Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Battle 22 was the first Dragon Ball game I played, being released here at the start of the newly emerging but quickly expanding English speaking Dragon Ball explosion but way after the game was in any way relevant. Hell, the PS2 was already out and well established by that point! I brought it cheap thinking it would “tide me over” until the PS2 DBZ games came along (which they thankfully did quite quickly!) but I barely played it because it was so… SO bad. Even my newly minted DBZ hype couldn’t cover the slow, clunky gameplay. Guess what? It’s not any better now! Let’s get this out of the way, shall we?
Background:
There you go, Dragon Ball era Goku! Now this review matches the film I reviewed alongside it!
Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Battle 22 was released for the Playstation in Japan on July 28th 1995, with oddly a version released in Europe the following year but it wasn’t until March 25th 2003 that it got released in the US (and I guess re-released in Europe and possibly for the first time in the UK? I certainly didn’t see any copies until that year, where it and GT: Final Bout were all over the place)
So yeah, in 2003 a 1995 PS1 game was released trying to get a quick buck out of the emerging DBZ craze. Bloody worked too! *shakes fist*
Gameplay:
Two different height levels and a foreground and background layer?! … Still looks like crap though.
The gameplay (which is a loose term here) is your basic fighting game affair, 1 on 1 with health bars and energy (or Ki) bars and you win by taking down your opponent’s health to zero and winning two out of three rounds. Doing basic Ki attacks or special moves will drain the energy bar, and while you can increase it by “powering up” if it reaches zero your character will be stunned. Taking cues from the SNES Butoden games that inspired it (which I have played on ROMs but I’m trying to keep this to games I actually own) the action can take place on the ground or in the air, and in fact one person can be in the air and the other on the ground, leading to some diagonal energy blasting. There are punches, kicks and throws to go along with the generic Ki blasts and special moves (which use classic Street Fighter inputs if you’re wondering) and it all sounds good, doesn’t it? Sadly, it’s anything but.
The actual movement of the characters is SUPER slow, like footage of someone pretending to run in slow motion put into slow motion slow. This makes connecting with strikes hard and getting the inputs right nearly impossible. Then you throw in the low-rez sprites that are alright if they’re zoomed all the way out but get increasingly worse the closer the camera gets badly pixelating all over the place with really crap early polygon backgrounds and the whole experience is a frustrating, ugly mess. This would’ve been “mildly impressive but annoying to play” in 1995, but in 2003 it was embarrassing and in 2023 it’s… really something. Yikes.
Ginyu powers up moments before getting struck in the face with the same generic Ki blast that every character has.
What’s that I hear you ask? Modes? That would be nice, yeah. Actually to be fair beyond the standard Arcade, Versus and Tournament modes (that’s right, no story mode to speak of) there is a “Build Up” mode where you can choose a character and fight a constant string of opponents and gain points to increase health and move damage, then fight with your own Built Up character against a friend’s if you both put your memory cards in. So if you actually enjoyed the game (somehow!) that would be something fun to put some time into. By playing this mode Ultimate Battle 22 can actually be turned into “Ultimate Battle 27” as you unlock five hidden characters as you progress, the final one being Gogeta, who actually appeared in this game before his film appearance in the twelfth DBZ Movie (which is why doesn’t have any of the… one move he did in the film), having said that you can unlock all five characters straight away with a cheat code that is oddly given away in the instruction booklet, so… thank goodness for that, nearly had to actually play the game for a second there!
Graphics and Sound:
Well… the broken buildings in the background don’t look too awful, I’ll give them that!
Terrible and bearable, respectively. Seriously, I’ve already mentioned the outdated-even-for-1995 sprites on terrible CG backgrounds, and the music while occasionally catchy doesn’t do much to elevate the experience. Sound effects are good though, and it uses the original voice cast (obviously), though the voice samples are often scratchy and too loud compared to everything else…
Thoughts Then:
I mean, firing a rocket launcher at a God is probably not going to do a whole lot there, Mr. Satan…
Played it once or twice, put it on again with a friend to laugh at it, then never played it again. I didn’t sell it though, it wasn’t worth much so I thought I may as well keep it for a potential Dragon Ball game collection, and what a collection it has turned out to be…
Thoughts Now:
Just look at how relatively crisp the health bars and names are and then look at the sprites themselves… Just, no effort put into making them look good at all…
Funnily enough a poor game in 1995 and a terrible game in 2003 hasn’t become any better in 2023. Avoid at all costs, unless you want to make one of those YouTube videos where you rip on something for being undeniably shit, in which case: have fun!
Hogan Reviews 