Dragonball Evolution (PSP)

The Dragon Ball series might be the most popular anime series of all time, so it came as little surprise when Hollywood took a stab at adapting it into a live action film. However, taking a series focused on martial arts and incredible powers and trying to ground it somewhat in real life and having its main character Goku in high school robbed it of much of its appeal to try and fit it into a generic mold that stripped away what made the franchise appealing in the first place. We are not here to look at the film though, but at a video game adaptation of Dragonball Evolution, a movie that didn’t even properly split the series name correctly. It truly comes as little surprise that the video game of a poor adaptation would be a poor adaptation in itself.

 

Dragonball Evolution is a fighting game that actually uses the same engine as some of the Dragon Ball Z: Budokai games. Regardless of how one feels about those games though, Dragonball Evolution manages to fail as a fighting game by its poor mix of effective attacks and counter options. All characters in the game play pretty similarly, whether they be the protagonist Goku, his grandfather Gohan, a girl with a gun named Bulma, or ones who should seem more unusual like the alien overlord Piccolo, the monstrous ape Oozaru, or the weird fabricated creature with sword arms Fu-Lum. The bread and butter of every character will be their two attack buttons, Square and Triangle being fairly easy to mash and get rewarded with easy combos with decent damage. Characters do have a few health bars worth of life to work through so fights aren’t over too quickly, but for the most part, it will be a matter of getting in close, landing an attack to open up the string of button presses, and then completing it for decent damage. These aren’t your only skills, as every character also has special attacks to use. These deal decent damage if they hit, but often less than a simple string of the same button being pressed. However, they do offer some projectiles, so this does lend you some options to attack from afar. By pressing different directions you can change what your special is, a fact true of your Square and Triangle attacks despite it not really enhancing those too much. However, the specials can become drastically different attacks, and this can pose a problem, as many characters can benefit greatly from having a special projectile they just run away and spam to deal hefty damage, perhaps the most unique being Bulma throwing a small capsule up into the air only for it to open up and drop a motorcycle on the foe for some absurd damage if it hits.

Projectile attacks are often balanced in fighting games by the damage reward being greater for moving in close and fighting with your fists, but Dragonball Evolution has a dash mechanic that makes it pretty easy to stay away from your enemy. Just retreat at super speed and it can be hard to land the opener to a brain dead Square or Triangle string. Funnily enough, the game has a grab option, but much of the battle will involve repeated dashes away that its much too slow to really pull off reliably. Special moves do draw on an energy meter that needs to be built up though, and you are encouraged to build this up by landing normal attacks… or dashing away and standing in place to charge it quite quickly and easily. Since fighting in Dragonball Evolution allows players to side step and move around large circular arenas, its hard to truly pressure this tactic in a way that won’t devolve into both players just trying to land the simple combos, so the alternative is both players constantly zipping around to build up energy and try to land their special moves after. There are guard and dodging options, but escaping is so easy after a failed attack the expected punishes for committing to a failed attack aren’t very dynamic or common. You will find breaks in the defense of course, but this game does fit squarely into the style of game where button-mashing and projectile spamming, tools of inexperienced players that are often overcome by a player with knowledge of the game’s mechanics and combos, are actually the best approach to playing.

 

There are still two types of attacks still worth mentioning though. There is something known as Aura Burst which combines with your other attacks to make them more powerful. Using it regularly to make an attack stronger is not usually worth the investment though as the powered up version of the attack will not be able to chain into the attacks strings as easily, often meaning the move used is actually weaker than the nearly guaranteed damage if you had used the basic attack’s greater ability to combo into more moves. There is something called Full Burst though where you spend the max amount of charged up power to briefly have all moves be Aura enhanced, this being a bit more worthwhile for comebacks or aggressive play, but it can leave you vulnerable after. The Ultimate Attack is more useful than it though, as by pressing Up and Circle with 5 levels of energy built up, you can deal devastating damage. The cast has different levels of usefulness for this though. Goku and Piccolo both get huge energy beams that can easily reach a retreating opponent, but Piccolo’s lady minion Mai does a jetpack divebomb that seems to have trouble connecting and other characters like Goku’s love interest ChiChi also need to be up close to pull off their well, a disadvantage in a game so focused on dashing in and out.

Naturally, a weak fighting game design at the core will sour most any mode you put it through, but Dragonball Evolution does try to give you a few different ways to experience it. Besides fighting other human players, the game offers Story Mode as what might be its other major draw, the game adapting the entirety of the film into a narrative mostly told through text boxes and still images with a fight thrown in between the long periods of characters just talking. The scenes are presented almost like a visual novel, text boxes handling the words as what looks like the film’s cast traced in an unflattering cartoon style appear to show who is speaking. Whatever your opinion of the movie is, it’s certainly superior to the long sequences of text boxes interrupted by some fighting that isn’t very hard. The AI in much of the game’s modes is easily defeated with the unengaging tactics of simple button mashing, and when it isn’t, standing back and spamming strong projectiles usually deals with them on all but the hardest difficulties. Story mode is a set difficulty though, meaning long periods of transcribed movie are interrupted with simple fights. As for what the tale is about, it speaks of seven mystical items known as the Dragonballs that when brought together can summon a dragon who will grant one perfect wish. Lord Piccolo wants to use them for his plans of domination, but many other characters enter the plot as they too want the balls for their own wishes only to join up with the nobler intentions of the main character Goku, who is setting off to stop Piccolo when the alien warlord kills his grandfather to get his Dragonball. Arcade Mode also offers some stories for the characters, breaking away from the movie’s events to personalize it based on who you pick for the adventure. This stories don’t have much substance and are mostly excuses to have one character face a sequence of other characters as is the norm for fighting game Arcade Modes, but it does feel like they missed a chance to have them all take on a personal quest for the Dragonballs rather than them mostly just greeting who they’re fighting until a pretty dry ending wraps things up.

 

Mission Mode challenges the player to pull off certain moves or fight in certain ways to clear them, none of these proving to be too much of a challenge. Even things like winning without taking damage can be completed with the earlier mentioned tactics of projectile spam and fleeing, but different missions at least will require different approaches more often as moves are required or banned and other limiters like time are placed on the affair. Survival mode is a bit more straightforward, the player fighting through enemies until they lose a round. The battles get harder as they go, but the slow climb built on easy battles makes it hard to stay invested long enough to even want to get to a foe who might take you down. These modes all reward you with Zeni on completion, the game’s money that is used to buy concept art and other behind the scenes materials to look at. Having extras is nice, but it’s hardly the motivation needed to make the already repetitive battles and modes worth playing again to get the money for these unlockables.

THE VERDICT: The Dragonball Evolution film had the characters and some of the story beats of the original Dragon Ball, but it was a surface level adaptation that failed to capture the charm or intensity of its source material. Funnily enough, Dragonball Evolution’s video game is like that for a fighting game. It has effective button-mashing and flashy projectile attacks that deal heavy damage, but there’s no deeper layer of play beneath that brainless approach to combat. It has what it needs to be recognizable as a fighting game and part of the Dragon Ball franchise, but its retreat-focused play, weak AI that makes single-player modes dull, and poor storytelling for an already poor adaptation mean that beyond the basic enjoyment of mindlessly whaling on vaguely recognizable characters, Dragonball Evolution has hardly anything worth your time.

 

And so, I give Dragonball Evolution for the PlayStation Portable…

A TERRIBLE rating. Dragonball Evolution is a game that has very little left to stand on if you strip away its association with Dragon Ball. The fighting system is simple where it shouldn’t be and rewards styles of play that discourage meaningful strategy or reflexes. Landing your basic attacks is surprisingly effective and has little reason to deviate from save if you want to instead effectively bombard foes from afar, and the counter to these two approaches is often to just use the other. The game-controlled enemies certainly don’t know how to handle you using these approaches well and against a human player, button mashing is just too effective. There is a minor thrill to a mindless fighting game that prevents this from finding itself at the bottom of the barrel, and at least the systems in play encourage some movement and need to shift from aggression to power charging, but it’s not an incredibly interesting shift since it still encourages a dull style of play without offering more complex and effective options.

 

One thing that always baffled me about the movie’s name is how it was meant to be an evolution of Dragon Ball. It boiled down the early arcs of the manga into their barest elements and slapped them on a live action film, but I guess the evolution there was that it was live action at all. Dragonball Evolution, as a video game, is pretty much a step back in all regards. It makes worse use of the fighting game engine it’s borrowing than the other Dragon Ball games, it’s an inferior way of experiencing the movie and the plot it was adapting, and it can’t really hold a candle to its video game competition. While not a complete disaster, it is still certainly a devolution.