Dragon Ball Z: Sagas

Written by D'Marcus Beatty  on April 04, 2005

Review: Final Fight, Super-Saiyan style.

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The Dragon Ball Z cartoon series seems like a perfect fit for games. Ultra powerful characters battling in hyper-fast, violent battles is an easy and almost essential translation for a video game experience. The Budokai fighting series has been an undeniable success, with Goku-fans gobbling them up by the handfuls. After three iterations, Atari decided to take their Dragon Ball Z franchise in another direction, eschewing the one on one fighting for a more Final Fight themed game that allows the hero to travel a world while fulfilling the DBZ storyline. However, Sagas seems less satisfying than the Budokai series, due to repetitive fighting, bad camera usage, and unresponsive controls.

Sagas follows the early DragonBall Z series, beginning with the Saiyan Saga and ending with the Cell Games. One thing that the game does well is supplying the story. The Budokai series was notorious for its disjointed storytelling, which essentially assumed the player was already familiar with the DBZ storyline and left huge gaps in the narrative. Sagas actually tells each tale while giving essential backstory, so if you don't know the difference between Goku's Kamehameha attack and Vegeta Big Bang attack, you'll still know what is going on. Sagas also offers a two-player co-op mode, so stages can be tackled by two characters. However, the story mode adheres tightly to the storyline, so only certain characters are available on certain stages, and not all stages have two-player capability.

Each stage of DBZ Sagas has certain objectives, such as collecting the titular Dragon Balls, protecting another character, or defeating an enemy. However, despite the variety of objectives, all of the stages seem alike, forcing your character into repetitive battles against what amounts to foot-soldiers before tackling the stage's boss. Your character also collects Z-coins, which he can use to purchase new moves and abilities, like teleportation and ki-attacks. However, only a few purchases actually seem to evolve your character. The characters all share abilities, although the names are changed between moves. For example, after your character purchases a Ki-attack, Vegeta will fire his Galick Gun while Piccolo shoots his Special Beam Cannon, but the only difference is in the animation. This sharing of abilities makes for little to no difference between characters, which seriously hurts the replayability of the game. Characters can also purchase combos to add to their attack repertoire. However, the strict adherence to the preset combos as well as the slow and unresponsive controls make this offensive ability laughable. Most gamers will stick to the simple four punch/kick combo, which is almost as effective as the longer, more complex, combos. Even the most anticipated ability, the evolution to Super Saiyan, though extraordinarily powerful, wears off easily and is hard to re-achieve. A meter on the screen must move all the way to the right before certain characters can ascend, and attacks move the meter. However, if the character isn't attacking, the meter moves back to the left, and there are breaks between groups of enemies, so Super Saiyan isn't as simple to achieve as it is in the cartoon or in the Budokai games.

Sagas suffers from a number of issues. The camera angles are preset, and don't always give the best view of the action. Characters cannot fly up or down, and can only hover in place, which is an odd choice. Sometimes to collect objects, characters have to leap from a high surface, hover, then move back to the object. When the game is finished, Pendulum mode is unlocked, which allows the player to replay any stage using any character, including some characters that aren't in the game. These characters have different power levels, so choosing some characters can make a stage a breeze while other weaker characters might make a stage almost impossible. However, because all characters share moves, there isn't much excitement in choosing between characters, since, despite power levels, they all behave the same way. Also, all objectives besides the battle objectives are disabled in Pendulum mode, which simplifies the stages and lowers replayability as well.

In addition to the gaming issues, Sagas is an unattractive game. The character models are blocky, and the environments are dull. Perhaps Atari should have retained the cel-shading look that Budokai had adopted and nearly perfected for its last two titles.