Let’s get this out of the way first. Unless you’re a REALLY, REALLY big fan of the Dragon Ball series – the one with Goku as a young boy with exceptional martial arts abilities, not the one where he’s a blonde man who can punch cities into dust – you’d best stay away from this title. That’s not to say that Dragon Ball: Revenge of King Piccolo doesn’t have any redeeming value. It’s a actually a decent game, Dragon Ball fan or not, and has extra content that would put other games to shame. It’s just that even with all the polish, graphical and content-wise, it still only comes off as a mediocre game.
Adding insult to injury, the Gameboy Advance’s Dragon Ball Advanced Adventure manages to do everything that Revenge of King Piccolo aspired to do and more, for a fraction of the hardware power. Which means Revenge of King Piccolo is further demoted from being a mediocre game to being an unnecessary one.
It has its merits. Dragon Ball: Revenge of King Piccolo is one of the most beautiful cel-shaded games on the Wii, even besting the fan favorite Budokai Tenkaichi 3. The visuals are bright, crisp, and really mimic the look of the manga (keep in mind that the games that use the manga’s art style tend to be better looking, as the source material is more polished compared to anime, which are usually rushed and outsourced to other artists).
Revenge of King Piccolo also has an extra Fighting mode (also present in the GBA version) that effectively turns it into two games housed in one disc. In the fighting mode, you can control Goku or Krillin, along with a host of other unlockable fighters like Tienshinhan, Yamcha, Grandpa Gohan, Jacky Cheung, and of course King Piccolo and his minions. The bouts are in different arenas that may look expansive at first, but are actually restricted by invisible walls. The small arena isn’t a problem, because being based on Goku’s early exploits, you won’t have access to screen-filling attacks or won’t be able to fly around like a jet. Your most impressive attack as Goku will be the Kame Hame Wave, which is something that you won’t be able to pull off on cue because the ki charge it uses fills up slowly. One or two per match is your best bet.
The main meat of the game is where Dragon Ball: Revenge of King Piccolo starts to devolve into mediocrity. It uses the wiimote and the nunchuk like your average gamepad – with the nunchuk’s joystick serving as the directional controls while the action controls are in the wiimote.
The controls are fairly responsive, to be fair, but controlling Goku during fights doesn’t feel natural, as you’re more likely to lose focus on a target before launching Goku’s attack, which is an auto combo. It’s not that hard to find yourself in a situation where you’re wasting time combo-ing nothing but air while the enemies gather behind you.
That’s not to say that the combat is hard. In fact, they’re very kid-friendly and you can button-mash your way around. Normally, this should be a good thing and we can just consider the game as targeted towards kids. I would rank it higher if it was meant for kids. Unfortunately, combat is just one part of the equation – the other one, navigation, is completely frustrating even for adults.
Dragon Ball: Revenge of King Piccolo suffers from the same problem that plagues most third party Wii titles: the motion controls are forced. Most of the time, the momentum you’ve built will be ruined by a tacked-in motion control that wasn’t really necessary in the first place. There’s also the issue of bottomless pits and environment traps that would be difficult on a normal gamepad but downright frustrating on the Nunchuk/Wii-mote combo.
Lastly, there’s not a lot of variety to the missions and the opponents. Majority of them are pallete swaps that don’t really do anything differently, except maybe require a couple more punches. This wasn’t a problem on Dragon Ball Advanced Adventure, because the action there is fast-paced and being 2D, you don’t get mired in exploration. Revenge of King Piccolo is slower-paced, which means you get more chances to notice how boring everything is and how you’re basically doing what you did in the last stage, except you’re punching a different-colored Wolf-guy.
In case you didn’t stop reading from the first paragraph and read everything, because you want to justify a purchase of the game, all I can say as a pitch is it looks cool, visually, and is probably your best bet at capturing the aura of Goku’s early exploits on the Wii. IF that does it for you, you can get this game without any regrets. Otherwise, only get it if you’re a completist who must have every Dragon Ball game in existence.
