Gamespot Review
Raging Blast captures the look of Dragon Ball but leaves out much of the excitement.
The Good
- Visuals capture the look and feel of the series
- Accessible controls
- Rich assortment of stories and modes.
The Bad
- Fighting system lacks depth and nuance
- Characters all feel the same
- Camera can easily lose sight of your opponent
- Online is plagued by spoilsport disconnections.
Dragon Ball: Raging Blast is the latest in a long, long series of games that try to take the superpowered fighting action of the popular anime series and adapt it into a compelling fighting game. The results here prove to be mixed. The visuals ably reproduce the lightning-quick speed and tremendous power that make the battles in Dragon Ball exciting. However, the fighting system lacks the depth and nuance to actually capture that excitement, making Raging Blast a game that Dragon Ball fans may enjoy for its breadth of content but one that has little to offer the uninitiated.
No mountainside is safe from these warriors.
The fights in Raging Blast take place in huge environments throughout which characters can dash and soar in any direction. Movement is handled simply, with the left stick hovering you forward, backward, and to the sides, while the shoulder buttons are used to fly up or down. The camera is situated behind your character and generally manages to keep both you and your opponent on screen, except in situations when you are on different vertical planes. In moments like this, you're given a great view of your fighter's head or feet while your opponent is nowhere to be found. It's easy enough to locate your opponent again--the tap of a button will make you immediately rocket toward your rival--but it happens frequently enough to be a nuisance. And while at first glance the environments look as if they go on forever, this illusion is shattered the first time you find yourself impeded by one of the invisible walls that surround them.
The actual fighting offers a fair amount of complexity but very little depth. There's a comprehensive training mode in which Goku familiarizes Gohan with all of the techniques, and it takes some time to progress through it all. You'll practice dash attacks, charge attacks, smash attacks, and numerous other attacks, as well as defense maneuvers. It's quite a bit to take in, though unlike many fighting games, there are no tricky inputs to memorize for any attacks here. Some actions require a precisely timed button press to pull off, but at most, you'll need to push a thumbstick in one direction and tap a button to perform even the most powerful of attacks.
This focus on easily performed, extremely powerful attacks helps make the battles feel tremendous, with characters constantly being sent flying backward through the air with such force that any mountains or buildings in their way get obliterated. But it also prevents the core action from being very involving. Performing these devastating attacks that are the staple of every warrior's arsenal requires "ki," which you build up by landing relatively weak punches and kicks. There's no nuance to these standard attacks; they're all performed with just one button, which you can tap to unleash combos or hold down to charge up a more powerful attack that will send your opponent soaring. But these attacks do so little damage to your opponent that they're not very useful. The only reason to use these weak attacks is to build up your ki, which makes the majority of fights feel overly simplistic and downright predictable. Ki can also be accumulated by holding down on the D pad, leaving you temporarily vulnerable to attack, but this comes with its own set of problems. For a game whose focus should be intense fighting, Raging Blast requires you to spend too much time slowly building your ki power, drawing attention away from the more interesting aspects of combat.
Raging Blast has a wide variety of modes, the most interesting of which is Dragon Battle Collection. Here, you play through many story arcs from the series, such as the Saiyan Saga, the Frieza Saga, and the Androids Saga, as well as a number of what-if scenarios. Those familiar with the lore will likely enjoy reliving some of their favorite moments here, but the unfamiliar will find the storytelling so poor that they'll have a hard time making sense of what's happening, much less finding it interesting. There is some incentive to playing through these sagas because you'll unlock characters, special moves, and items that you can equip to improve a fighter's attack power, defense, health or some other characteristic. The grand total of more than 70 characters seems impressive at first, but that fades fast as you realize that they all feel pretty much the same in action.
In addition to the stories, Raging Blast has a standard assortment of fighting game modes, such as Arcade, Survival, Time Attack, and a Tournament option that allow up to 16 players to fight it out for supremacy. Unfortunately, competing against friends on the same console is tough to enjoy because the screen is split down the middle, which severely limits your view of the action. Online combat is a better option, but it's plagued by a significant percentage of competitors who won't hesitate to disconnect if things aren't going their way.
The visuals capture the look of Dragon Ball with striking success. The characters look as if they've stepped right out of the anime, with the smoothness and speed of the action found in the series faithfully reproduced here. The music is upbeat and catchy but much too repetitive. And while the voice actors bring the same steadfast enthusiasm to this material as they bring to the anime, you'll quickly grow tired of hearing the same few taunts.
The huge assortment of characters, stories, costumes, and other aspects of Dragon Ball lore cannot hide how shallow and uninspired the fighting mechanics are. There is no depth to your actions, making it a slow-paced race to be the first person to build up your ki power, which quickly becomes monotonous. With the wide assortment of deep and varied fighting games already on the market, it’s impossible to ignore the many faults present in this often-dull anime-inspired brawler.
IGN Review
Another year, another Dragon Ball game. Actually, Dragon Ball: Raging Blast isn't even the first one of the year, but that's beside the point. What matters is that many DBZ titles have come and gone, and for the most part in recent years, they've gotten better and better (even if just incrementally so). The issue with Raging Blast is that while it has a lot of content and some good online options, the actual fighting mechanics have taken a step backwards, and the game suffers because of it.
In terms of content, like I mentioned, you're getting a lot of bang for your buck. The Dragon Battle Collection allows you to play through a number of different DBZ sagas as well as some "what if" scenarios. Oddly, you don't have to play them in order as you can skip ahead to key moments in each saga. While you'll probably want to play them in order, this does allow you to skip battles that you have problems with.
One downside to the Dragon Battle Collection sagas is that the stories are told pretty poorly. Before each fight you have an option to catch up on the story, which is just a short text description of what has lead up to this fight. The problem is that some of this stuff isn't actually shown in any sort of visual method, so if you don't read these then you'll be really lost unless you've already seen these stories in some other fashion previously.
Outside of these story bits, you can try out the Super Battle Trial mode, which is a collection of challenges with different goals, like a survival fight or beating someone in a short amount of time. These are generally quick, one-off tasks that vary in what you need to do, and for my money, playing these short and different challenges (with plenty of rewards) were the most interesting bits for me.
Yet another option is the World Tournament, where up to 16 players can compete in a single-elimination tournament. Computer opponents can fill in for any open human spots. It's straightforward and simple, but being able to include a roomful of friends in your game to see who's best is certainly nice.
Then there's online. You have the option of ranked or unranked single matches, or to compete in a World Tournament with a selection of other players. What's cool is the number of customization options you have. You can play with people in your country or internationally, set whether you want default characters, upgraded guys or even downloaded characters and more of this sort. It's not an amazing list of options as the gameplay is still just going in and fighting someone else like you would the computer, but the customization options are fairly robust.
So all of that is mostly good, but then we come to the actual play mechanics, and that's where things begin to fall apart. To me, some past titles have built a good balance between super, ranged and melee attacks. You'd mostly do melee attacks, throw in some ranged stuff when someone backed away and then try to finish them off or change the tide with a special attack. Here, it feels like everything is there just to allow you to do special attacks, which makes melee combat feel like it's taken a back seat to the more flashy stuff.
The melee combat also feels unresponsive. Tapping the attack button doesn't mean you'll always attack. If you're facing an enemy and you're not doing something else already, you'll attack. Otherwise, probably not. There's a distinction there that makes it feel unresponsive and as if you're only allowed to do something if the game deems it OK to do so. The result is that you'll sometimes run up to someone and wail away on the attack button, but you won't attack right away, which is obviously problematic in a fighting game.
There are also massive camera issues. The camera can go into the environment and seriously obstruct your view, or if your opponent is above or below you, you might not be able to see either character on the screen. Speaking of which, the game gives you no hint as to whether a character is above or below you, so you'll have no idea which direction to manually travel in. You can tap the dash button twice to quickly fly at them, but this almost always results in you being smacked around.
The problems continue. There are sections where you and your opponent will do the same thing at the same time, so a mini-game starts where you need to wiggle the control stick or whatever to get more "hits" than the other player. Get more hits in this game, and you're the one that causes all the damage. The problem is that there's no warning that this is about to happen, so the computer always gets the jump on you, and most of the time it's very difficult to recover.
Really, Dragon Ball: Raging Blast is like a $5 lunch buffet. There's lots of stuff to choose from, and some of the deserts are good, but the stuff that fills you up will give you a stomachache.
Credits : Gamespot, Classic Game Room, IGN, Youtube
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