Dragon Ball Z, this animé brings back sweet memories of my teenage years where I would literally watch it being glued to the TV every day after school. Being the owner of a PS3, I was excited to hear that a Dragon Ball Z game was being made for Sony’s latest entertainment system. Looking at early trailers, Promotional Videos fed me with hype and I really felt I had to buy this game. Come June 6th, I had picked up Dragon Ball Z Burst Limit to keep me busy before Metal Gear Solid 4 and I thought it was going to be a great game, only I felt after an hour of playing it ripped off and unhappy.
Burst Limit is fantastic at but I sadly can’t say the same thing about the gameplay
I’ll start with the good parts of the game. Burst Limit looks fantastic! From every generation of consoles Dragon Ball Z has appeared on, the graphics have not just improved but have at the same time looked closer to the look and feel of the animé and with Burst Limit, it looks stunning and really gives the player a great impression. Burst Limit also introduces On-line Play which allows players to take on fighters around the world so if you happen to import like myself and think that you can only play people from the game’s region, you can take on anyone! The On-Line play is great and I had no problems when I went On-Line. The game play is very good also, its not broken and keeps the simplicity of the Budokai games which DBZ fans will like with Burst Limit. Finally, Vegeta’s famous “Over 9000″ scene is also in this game which made laugh but that is where the positives of the game stop there.
I have a lot of issues with this latest Dragon Ball Z game. Firstly, it feels like the game was seriously rushed and lazy. When playing Z Chronicles, the mode was shallow and didn’t really any brief detail what the hell was going on. I know what happens in Dragon Ball Z but some of the cut scenes weren’t true to the anime version and it is weakly executed. The original Budokai game’s cut scenes were excellent and recreated them flawlessly but Burst Limit is very poor and the animations within those cut scenes are scene over and over and over again which left me disappointed. It further pissed me off when I completed the Frieza saga when a movie played with the in depth cut scenes I wanted to see with dialogue but also proves that the game feels rushed.
The other problem is characters. There is only 21 characters for this game which for £40 is ripping your wallet a new asshole. Previous Budokai games have MUCH more characters, even Budokai Tenkaichi has more than 100 characters. I really wanted to play as Cooler (favourite enemy) but was annoyed to hear just Bardock and Broly from the Movies and Specials were going to be in the game so again this is something which will be a major problem with many potential customers and fans of Dimp’s Dragon Ball Z games.
Cooler like me is very pissed off with Burst Limit
Drama Pieces is the major pisstake with this game. Drama Pieces activate when certain conditions are met within the fight but not only does it make change the characters’ effects such as Health, Ki, Attacks, Defense etc. but it also kills the flow of the fight for players and at first I thought it was cool thing as I could see what Dimps were trying to do. For those who have watched DBZ will know that fights will get interrupted with assists from friends and foes, long dialogue and plot twists but in Burst Limit it simply doesn’t work and you can’t skip the Drama Pieces either which is a shame as it is very annoying.
Imagine playing Gears of War or Unreal Tournament and the game pausing every time you’ve got one or two frags with useless, non-skip dialogue. That is the true annoyance of Drama Pieces and if Dimps are planning a sequel, this is the first thing I would remove.
Overall, I am very disappointed with this game and it failed to live up to my expectations. It feels like a dummed down version of the original Budokai but in HD with added inconvenience and mediocre value . If you are curious to see this game, I would rent it or buy this game when it goes down in price but it certainly isn’t worthy of the RRP and is very difficult to recommend for its asking price.
Being the mediocre game it is, the next day it found itself back at Woolworths where I claimed my refund 
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