E3 2019 - Hands on with Dragon Ball Z Kakarot

There have been so many Dragon Ball games over the years, I have honestly begun to switch off to them, be it their announcements, trailers, tweets or anything. However, at E3 2019, there was a real Capsule Corp ship in the middle of the Bandai Namco booth, so when I saw the game in the media section, I thought why not.

Jumping into the game, I was bombarded with so many tutorial prompts that I really thought, that my entire time with the game would be reading them and after the first few, just skipped past them all. Eventually, I was given control of the game and I started to fly around, and this was what I had wanted to do, way back in the PlayStation 2/Gamecube days, just explore the world. Flying around was pretty ok, the controls took a bit to get used to, but once I was in the air, I just checked out the world, I did not really care about anything else, as I was playing as Goku and flying around, that was all I needed.

Though, in order to ensure that I sampled the game to its fullest, I made my way to an icon on the radar, and low and behold, I had stumbled on a fight, but not just any fight, the one against Raditz. It was at this point, where the game became another by the numbers Dragon Ball fighting game, in fact, it would not surprise me to learn if this was the same mechanic from the last Xenoverse, it felt so similar. Attacks were done with the face buttons, holding a trigger down, would allow for more grander attacks, like burst attacks and you could even charge your Ki, the downside was it was nothing new.

Now the developers have stated that the game is an RPG, meaning there are choices to make and more things to do, but I was not able to see them, I did get a wicked cool cutscene if Piccolo sacrificing himself, but again, it was nothing new. If there was an upside to what I got to play, is that the game looks amazing, not so much like the cartoon come to life, more along the lines of, if it was made today, this is how it would look. The characters look like they are meant to and while I prefer the English dub, they sound just as fantastic.

When I put the controller down, I couldn’t help but feel underwhelmed by the game, there was nothing bad about it, but what I had done, for the most part, had been done before. Given the amount of RPG elements that I have yet to see, I can only hope that they make the game something that is hard to put down, but I still have to question, just how many times we need to relive the story of Goku.