Dragon Ball Fusions - Review
I should be honest, I have not paid any attention to the
Dragon Ball anime or manga in years, purely because it became so bloated. In
that same time, the games have pretty much repeated the same formula and while
they try to mix things up sometimes, it’s a lot of the same, so going into
Dragon Ball Fusion, I was not expecting much.
Your character, which you can name and design and their
friend/rival Pinich start the game by finding the final Dragon Ball and they
make their wish that they can fight against the best fighters ever, to prove
that they are the strongest fighters. However, when their wish is apparently
granted, nothing else happens, for a moment, then a vortex appears and they are
sucked into this new world, where fighters from across space and time are
showing up to prove their worth. Upon arriving at the world, Tekka, my character’s
default name and Pinich split up, as they learn you need to form a team of 5 to
enter the ultimate fighting championship.
As you explore the world, you will start to encounter
fighters from throughout the Dragon Ball world, it was not long after I got to
this world that Goten and Trunks, in the kid forms showed up to help me fight
against Nappa and Raditz and soon after they joined my team. As my team grew,
so did where I could explore, each section of the world is blocked off, by
fields of energy that you collect from winning fights, so as you fight more,
the world opens and as the world expands, so do the characters that you can
meet. The problem with meeting all the versions of the characters from the
entire saga is that, some of them I did not know and the game does all it can
to avoid telling you about them, but still trying to tell you, it gets
confusing and frustrating.
Making your way around the world is done by flying
everywhere, you can fly slow or fast, but you can only fly and while that does
not seem like a bad thing, when you are close to the ground and trying to get
to location nearby, it does become a little awkward. While flying however, you
will see on your map, lots of dots, these are other teams, all trying to earn
enough energy to open up the next barrier to move forward, if you fly around at
slow speeds, you can ignore them if you want, but if you blast around at full
speed, you can trigger a fight if you get too close, so even flying around
needs you to pay attention.
Once you get into the fights though, the game really expands
itself from the standard Dragon Ball fighting games and while to does lead more
to the side of too many systems, it takes its time in introducing them, so it’s
not everything at once. The basic fighting takes place on a flat circle, with
characters moving around in a 3d space and while you can’t move until its your
turn, you can still plan ahead. Across the bottom of the screen is a bar that
tracks which character has their turn next, each character will move at
different speeds, based on the type of fighter they are, if you are a speed
fighter, you will deal less damage than a power fighter, but you will attack
more often. Once one of your fighters gets their turn up you can select your
attack and begin your assault.
There are a range of attacks to choose from, the standard
melee attack, ki blast, special, Zenkai and fusion, with each having a benefit.
The standard melee attack will see you move towards your selected fighter and
then you will move to a new camera angle, at this point you can move around
your target in the hopes of hitting them. If you happen to land on the
direction they block towards, you will only get to deal minor damage, if you
get them from the opposite side, then you can deal pretty big damage. If you
have another one of your fighters almost ready to attack as well, you can team
up to deal even more damage. Once your attack lands, if you happen to punch the
enemy from the right angle, you can punch them towards their own allies, which
knocks them all back in the queue.
Joining up with ki blasts, Kamehameha, gattling gun or other
energy attacks, you can deal significant damage and the attacks can be split
into single target attacks or multiple, but the game changes things up again
with the Zenkai attacks. Each fight you enter will earn you fighting energy and
when you complete one bar, you can launch a zenkai attack, this takes into a
standard 3d fighter mode, where you need to move around, target your enemy and
launch attacks. As you land hits, you earn ki energy, which is used to then
land a ki attack, which deals more damage, but the level of power behind each
attack varies, depending on the number of energy orbs you collect. Finally,
each fighter has a fighter type assigned much like rock, paper, scissors and
you can deal more damage if you target the type weaker to yourself. Each fight
you win will also reward you with energy, that you can use to open the barriers
between sections and to purchase new clothes, if you want to.
Add to that mix a levelling system, where you earn xp to
level up your own fighter, as well as the other members of your team and as
both level up, you earn new moves you can learn, but while a new move might be
a welcome addition to your roster, the move might be only marginally better
than something you already have, so you need to find the balance there. The
problem is that after every fight you have to go through these motions and
while you can save new moves you earnt, if you want to sort them out later, its
not automatic, so if you skip them, then you lose them, until you earn them again.
The problem with all the methods of fighting is simple, it’s
not at all simple, the game has added so many levels to the combat system, it
becomes a chore trying to work each one out enough to combine it with the
others. After the first few fights, I had adapted to the basics without any
real hassles, however the game just keeps throwing different methods of
fighting at you. While you can keep things basic, as you progress through the
story, the stronger enemies will keep launching stronger attacks at you, which
means you must try and keep pace. The worlds also suffer from not having a lot
to do within them, sure there are towns and places you can visit, but they also
don’t contain anything of note to do once you are there, the entire game
revolves around flying around and punching things.
From a presentation point of view, the game is odd, visually
the game is great, the amount of detail that the game present, no matter the
speed you are flying at or how fast the fights are going, the game never has
any issues keeping up. When you get into conversations, it does become an
issue, not from the quality of the visuals, just because each character will
slide off screen and be replaced by someone with a set pose, or they change
from happy to sad so quickly it becomes jarring. The other odd element is the
audio, the music is pure Dragon Ball and the lines, which are only available in
Japanese are fine, but there were a lot of times that I would find the
characters to be speaking, even just little things post a fight, that were
never subtitled, so I had no clue what was being said.
Dragon Ball Fusion is a game that on the surface looks to be
the same basic formula, but with a very in-depth fighting system and character
levelling options. Players will find a challenge here in trying to maintain the
balance everything that is on offer, but if you can do that, the rewards will
be worth it.
Thanks to Bandai Namco Australia for supplying the game for review
Luke Henderson