Nobody likes to read long winded reviews, especially for old games. I want to focus on quick fire reviews that get straight to the point about 5 things I liked and didnt like as much. I picked up DBZ randomly while getting my switch pre order and finished it yesterday. Here we go.
PROS:
1. Tien will learn the Evil Containment Wave early into the game. With this skill you will be tasked with a Pokemon styled side quest where you catch all 150 regular enemies. I liked this side quest, just wished you got something more from doing it. Its fun though.
2.Anime had filler. AotS also has filler but in a better way. Main game takes place in the year the Z fighters were training to defeat the Saiyans. New scenario's are added to help pad that out in the form of quest that focus on characters not goku and stuff that does appear in the manga/anime has been expanded on to make as many dungeons as possible.
3. When I was checking this game out, I was asking myself how the hell are they going to make classic RPG out of this? Who's going to fill out out biestary? Questioned was answered. Game does an excellent job of using the series lore when creating enemies. You will be fighting Red Ribbon remnants, the dinosaurs that appear throughout the series, enemies based of DBZ villians (Dabura, Garlic Jr, first form cell,) and orginal enemies that fit right in.
4. Grinding made fun. The battle system moves at a blazing pace considering all the animation and that is good because grinding is required at some parts in this game (characters do not gain experience if not in the group, or if you want to max out moves/abilities). It also helps you do not need to have all 3 slots filled in battle so if want one character to get all the exp and ap you can. I took my level 81 Goku and got him to 99 in about an hour and half with each battle taking no more than 10- 15secs. Speaking of animation...
5. The game is a visual treat. Battle sprites for characters and enemies are nicely detailed and they animate even better. Your characters are given several different animations just for the baisc atack command that involve the flurries of kicks and punches the series is known for. Each character is given 5 special moves and 2 super moves and they never ever get old. All the ki blast look so damn cool with my favorites being Tri-Blast, Special Beam Cannon, and Destructo Disk. I was surprised at the amount of detail put into enemy attacks as well. There was no skimping out in this area.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpxmdKsrd40
CONS:
1. A little to many recolors; not at a terrible or bad level, but it's there for a few enemy types.
2. A lot of useless/underdeveloped features - The combo system si cool, but unless you memorize all the moves used for a combo attack you wont be using them much as there is no way to reference them inside battle. There are elements (fire ice lightning) in the game for that rock paper scissors set up, but unfortunatly you will also not use this as well as your charcters do not learn any elemental moves. You use them through capsules you buy or find; never felt a need to even bother with them because its not pushed at all. Then there is a capsule system where you can equip up to 4 capsules at a time. The highlighted capsule works at 100% effeciency while the other 3 at half..or not at all and that is the problem. Too many capsules do not have standby effects so they can only be used when they are the primary one. creating a system where every capsule had a primary 100% and 50% standby would have allowed for cool perk combo's.
3. Game has Golden Sun syndrome, that rare disease where characters emotes and dialogue cant display at the same time, so every time a line of dialogue is spoken every character has to emote several times before the next line is spoken. This means a paragraph of text taking forever to get through and AotS can be pretty chatty.
4. Because of the games really small map sprites inability to display any type of range of emotion, important plot events lack any type of impact. The game tries to rectiiy this by adding color versions of said scences from the manga but it does this so infrequently and randomly, it feels like an idea that they never really finished. It would have been cool to have small clips from the anime play at important moments.
5. The game decides to nuerter its own pontential challenge by implementing hand hold features: every time you step on a save point or a character levels upt they are fully recovered. It feels like a recovery item is rewarded after every battle so no need to use all that money. Biggest offense in this category is Vegeta, Nappa, and Brolly boss fights; it just feels like a low level range was chosen to be able to beat them comfortably. This doesnt make any sense. Each character can learn 7 moves total and they also have a abilities page (HP,DEF,STR ext) where you can use ability points to increase proficiency. If you decide to max these out your characters will be 70+ which is overkill for these guys apparently. Higher level should have been chosen for these end game bosses.
Monolith Soft did an excellent job. I went in expecting typical license effort but got not only the best DBZ game that is not a fighter but a great JRPG in general.
