Fighting Games Are A Mixed Bag, Always

I bought Super DragonBall Z for the PS2 a long time back. At whatever point I was buying tons of games for the PS2, 2010? I only played it sporadically until the last few months. I think I picked it up because it played somewhat differently from the Budokai games, and because it had Chichi as an option for a playable character, which is not typical.

So it's a fighting game - surprise - but more old-school. I think it may have originally been an arcade game they ported to consoles. It feels like something some friends would pump a bunch of quarters into. Virtua Fighter, Tekken, that kind of thing. The fighting is a lot of special moves that involve moving the joystick this way, then that way, then hit some buttons. Rotate joystick quarter turn from bottom to the right, then one-eighth of a turn from bottom to the right, then hit the light attack button and viola! Some sort of super move. I forget which one that is, maybe the Destructo Disc. I could see myself trying repeatedly, unsuccessfully, to pull off that move.

That's the issue, of course. I've never been any good at those sort of fighting games. Even if I can remember the sequence - or hit pause and look it up, which is handy - I probably can't calm myself down and do things deliberately enough to pull it off, except by total fluke.

On the low difficulty levels, it isn't strictly necessary. You can win a fair amount of fights against the CPU without super moves. One shoulder button does a flying charge that ends with a light attack, and another ends the charge with a heavy attack. Difference between the two is the heavy attack sends your opponent flying backwards, leaving them unable to attack for a few moments, the light attack leaves them right there where you can immediately segue into some sort of combo. I opt for the heavy attack, because I'm trying to drive them into a wall, where they'll be stunned and I can use a throw combo. Sometimes it works, sometimes they just keep blocking. The charges use up bars on your Action gauge, which needs time to recharge, so it isn't something you can do indefinitely.

There's a sort-of story mode, that involves fighting a bunch of other characters on your way to facing Cell and saving the world. But it isn't as though the game spends any time explaining why you might be fighting some of these characters, especially the ones who would be your friends. There's no specific order, other than Cell's the last boss. There's also a Survivor mode, where you keep fighting opponents, but your health doesn't automatically replenish between fights. However, after each fight you win, there is a roulette where you can try to choose between various bonuses, one of which is to regain a percentage of your health (somewhere between 20% and 100%). Or a defense boost, or more experience.

The experience and leveling up idea is one of the cleverer bits. When you level up, you can add a skill to your character. Might be an extra bar for the Action gauge, or to unlock a special attack, or the ability to make non-homing attacks home in on enemies. But the skills are presented as a kind of chart or tree, and so selecting one skill may send you down a path that precludes you from getting another one later. And typically when you level up, you're picking from two or three skills. The nice thing is, if you collect all the Dragon Balls (which you can do in story mode or Survivor mode), one of the options for your wish to is essentially reset back to the start, but with all that experience you earned available again. So if you don't like the set of abilities you have with Vegeta, you can try again. Mix and match. The game also lets you create character cards, up to 30 as part of this process. So you could have multiple Vegetas, and try different approaches to building each of them up. Which is kind of cool, even if I'm too limited of a player to take full advantage.

So there are a couple of nice features to the game, but the actual fighting is not my favorite.