Dragonball Z: Burst Limit

June 23,2008 - One of the reasons Atari hasn’t completely gone bankrupt yet is the Dragon Ball Z series. Each game they release always does well because they always have a locked in audience for them. It’s about that time again, a new Dragon Ball Z game; Burst Limit has just hit store shelves. Is this yet another cheap cash in, or is there a bit more to it than that?

Burst Limit spans three Sagas in the DBZ universe. These are the Saiyan, Frieza, and Cell Sagas. In the show, these Sagas span several episodes, but in the game, they’re truncated to a handful of fights each. The result is that you get a super condensed version of the story that fans of the show will understand, but will be completely incomprehensible to everybody else.

The game play employs a fighting system that’s similar to the recent Budokai games. It’s not the deepest of fighting system, that’s for sure, but it isn’t the shallowest either. There’s enough in the fighting system to be just deep enough to be enjoyable, but not enough to really be considered a viable competitive fighting game. It’s not perfect by any means; there are any moves that are overpowered and easy to take advantage of, for example.

The obligatory DBZ Beam attacks are present and accounted for, as are the dramatic interludes throughout the combat. This is the game’s biggest fault, as it will interrupt the action with a non-interruptible cutscene to show a projectile missing or a partner intervening on your behalf. While this is something that Dragon Ball Z does during the animated series quite well, in the context of a game, it just breaks up any sort of flow that the game might have otherwise had.

Burst Limit doesn’t have any shortage of game modes to play through. There is the Z Chronicles mode which serves as the game’s story mode. There are also a variety of Survival, Time Attack, and Score Attack modes to keep you busy. Unfortunately most of them are locked from the start. Unlocking them is a simple matter of playing one of the other game modes. Doing this sort of feels like the developers were just creating busy work for the player. You don’t have to clear one mode to unlock another; you just simply have to play it.

Along with the single player modes, there are many multiplayer modes for you and a friend to duke it out in. These can be played on the same console or online. The online play is hit or miss. Sometimes you’ll get a nice fast and fluid match, other times it’ll be a laggy mess. What you’re almost guaranteed of though is that the eleven year old on the other end believes they are the reincarnation of Goku and will take losing personally and disconnect. This isn’t a fault of the game, just the majority of the people that play it.

Visually the game does a very nice job of mimicking the art style of the animated series. The characters are in 3D, but through some clever shading can almost look hand drawn at times. The same can’t be said for the backgrounds though. Most of them consist primarily of a wide non-descript arena style area, followed by a skyscape that you inevitably end up fighting in. Some of them take this a step further and have you fighting in space, and these are the more interesting ones as the backdrops are usually more vivid. All in all, the characters look good, and the backdrops look decent but aren’t anything groundbreaking.

DBZ has a very distinct audio style with exaggerated sound effects and a fast and frantic guitar driven soundtrack. The music in particular does have some high points, as it features some pretty complex sounding riffs. Some of them sound eerily similar to Yngwie Malmsteen’s early 90’s works. The game emulates this pretty much perfectly. If you’re a DBZ fan, then this will be great news to you. If you’re not, the audio will just grate on your nerves. Voice acting by the original cast is present and accounted for, so you can be assured that the Japanese voices are spot on, and the North American ones are spot on awful. If you value your sanity, just switch the voice language to Japanese.

DBZ Burst Limit is a game that’s very clearly made for its fans. A newcomer who picks this game up will have absolutely no idea what’s going on in the story, other than seeing a lot of oddly dressed people yelling at the top of their lungs for no obviously apparent reason. If that newcomer can manage to look past that, they’ll find a fighting game that isn’t all that bad. There’s plenty of game modes and content to unlock, which ought to keep someone occupied for a weekend at least.

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