‘Battle of Z’ a beautiful waste of time

I’ve played a variety of Dragon Ball Z games, ever since falling in love with the anime a fair number of years ago. From the Dragon Ball episodes where we watched Goku first get introduced to the world thanks to Bulma, to the Saiyan saga when we get conformation that Goku isn’t of this world, to the Buu saga where the story more or less wraps up (we’re ignoring “Dragon Ball GT,” obviously).

As with most games based on popular movies or TV shows, most of the DBZ games haven’t been … amazing. Most serve the simple purpose of transporting you to a particular set of sagas in the anime and let you play out the predestined storyline. Which is perfectly fine for these types of endeavors. Some games were story-based while others were mostly fighting games.

The latest entry in the DBZ canon, “Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Z,” falls mostly into the latter category with a touch of the former.

Being the fan I am, it was more or less ordained that I was going to give the game a try, despite the less-than-stellar track record these games have. To be honest, though, I wasn’t expecting all too much. When I play a DBZ game, I want lots of action, special attacks that looks amazing, destructible backgrounds and familiar characters. In “Battle of Z,” I got all of that.

Sadly, that’s all I got. And no matter how much fun it can be to smash some buttons together and launch a Kamekameha right into Vegeta’s face, ending the battle with your victory, it’s not enough to save a fighting game comprising bare-boned fighting mechanics, a truly terrible camera orientation system and just-about-useless AI teammates. Even if watching myself go Super Saiyan was breathtaking.

To start off with, if you have a basic understanding of the DBZ storyline, you won’t have any trouble following “Battle of Z’s” story. That’s about where the ease ends.

When you start fighting the single-player missions (when you finally get past the insanely confusing menu screen), you’ll quickly realize that despite the fact that every character has the same basic fighting abilities — melee, ranged attacks and special charged attacks — it feels like pulling teeth trying to get those characters to handle even some decently. It’s not that you can figure out the control scheme. Like I said, it’s the same for almost every character, but that thrown in with a camera that won’t focus and three-dimensional gameplay that fails to behave properly leaves you punching mountains and zipping around randomly more often than not.

To top that off, those fighting mechanics quickly become repetitive and boring, which is kind of a spit in the eye to the world-ending, nail-biting battles found around every corner in Dragon Ball Z.

But wait: You collect cards! Yep.

These cards, awards after beating missions, can grant certain boosts to your characters when you attach the cards to them. Some are infinitely more useful than others, and knowing what’s available to you will help in some of the tougher fights. However, you can easily swap the cards between characters, so there’s no penalty for just loading up what characters you’re using for that specific mission. Not to mention just how boring it can get swapping cards back and forth. This isn’t Yu-Gi-Oh!, you know.

Then there’s the AI that’s supposed to helping you out, such as providing fodder material or healing you when you get your butt kicked. News flash: They don’t help you. I had to contend with more Game Over scenes than I should have had I had a human friend playing with me instead.

But not all is miserable here in “Battle of Z.” The characters do have special abilities, and trying to figure out what and when to use them was enjoyable. Strategy played a role here, and knowing what your character specialized in could tip the battle when you busted out your ultimate attack.

There is an online component, but I don’t have much to say about it, as lag continually bumped me or crashed the game. It was a bunch of chaos with eight people smashing buttons as hard as possible. For what little I did play, I did enjoy coordinating with real people in order to secure victory. The games themselves, though, we’re incredibly ill-matched thanks to some terrible matchmaking software. If you didn’t have some of the more advanced characters unlocked, you weren’t going to last long.

In the end, “Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Z” manages to present a gorgeous take on utter mediocrity. It’s chaotic, lightning fast and full of the characters and stories you’ve come to love from the DBZ story. But with shallow fighting mechanics, uninspired and technically useless computer teammates and a multiplayer systems that lags and fails to properly match-make, we’d have been better off just watching the TV show again.

Two Super Saiyan stars out of five.

This game was reviewed on the PS3.

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Above, a scene from “Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Z.” (Photo credit: Bird Studio)