requirement of any modicum of skill. The decent variety of moves each character is equipped with seems like a bit of a waste, since you can best most enemies just by mashing on the main attack button repeatedly.

The only real motivation to change up your attacks is to avoid hearing the exact same canned battle cry over and over again, a problem that plagues the whole of the game's sound design. When you're not listening to a generic, synthesized orchestra, you're being punished with gratingly enthusiastic sound bites. The game's visuals are more compelling--the characters sport some solid cel-shading--but virtually everything you'll see in Grand Adventure was lifted from last year's Grand Battle. Top it all off with some stifling frame rate problems, and it's hard to get too excited about the game's presentation.

One Piece Grand Adventure is definitely a more fleshed-out game than its predecessor, but the game feels as though the developer just threw in the features it meant to include the first time around rather than develop a full-blown sequel. If you already invested in One Piece Grand Battle, you should save your money, because you've effectively already played One Piece Grand Adventure. Everyone else, aside from maybe the most devout One Piece fans, should avoid Grand Adventure because of its insubstantial story mode and shallow gameplay.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Zatch Bell! Mamodo Battles Review

If you're finding yourself asking questions like whether it's really pronounced "Zack," or what a mamodo is, then you need not read any further. Zatch Bell! Mamodo Battles quite simply isn't for you. This dumbed-down anime-inspired fighter--which bears a striking resemblance to One Piece: Grand Battle and Inuyasha: Feudal Combat, two other dumbed-down anime fighters from Bandai--exists solely for the sake of those already smitten with Zatch Bell!, though that still doesn't fully excuse the game's short and clumsy story mode or its shallow and unbalanced gameplay.

Zatch Bell! easily could have come from the same cut-rate anime factory responsible for Yu-Gi-Oh!--both are saddled with weirdly high-concept premises, and both teem with spiky-haired youths who like to kick it with strange and often grating extradimensional beings and who like to fight a lot. If you want more specific details than that, you'd better go read a FAQ or something, because you're not going to get much from Mamodo Battles. To a point it seems unfair to expect the game to be completely choked with exposition, but there's a soap opera quality to Zatch Bell! that makes it nearly impenetrable to outsiders.

Then again, you don't have to care about character motivations when you're just kicking the crap out of everyone you meet, which is the crux of the "story" mode in Mamodo Battles. Playing as a pair of characters, one human and one otherworldly "mamodo," you hop around 10 different locales, running into and throwing down with other couples. Each stage is supposedly set in either Japan or England, but the menu that you select stages from doesn't give you much sense of place, and most are generic-looking enough to have been set anywhere. In a halfhearted bid to pad out the six incredibly short stories, the game sometimes has you go to a location to find points, which you can use to buy character enhancements or replicas of Zatch Bell!-branded collectible cards; sometimes you'll go to a location and find nothing at all. Still, it won't take you more than 20 minutes to tear through each of the six scenarios.

Once you've wrung the two or three hours of gameplay from the story mode, your options in Mamodo Battles are limited. You can test your might in the time attack mode, which challenges you to beat a series of opponents in the least amount of time; you can square off with the AI or player two for one-off fights; and that's about it. That the actual combat is rather mindless doesn't help the game's case, either. Though you'll play as a team of two characters, they effectively act as one, with the secondary character only occasionally becoming active for special team moves--and, realistically, there's only half a character's worth of moves in any given team.

You can mash on the X button to perform a canned melee attack routine, you can hit the square button to cast a ranged spell attack, and if your special meter has filled up, you can press and hold L1 to unleash an exceptionally devastating special attack that more often than not will end the match. How your special meter fills is dictated by how many multihit combos you can pull off, which brings us to Mamodo Battles' biggest problem. Many of the characters have attacks that will overwhelmingly net them big combo points, thus rapidly filling up their special meter. Though the game does offer several different difficulty settings, the AI is never particularly cunning, making it easy to use the same techniques over and over again, turning the whole experience into a monotonous grind. Live opponents can prove to be more challenging since they're more prone to mix up their techniques, but the two-player game is still plagued by poor character balance, and once both players figure out just how powerful the special attack is the game quickly turns into a race to fill up your special meter.

Zatch Bell! Mamodo Battles distracts from its stupid gameplay with some flashy cel-shaded graphics, and it works well, to an extent. Despite a total disregard for any aesthetic consistency, the characters look uniformly sharp and colorful, though the thick black lines around the cel-shaded models often reveals some pretty harsh aliasing. The attack animations can get a little repetitive, but they do a fine job of capturing Zatch Bell's goofy, exaggerated style. The game adds a lot of punch to all of the attacks with an overwhelming amount of crazy special effects. All of this glitz has a price, and even though the scope of each level is extremely modest, Mamodo Battles is still prone to some slowdown.Though all of the story sequences are told with minimally animated portraits of the characters, the game gets added authenticity by way of the American voice cast for Zatch Bell! Unfortunately, a number of the characters are so achingly annoying that you wish they were mute. Additionally, since each team has a very limited number of attacks, you'll inevitably hear the same handful of attack sound effects over and over again. Though the music occasionally treads into the kind of schmaltzy synthesized lounge sounds usually reserved for mahjong or horse-racing games, it usually backs up the action nicely with energetic and catchy tunes.

It's understandable that the audience for something like Zatch Bell! Mamodo Battles might not be bothered by the game's rather low ambitions--save for the anomalous Dragon Ball Z: Budokai games, the standard for anime-inspired fighters isn't high, and the typically young fan base is primarily concerned with the representation of their favorite characters. But if fans don't expect better, these games aren't going to get any better.

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 2 Review

After over a decade of poorly realized Dragon Ball Z fighting games, Atari and little-known developer DIMPS surprised many people in 2002 when they released Dragon Ball Z: Budokai for the PlayStation 2. Amazingly, it wasn't half bad. The action wasn't complex--as it valued accessibility over depth--but the visuals had a sharp, clean look to them. Surprisingly, the game made excellent use of the license, with the crowning achievement being a story mode that reenacted many of Dragon Ball Z's most memorable moments. Now, about a year after Budokai hit shelves, DIMPS has churned out a better-looking sequel, but this time around it lacks the compelling story mode that distracts you from the rather basic gameplay.

In place of Budokai's story mode, Budokai 2 features the new Dragon World mode, which is essentially a board game where you control a team of Dragon Ball Z heroes as they move around on a series of maps while fighting bad guys and collecting dragon balls. The story for the Dragon World mode takes some liberties with the Dragon Ball Z continuity by fashioning a tale that has many of the series' different villains teaming up to collect the dragon balls. Unfortunately, after a few levels, the overlying story just sort of derails. The fundamental problem with the Dragon World mode is that there's really no point to it. With your sole objective, on most maps, being to just find the bad guys and fight them, the board game format doesn't bring a lot of strategy to the table. Also, you have to fight the same enemy several times before he is permanently vanquished, in most cases, and that just isn't any fun.

Unfortunately, if you want to get the most out of Budokai 2's multiplayer game, you really need to play through the Dragon World mode, as it's the only way to unlock many of the game's characters and stages. Beyond the Dragon World mode, Budokai 2 offers a duel mode (where you can fight against the CPU or another player in a one-off match), a single-player, ladder-style World Tournament mode, and a training mode. Whether you're already familiar with Budokai or not, the training mode is worth going through, as it explains the mechanics that are new to Budokai 2 and explains those that make the series different from other 3D fighters.

The fighting system in Budokai 2 isn't too different from last year's Budokai, though it does add a few new bells and whistles. The game still plays like a stripped-down 3D fighter, with basic punch, kick, and energy attacks that can be strung together for more powerful combos. Players can't actually jump, but there are certain attacks that will launch your opponent into the air, at which point you can fly up to him or her and continue your battle in the sky. If you and your opponent both try to attack each other at the same time (with certain moves), you'll enter burst mode. Here, both characters unleash a flurry of punches and kicks--and mashing buttons is the only way to come out on top. The most significant addition that Budokai 2 makes to the fighting system is the fusion technique, which allows you to merge your fighter with another for a short period of time while in midfight, thus greatly increasing your power. While the fusion technique is definitely a nice touch, the game still lacks any sort of power-struggle mechanic--where players just try to overpower one another by using huge beams of energy.

Budokai 2 really outdoes its predecessor in the graphics department, which appears to be where DIMPS spent a majority of its development time. Budokai had a fairly cartoony look to it, but Budokai 2 ups the ante by rendering all the characters with a cel-shading effect. Though it's not the greatest looking cel shading we've seen, it definitely works to the game's advantage by giving the characters even more of a hand-drawn feel. The character models appear slightly more detailed and display more prominent creases in skin and cloth. A little bit of the glossy shine effect, which the characters took on in the latter parts of the series, is even apparent. The game also features actual shadows, which replace the black dots that the characters cast in the original Budokai. The visuals aren't entirely new, though, and the game borrows a fair amount from its predecessor. Virtually all the in-game animations are reused from the first game, and many of the characters themselves share identical animations. The game also recycles sound from the first game pretty liberally, and players of the first game will probably notice a lot of familiar music, menu sound effects, and voice clips. To its credit, though, the game does include a fair amount of new voice acting--all provided by the American voice actors from the Dragon Ball Z cartoon.

The first Budokai was total fan service, and, really, Budokai 2 isn't that radically different. However, it feels rushed and doesn't quite exude the same level of care that the first installment does. The omission of a story mode is Budokai 2's biggest misstep, and the Dragon World mode simply isn't a suitable replacement. The improved visuals are nice, and some of the additions made to the fighting system are fun, but Budokai 2 still comes out as an underwhelming sequel.