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First of all – if you are wondering if this game actually covers any parts of the Dragonball story, then here’s your answer: NO. For some reason NamcoBandai and Spike chose to keep referring to the Dragonball Z story as Dragonball which can be a bit misleading. This game covers the Dragonball Z story and even included a bunch of new what-if scenarios. Fans familiar to the Budokai Tenkaichi series from Spike will instantly know what to expect from the game as the same developer is back this time around and it’s the same open-world kind of fighting. I’ve always been more of a Tenkaichi fan so I’m pleased to say this game is really enjoyable.
Dragon Ball: Raging Blast is the latest in a long line of console Dragon Ball franchised fighters. As I said earlier, the game covers the events of the Dragon Ball Z (DBZ) anime, from Raditz's arrival on Earth to the defeat of Kid Buu, as well as the Bardock and Brolly movies, but nothing from the original Dragonball or DB:GT. It's the spiritual successor to the Budokai Tenkaichi series (Not to be confused with the Budokai series, which is entirely different) of Dragon Ball Z games, known as the "Sparking" series in Japan. It's best classified as a 3D brawler; you can freely move through a 3D environment both on the ground and flying through the air, and the game has a streamlined combo and special move system that is much too simple to call this a fighting genre game. It works mainly on two levels, as a brawler game and as a Dragon Ball fan-service game.
Raging Blast offers the player a variety of modes to choose from like Dragon Battle Collection (story mode), Museum (character encyclopedia, music, replays), for the first time an actual Dojo,World Tournament Mode, Xbox LIVE play, offline Versus, and Super Battle Trail (Arcade, Survival etc.). With these modes, fans will find that they have a lot of options to choose from and a lot of gamplay to cover.
The Dragon Battle Collection is the main hub for the story mode in the game. A pretty cool thing about this is that each saga’s fights have these nice little character models showing what each battle is about and some even have very familiar poses. As far as the actual stories go, fans may be a bit disappointed. First off, they totally butchered the story. They worked around certain restraints by omitting pieces of the manga; for example, since they have no Giant Ape Vegeta character in the game, they simply omit the fact that Vegeta ever went ape form. This has the result of several battles being wrong. In the game, for example, when Cell first fights Piccolo you control Cell and beat Piccolo, while in the manga Cell actually is defeated and runs away. Last but not least, they made fights out of several scenes from the manga that are not really fights at all. For example, there is an entire fight based out of a ten-second scene from the anime where Vegeta asks Krillin to injure him during the Frieza battle. On top of all this, the actual cutscenes are terrible... there is only at least (which is it?) two characters on the screen at any given time, and when there are other characters watching the fight, they were too lazy to load their character models on the screen so you just hear their voice come out of nowhere. To be short, they totally butchered this aspect of the game. But who doesn’t know the DBZ story by now right? So let’s talk about the what-if scenarios.
What-ifs are what I think should be more focused on because the DBZ storyline is seriously getting old and tired…fast. I’m not sure how much longer they can keep pumping these Dragonball games out with the same story. Luckily, Spike included a few new made up storylines. Unfortunately, they all suck. There is Future Trunks fighting Kid Trunks, Ginyu Force auditions, Gogeta vs. Vegito and just a few other pointless and ridiculous storylines. The only one that really struck interest with me is the SS3 Broly and SS3 Vegeta storylines. Yes, they made up two new characters. It’s very unfortunate to know that the what-if stories are really lame because this is the one part where no one actually knows what will happen and it’s something new.
Gameplay wise, the character roster is pretty huge (though not as big as Tenkaichi 3) and involves most of the important characters from the source material. The only characters omitted who I recall actually fighting in an important battle are Dabura and Cell Jr. There is unfortunately, only a limited selection of stages, but they are all completely interactive and you can destroy them in a way never seen before in a DBZ game. Downloadable Content seems likely for this game in the near future. Each character has a number of base abilities and combos which all characters share , a character-unique attack mapped to the B button, a generic ki projectile mapped to the Y button, eight character-specific special moves of which you can pick four to map to the right joystick, and one unique ultimate attack. As well, you can have custom versions of characters which you can equip with a set of items in order to give them strength or defense boosts, or boost their abilities in some other ways.
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