Dragonball Raging Blast

Dragon Ball: Raging Blast

Rating: T

Score: 7.0/10

                What can you say about the Dragon Ball series?  A summary of any intelligent response is that it's a weak story intended to hold together people getting freshly served knuckle sandwiches for breakfast. Along with fast-paced fighting, there are flashy special attacks, flying through mountains, ridiculously over-dramatic conflicts, and just an overall fun anime to watch. Game after game has been trying to capture a style that appeals to fans of the series while keeping the story simple enough to appeal to new gamers. Raging Blast is the newest in the series trying to capitalize on the huge franchise, but also faces the intimidation of the about 30 other Dragon Ball games (somewhere between 25-35 games). Does it hold strong enough to bring fans what they want while reeling in new fans? This game is available on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.

                The story gets scattered around a lot, but basically it's about Goku and his friends searching for the seven magic "Dragon balls" to call forth a genie who will take the form of a dragon. After using these Dragon Balls multiple times (each time he needs to find them again), Goku fights stronger bad guys and finds his true strength in being a "Super Saiyan", a class of elite warriors with incredible power. Each saga has a different story within the original story, and it does a good job telling the complex (not so much complex as hard to follow) story that is Dragon Ball, in pretty good detail too.

                A fighting game is only as good as its actual fighting. The fighting is, as expected, very flashy and quick. Actually playing it is a whole other world. It controls very quickly with very rapid timing needed along with proper hand-eye coordination.  The controls take a while to get used to, but work well. The game itself is relentless, so practice is at the very least recommended. Once you have all that down, it plays like the Budokai Tenkaichi series did, with the basics simplified to add more controls and whatnot. Keep in mind though that the Budokai Tenkaichi series has aged, and prices for those games can range around the single digits (as opposed to the Xbox and Playstation where new games come out for $70 each).

                One thing missing from last installment's Burst Limits that was included in Budokai Tenkaichi and now added into Raging Blast is the ability to customize characters. Each character has different stats, and each can be upgraded to have more health, more Ki (energy), specials, and powers. It was a great addition before, and it's still is a great addition.

                Thankfully missing from Raging Blast (since we're on the discussion of features missing/coming back) is Burst Limit's Drama Pieces. If you forget, those were special abilities activated mid-battle that stopped an attack, gave back health, or made the user stronger. It was a fine idea on paper, but interrupting the battle randomly six times got old really quickly.

                You have all the basic stuff you'd expect from the Dragon Ball video game series, including tournament modes, online and offline gameplay, and of course the story mode. Each mode works well enough, as expected with no real flaws or extra attributes.

                An interesting thing to note is the fact Burst Limits was a sort of revitalization of the Budokai series, while Raging Blast seems to be a revitalization of the Budokai Tenkaichi series. When Burst Limits was released, the lastest Budokai (Budokai 3) was released four years ago, while the lastest Budokai Tenkaichi is only three years old.  Someone should really call Atari out of this before it gets out of hand. As already mentioned, it doesn't add a whole lot from Budokai Tenkaichi, which is only three years old now but is nonetheless worth little nowadays.

                While Burst Limits felt very fresh on release, this game in comparison suffers by feeling stale, like we've played this exact type of game before. Raging Blast does add much more flash and backstory to the series, but combat doesn't add a whole assortment of new additions (in fact, a lot of characters feel very similar in control, which was present in Budokai Tenkaichi but that game has so many characters that picking two similarly-played characters was fairly rare). In itself, it's very good, but it comes dangerously close to being a shameless rehash of a previously successful game (which I wouldn't put past Atari). Don't be too blinded by all the new flash, it's a very similar experience to its predecessor.