Dragon Ball: Evolution for PSP Reviews by Gamers

The Dragonball series seems to be as popular as ever, with games still hitting stores in a yearly fashion and selling well, and it has finally spawned a live-action film entitled Dragonball Evolution. Of course, a movie release means that we now have a game based on the movie (which seems somewhat meta). Unfortunately, while the Dragonball games have largely been improving over time, reaching a point nowadays when they can be fun to even non-DBZ fans, Dragonball Evolution is a pile of trash.



The game follows the story, as it were, of the movie, or at least it seems so based on the trailers and the assets used in the game (I haven't seen the film as it's not out yet). I use the word story loosely though as it's basically a patched-together series of events that is about as predictable as the sunrise. That's the movie's fault and not the game's, but that doesn't make it better.



Dragonball Evolution's main Story mode just takes you through this tale, so it doesn't last long. I was able to finish it in less than two hours. Let me tell you my amazing strategy for finishing it:



Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, Square, watch the end credits.





Seriously, I finished the entire story mode using only the Square button. No directional presses, nothing. The only two exceptions to this are that I had to use X to get through the cutscenes, and one fight near the end required finishing it with an Ultimate Attack. So I just used Square the whole fight until my opponent was weak, and then pressed Up and Circle at the same time. Done. Roll credits. Keep in mind that I only lost in three battles and actually racked up S rankings (the highest) in a handful of them.



Beating the Arcade mode was only slightly more challenging, and that was on the hardest difficulty level, Dragon. Here, you can just hit Square until your Ki meter is full, then use an Ultimate Attack, and then go back to mashing on Square. The AI does nothing to circumvent this. In fact, the AI is so broken that even on the hardest difficulty level, it'll sit back and repeatedly use a short ranged attack over and over again. Well, until you get close, when it would actually be effective, and then it just runs into you and wails random attacks.



Obviously, you can choose to fight for real and not take advantage of the idiotic AI, though since you can cheap it out so easily, it's not rewarding. However, the fighting mechanics are quite simple and don't really provide much depth. The newer Dragonball games have a whole lot more to them than this title, and anyone who gets this will likely have at least one of the recent releases.



While the fighting is pretty terrible, the cutscenes and overall presentation trump it in terms of awfulness. Aside from three poor in-engine cutscenes (which are all short), the game presents the story by putting two still images of the characters on the screen and popping up text of their dialogue. This worked in the SNES days and to a degree it can still be passable if it's done right, but this is not an example of that. When characters "fight" in these scenes, one simply slides across the screen and bumps into another. If they use a power of some sort, the screen just flashes and then someone says they're hurt. The character images rarely change to show emotion or anything else, so you really have no idea what mood they're in, if they're being sarcastic or anything of this sort.



What's worse though is that the backgrounds are very generic and offer no context to what's happening. At one point, the heroes are down in a pit and sense that a Dragonball is nearby. Then they start saying, "Oh no, but it's too hot! How are we ever going to get to it? We have no way across! What are we going to do!" This goes on for a couple minutes before someone mentions a river of lava. It is never shown on screen, so until someone specifically says "lava", you have no idea what they're talking about. In another example, there's what is supposed to be a vehicle chase at one point. The jeep the heroes are riding in isn't shown on the screen, so it looks like the characters are just standing around. The only way you know what's happening is that someone will say, "I just fired the harpoon" or "Oh no, we've crashed!" Utterly despicable.



I could go on, but there's no point.

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