When the Nintendo DS got Dragon Ball Z: Supersonic Warriors 2, gamers were willing to cut it some slack even though the overall quality of the game was way below the PSP’s Dragon Ball Z: Shin Budokai, citing the Nintendo DS’ underpowered hardware as the reason why a decent Dragon Ball fighting game wasn’t possible.
And then came Dragon Ball Kai: Ultimate Butouden, which proved that it had nothing to do with the hardware - the Nintendo DS was perfectly capable of carrying a bonafide 3D fighting game that can at least come close to the PSP’s admittedly superior offerings.
Dragon Ball Kai: Ultimate Butouden is the spiritual successor to the Super Butouden series on the Super Famicom back in the 90s. While not made by the same developers, majority of the gameplay mechanics from the original Butouden series found their way to the DS, with some minor tweaks and polish, of course.
Visually, Ultimate Butouden is easily one of the most beautiful on the DS. Barring the lack of framebuffer effects and the lower resolution, it can easily be mistaken for a PSP game due to the amount of detail that went into the character models and the stages.
The characters are rendered in a slightly SD (super deformed) style, with the heads looking like they are a little on the big side, though not comically so. Think of it as a stylistic take on Akira Toriyama’s art style. The stages are well rendered, with the engine finding time to show minor details like reflections on shiny surfaces and dust that’s been unsettled by all the fighting. The beams and explosions, on the other hand, are unimpressive. There’s no transparency so they don’t look like proper ki blasts.
When it comes to gameplay, be prepared for a learning curve that’s steeper than the Shin Budokai series. As mentioned above, Ultimate Butouden carries the mechanics found in the 90s Super Famicom games. This means the stages are wide and divided into a ground and sky area, with characters shifting from one to the other by pressing up twice. The controls for pulling off super moves are more complicated than just pressing up and ki (street fighter veterans will be at home here.) thankfully, the touchscreen is used to assist novices. All the super moves and the special itself can be launched by pressing buttons on the touch screen.
Speaking of specials, the desperation moves are presented as cutscenes instead of real time attacks, though it’s not completely out of the user’s control as the success of the attack will be decided by various QTEs that occur while the cutscene is playing. The QTEs are difficult at first, but once you memorize what kind of minigame is used by which character, you’ll be having an easier time winning the minigames.
There’s the matter of transformations. I’ve been very vocal about in-game transformations being a requirement for Dragon Ball Z games, and Ultimate Butouden doesn’t have them. All the various transformations are in the game (including all levels of super saiyan for the characters), but you can only select between them at the start of a match. You can’t transform when the match is already underway. It’s sad that there’s no transformation in this game, but the sum of all parts is good enough that I can overlook the lack of in-game transformations, and maybe this time we can finally use the “underpowered hardware” as an excuse and give the game a pass.
As for content. There’s lots. Replay value is definitely high. As mentioned above, the transformations are separate characters, so there’s a whole lot of characters to unlock. Additionally, the story itself can branch out depending on your choices so there are incentives to replay the single player mode, especially because the story mode has mini games that you won’t be able to play in any of the other modes. Even if you manage to unlock all the content, it should still be good enough for short bursts of play.
Buy or Not
If you’re a Dragon Ball fan and a Nintendo DS owner, seek this out and add it to your collection. It’s the best Dragon Ball game you will ever have on your handheld, and it’s also the last game you’ll get from developers Game Republic, as they have since gone under (it’s a shame that being able to develop a really good game based on a really popular franchise is no longer enough to keep a company afloat these days.)
If you’re not a Dragon Ball fan, Dragon Ball Kai: Ultimate Butouden should still be worth purchasing, because it’s a damn good game on its own, and you need to at least check it out just to see what the Nintendo DS is truly capable of if developers are only willing to develop games that push its hardware.
