And these boss battles are some of the most fun parts of the game. There are in-fight dialogues, anime cutscenes, and even boss battles in the story mode. The single-player story modes are actually where most of the fun is, as they walk you through the entirety of the Dragon Ball Z story arcs, movies, and even parts of Dragon Ball GT. All in all, it feels as if the gameplay was developed to specifically target the nostalgia centers in our brains.Ĭonsidering the main draw of this game is nostalgia, the multiplayer is just a nice bonus. And since there isn't a whole lot of depth to the anime either, the game certainly gets points for staying true to the source material. Even though there isn't a whole lot of depth to the game, it actually feels (through the use of quick time evens and rampant button mashing) like you are in a real DBZ fight. In fact, I'd say the game looks even better, graphically, than the anime itself. Every fight looks like a scene from the anime, and that's actually why I think I enjoyed the game so much. Your character will monologue as they fire their planet-destroying beams to finish off each villain. The camera will swing between multiple angles as you go in for rush attacks. A successfully landed super attack will blow huge holes in the earth, leaving permanent craters, shredding opponent's clothing, and, in typical Dragon Ball Z fashion, leaving them clutching their arm. As you fire off special attacks, your characters will converse with each other, shouting out their attack names, grunting about how they hope their body can take it. It's mostly quick time events with a side of cinematic banter, and the cinematic banter is actually the best part of the game. But halfway through my time with the game, I stopped looking at it as a fighting game, and instead started looking at it as a cinematic experience. The gameplay in Ultimate Tenkaichi is extremely shallow, and I haven't particularly had the urge to take the game online and prove that I am better at mashing buttons than the rest of the world. In fact, most of the game is spent in quick time event-style scenes rather than actual combo-based gameplay. Press left or right with correct timing to dodge projectile volleys, or counter with your own projectile volley and win by mashing a button quicker than your opponent. The same holds true for any other attack in the game.
Everything else is pretty much a coin flip.Īfter every series of strikes, you can continue your combo into a rush or smash attack (essentially those quick teleporting punch flurry maneuvers you see in DBZ fights.) You do this by pressing a button in a cutscene that is suspiciously similar to a quick time event, but your opponent has the opportunity to counter you. (Your ki is used for mostly defensive maneuvers, while your spirit is used to execute your special moves.) That is about as intricate as the game gets. Your health is at the top of the screen and a secondary spirit meter fills up below it, which is separate from your ki. You can block, attack, throw projectiles, and charge your ki. The controls are incredibly barebones here. In the end, though, there's no real strategy to picking which character to play since there's not a whole lot of difference between them. Some are slightly faster and some are slightly slower, and, of course, every character's special attacks have different animations. They can all fly, throw flurries of punches, throw energy blasts, and blast huge craters in planets with special moves. The first thing you'll notice about Ultimate Tenkaichi is that every character controls pretty much exactly the same.
To understand why that is, let's look at the latest-perhaps even the greatest-installment in the series: Dragon Ball Z Ultimate Tenkaichi. Now, the Dragon Ball Z games may not have the most complex fighting mechanics, yet I still can't stop loving them. Like every anime fan, I still find myself waxing nostalgic whenever a new Dragon Ball Z fighting game is released. If there are two things I love in this world, they're fighting games and anime.