I really hope this disaster is final

Author's Rating:

Pros: It was free

Cons: In 15 words?not a chance

The Bottom Line: 
Nobody wants to play this game. It's really,really bad.

Author's Review
Exactly where my enjoyment of Dragonball comes from is something that goes as far back as I can remember, yet it can't have been before I first played one of Capcom's Streetfighter videogames, because part of what attracted me to it was the fact that the majority of the characters were wearing costumes like Ryu and Ken. I later learned that these were actually just Martial Arts outfits named Gis, but at the time they were Streetfighter outfits to me. It should be noted then, that this was the late 1980s/Early 90s, when my parents owned a time-share on an appartment in Spain. Every summer we went to Spain, where anime always seems to have been big, and I would watch, in Spanish, what I think was Dragonball Z. I never expected this to come to much, until I got much older and into Anime, only to rediscover the series,not too long before the dubbed version was aired on Cartoon Network in the UK. For some reason, even though it was in his native tongue, it didn't quite appeal as much to the lad in his late teens as it did to the youngster when it was in Spanish. Some of the fights were still entertaining, but far too long was spent on characters charging up to do attacks, meaning a single battle could span about 3 episodes, despite nobody throwing a punch or any form of offensive maneouvre.

The show always did have potential for a great videogame, and via some less than proper means, I managed to play some of the 16-Bit Dragonball Z games, all of them 1-on-1 fighters, none of them very good, before Bandai, seeing an emerging market for Dragonball products in the UK, popped out two DB games for the PlayStation very late into it's life, giving PAL gamers Dragonball Final Bout and Dragonball Z: Ultimate Battle 22. I found a copy of Final Bout in a buy 2 get one free on Preowned games, a deal which came to a total of £9, so not much money was lost on it, and I figured it would be a pretty cool fighting game. I really should stop figuring this about licensed games of any sort.

The rough story of Dragonball, because it would be far too complex to give a complete history, centers around an alien named Goku, who came to Earth as a child, and due to his nature as a Saiyan, a creature of immense power, who also undertook great training under his master Kami in the field of martial arts, he constantly got involved in thwarting various schemes to destroy the world, be they from other Saiyans, Alien dictators or mad cyborgs.

One of the perks to being a Saiyan is the ability to turn 'Super Saiyan', where your hair bleaches and spikes upwards, as well as enabling you greater powers, Goku has mastered this, as have his Saiyan compatriots and enemies, and in many cases it is necessary to defeat greatly powered enemies.

This game doesn't actually have a story at all, it basically just pits characters from Dragonball Z and it's sequel series Dragonball GT against each other in combat, which isn't really a bad idea I don't think. A list of characters is as follows:

Goku
Little Goku
Trunks
Gohan
Pan
Piccollo
Super Vegeta
Freiza
Cell
Majin Buu
Super Vegetto

And some more unlockable variants on the Saiyan characters, making them Super Saiyan. It's a fairly decent cast, although Goten and Nappa would have been nice inclusions.why

First of all, Dragonball Final Bout is a 1-on-1 fighter, with 3D graphics, yet 2D gameplay, where the idea is to reduce your opponent's health bar to empty using a variety of punches,kicks,throws and special attacks. Characters can also float in mid air and carry on their battle in the sky, but that, along with using superhuman special moves, reduces their Chi meter, which when empty will render your fighter completely open for attack. Thankfully it fills itself up over time, so the key is not to go all out with beam attacks and flight in a quick succession. The game only requires you to win one round of combat as opposed to the normal three, and if you defeat all the standard fighters, you will take on a special unlockable character.

The gameplay options are barely competant in their numeracy, Battle Mode is the single player game described above, a Build Up mode, where you upgrade your character's abilities in the manner of the cartoon, a tournament mode for these characters and a bog-standard options. Any attempt at 2-Player play has to be done either in Battle Mode or the tournaments, Bandai were too cheap to even include Versus mode.

Not that any of this really matters, because the gameplay of the game is absolutely atrocious. Characters have a sparse arsenal, respond poorly, are too slow, and the less said about the special move system the better. Attempt to perform a beam attack, and your opponent has a chance to counter by pressing a button in the time it takes 'Counter' to flash up on the screen. 9 times out of 10, a computer controlled characters gets it, but even if you do press the button in time, there is simply a 70/30 chance that it won't respond to you pressing it. This wouldn't be so bad, but the animation for the counter beam always takes an eternity, meaning fights last about half an hour just watching the animation for an attack. What makes this more ridiculous, is the fact that occasionally the beams fire with no build up, and work like throwing a hadouken in Streetfighter. When used this way, the projectiles become a lot more useful, and the game actually seems to be playing at being a competant fighter. Then the next time you try, you get the really tedious reversal-friendly attack and things go from dull to suicidal in terms of boredom.

Given that trying to fight via projectile, which is how most of the TV show's fights are stages, is so horrible, it's good to know that Bandai were at least consistent, and made the hand-to-hand scrapping terrible as well. Collision detection is dreadful, punches go through enemies, there are only about 4 attacks per character...the game is just a disaster.

The aesthetic aspects aren't much better. Some characters, such as Goku, look ok, but most other fighters are far too blocky(especially Frieza) and the backgrounds are possibly the most boring locales ever found in a fighting game. Some animations, like when characters shape for a kamehameha, look good, but basic things like walking and punching are animated worse than a skid row 70s cartoon production.

Sound is mixed. The music is pretty cool, with it sounding like it was taken right from the cartoon, making for a fitting soundtrack. Voices, left in Japanese, are pretty bad. I don't know if these guys voiced the original cartoon, but Goku's voice is absoluely diabolical, him sounding like a really whiny girl instead of an all-powerful martial artist.

Controls for the game look like this:

X: Block
Triangle: Energy Discharge
Square: Punch
Circle:Kick
L1:Dodge in air
R1:Dodge in Air


There are some more complex controls, but the fact that the response of these is absolutely disgusting means that chances are you wouldn't be able to use them even if you knew the commands. It actually takes concentrated effort to get your bumbling idiot of a character to walk accross the screen to meet you opponent, never mind stringing together anything that could be classed as an attack.

In general, Dragonball Final Bout is a pretty terrible game. There really isn't anything to redeem it, even to fans of the cartoon or comics. It's not quite the worst PlayStation fighter ever(that one starts with a V and ends with an S and has no letters inbetween), but it certainly ranks up there, and is nigh unplayable for all but the most persistant gamers. This isn't a game I would recommend to anybody, and I've absolutely no issues with handing this unplayable mess the score it deserves: 1/5.