REVIEW: Dragon Ball GT Final Bout (PSX)
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008Intro: Back when I was a 10-year-old boy, I was a rabid Nintendo fan and wouldn’t touch a Playstation with one of those sticks you see morbidly obese people using to point to stuff. Then my cousin from out of town came to visit and brought his PSOne with the game Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout. Granted my experience with fighting games up until then was nil, and was limited to SF2 and… yeah that’s about it. I was also just getting into Dragon Ball Z at the time (and anime in general), so playing this game was AWESOME back then. So, 11 years later, I’ve decided to revisit this game. I’ve watched a lot more anime and played a lot more fighting games since then, so let’s see how this game stacks up to then.
… all I can say was, I was a stupid, stupid little boy.
Aesthetics: When you first fire up this game, you are given probably one of the best intro sequences to a Dragonball fighting game ever, complete with an original song by Hironobu Kageyama (For the uninformed, he did the songs, “Chala Head Chala,” “We Gotta Power” and “We Were Once Angels” for the anime). Even though anime has come a long way in terms of production values and fancy computer effects, and although Kageyama has done songs for all of the 6th/7th gen console fighting games, nothing that the newest DBZ game intros have has summed up what it means to be a fan of the franchise quite like this one.
Okay maybe not that last one, but you get the point. If you want to see the whole thing in action, it’s up on Youtube somewhere. So assuming you do the first thing you do when you fire up a fighter is go into arcade mode, you’ll be greeted with this modest player select screen (assuming you haven’t unlocked the secret fighters, which I’ll get into later).
Good god, even Cartoon Network Flash games put more effort into their select screens. But whatever, it’s functional, and it gets the job done. Anyway, for the non-DBZ savvy, here’s a list of the characters available at this moment:
Goku
Pan
Goku (Kid)
Trunks (GT)
Majin Vegeta without the “M” (yes it is the Majin one, it even has the self-destruct attack)
Mystic Gohan
Perfect Cell
Majin Buu (Final Form)
Freeza (Final Form)
Piccolo (fused with Kami)
Keep this list in mind for later on. Okay, now for a screenshot of an actual fight in progress.
Okay, I’ll give the game the benefit of the doubt since it was made in ‘97, and it was the first 3D Dragonball fighter. Still though, would it have killed them to make the backgrounds look better? What you’re looking at is probably one of the better backgrounds in the stage. Most of your fights are in deserted wastelands, decimated cities, Planet Namek on the verge of blowing up, and some unnamed lava planet. Oh yeah, and the Hyperbolic Time Chamber. Pretty exciting, don’t you think?
However, this game has one great advantage in aesthetics: its soundtrack. While there are some flops here and there (ie: Majin Buu’s theme song), the majority of it is quite fun to listen to, and really works with whatever character you’re fighting at the moment.
Gameplay
Okay, now we can get into the nitty gritty of this game. I can sum it up in one sentence: It’s fucking terrible.
I’ll assume that’s not enough for the review, so I’ll have to elaborate why. For starters, the first obvious problem this game has is terrible collision detection. What does this mean? A lot of your attacks that you think will connect will wiff instead. Conversely, it’s possible to hit your opponent when you’re obviously too far away to punch. Even worse is that the fighting isn’t even mapped for characters based on height, so if you pick a tall character like Cell, you will have a hell of a tough time fighting characters like Young Goku, Pan, or Majin Buu. Combine this with the fact that commands are usually delayed, especially for the big characters, and this is a huge problem.
The second is simply the balance between the characters. Remember the select screen I showed you up there? Here it is with everyone unlocked:
Here’s the list of the characters that were unlocked:
Super Saiyan Goku (from DBZ)
Super Saiyan Goku (from GT)
Super Saiyan Kid Goku (from GT)
Super Saiyan Trunks (from GT)
Super Saiyan Future Trunks (from DBZ)
Super Saiyan Vegetto (from DBZ)
Super Saiyan 4 Goku (from DBZ)
If you’re slow, the “unlockables” are merely 4 alternate versions of Goku, 2 alternate versions of Trunks, and a fusion of Goku and Vegeta. WOW.
This is worsened by several problems. For one, there is no attempt at balancing any of these characters. As you would probably guess, all the Super Saiyan versions have huge advantages over their normal counterparts, from doing more damage to getting more hits in combos. This is especially apparent in Super Saiyan 4 Goku, who doesn’t even flinch if he takes damage. The second problem is that you cannot save them. Every time you turn off the Playstation, you have to unlock them all over again. This wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the third problem, and that’s unlocking them. In order to unlock all characters except for SSJ4 Goku, you have to beat them in Arcade mode. If you want SSJ4 Goku, you have to beat the entire arcade mode on the highest difficulty without continuing, then beat the final boss with at least a near-perfect (no more than 1/4 of your life missing). This will give you the opportunity to fight SSJ4 Goku, and only if you win will you get him. Sound like fun? The only way to unlock the characters outside of this is to punch in a cheat code on the title screen (said cheat code isn’t even mentioned in the game, so thank god for the internet).
The third is just that the fighting system itself is a total mess. One thing that this game has that many people were bitching was absent in the Budokai series is the lack of the ability to fly at will. Well let me tell you, if this game is any indication, those people should be kissing the ground Dimps’ programmers walk on. By holding L1/R1, you can dash or fly when you hold the button. This leads to problems in positioning the character, as it becomes a chore just to get them in the right spot to hit the opponent. Special attacks are executed in quasi Street Fighter fashion, relying on QCF+Punch movements and the like to do attacks. Unfortunately, most of these are canned punch/kick combos, and, due to sidestep being introduced, can end up working against you as most of the time, an opponent can simply sidestep while you end up flying past them punching air for quite a while (especially if you picked a Super Saiyan). If you can’t get enough of those, there are Meteo Smashes! Attack an opponent with a specific command to activate an automated punch/kick/ki-blast combo. If you time it right… you can chain more onto each other (well except for the ki-blast one, which acts as a finisher). The opponent has a chance to counter these if they input the commands before the opponent does, but the whole system is unsatisfactory. Push some buttons and watch an auto-combo.
If there’s one kind of cool feature that was implemented in the game, it’s the Ki battles. All characters have a general ki attack that they can use (ie: KAMEHAMEHA). At one point during the start-up, you’ll see katakana spelling the word “counter.” At this point you can do one of several things. The easiest is simply to guard the attack and take half damage. You also have other options such as batting the attack away, creating a ki-shield, or returning your own ki attack at them. When this happens you have a veritable tug-of-war with the opponent, in which you must tap the ki button repeatedly as fast as you can. Whoever has tapped it the most in a limited time succeeds, and damages the other at full damage. This is probably the only good thing about the system I know, and it’s one of the few features that actually showed up in DBZ Budokai 3 in some form.
Conclusion
This is just a terrible game. There’s no way around it. It has a good soundtrack, one of the best opening vids ever, and some good voice-acting, but other than that, it’s subpar in every way imaginable. If this isn’t the worst fighting game ever made, I don’t know what is.
Aesthetics: 7/10
Gameplay: 2/10
Final: 4.5
Final Thoughts:
Just because I’m such a fucking nice guy, I ripped Cell’s theme from the game and uploaded it as an ADX for you to enjoy.