Scattered throughout the game’s various environments - which are amalgamations of many iconic locations from the anime - you will face random encounters and side quests to keep you busy outside of the main story. Energy comes in five flavours – red, blue, yellow, green and purple – and can be earned by defeating certain enemies found all around the game’s map. The game world is also a little less exciting to explore, while progress is gated by a series of barriers that literally block your path until you store enough energy to break them. Featuring an original storyline complete with new characters - even one you create yourself - this Nintendo 3DS exclusive deals heavily in fan service, leaving everyone else out in the cold.įusions reminds me a little bit of the Legacy of Goku games for GameBoy Advance, only it’s less Final Fantasy and more 3D brawler with RPG mechanics. It is charming in its willingness to innovate within Dragon Ball, but it never quite executes on any of its pillars.Dragon Ball Fusions kicks away the trend of retelling the events of the anime as has been the case with literally dozens of games before it. I enjoyed trying to add all the Dragon Ball staple characters to my party, but would have happily ignored the randoms if I hadn’t been required to collect a few of each race in order to move to the next area.įusions stands out in the library of Dragon Ball video games as an interesting entry in the otherwise fighting-game-heavy collection. Each one feels like the result of hitting the random button on the character creator. Additionally, the original characters you can add to your party are all bland and not worth pursuing. You can perform EX Fusions to create strange combinations with familiar characters late in the game, but meeting the requirements for these is time-consuming. Seeing anything interesting takes too long you encounter familiar fusions from the show early on, like Gotenks, and some new fun ones like Raditz and Nappa (Natz), but getting to the interesting stuff takes time. I enjoyed the moment-to-moment combat, especially the ping-pong nature of it all, but I checked my watch often during each fight.Ĭollecting and fusing characters is underwhelming. The fight structure is interesting and original, but the tactics you develop early carry you through the game. The battles are time-consuming, ramping up to five versus five as soon as you fill your party, which makes each fight last a long time. Every match plays out like turn-based bumper cars, and bouncing an enemy around your team to eventually watch them fly out of the ring is rewarding. You can even bounce enemies into one another for extra damage, or into your team so they can volley the bad guys back to you. Pushing all your enemies together, for example, can open up the opportunity to use a powerful Kamehameha blast to ring out everyone at once for additional damage. Position is important give each a tactics feel. The story functions as a good excuse to bring literally all of Dragon Ball’s familiar characters together (even GT ones), but does not go beyond that to craft a worthwhile narrative.Ĭombat is turn-based, with periodic button-mashing action when using certain special attacks. Everyone is strangely okay with this sudden universe-affecting change, and it creates opportunities for fun dialogue, like when Goten meets and fights alongside the child-version of his father, Goku. This creates a world not bound by the restrictions of time or dimensions, where the best fighters ever – not just those currently alive – come together to train and fight. Fusions begins with two original characters (one created by the player) using the Dragon Balls to wish for the greatest martial arts tournament of all time. This tale does not follow the mainline Dragon Ball story, which has been done ad nauseam in video games. It struggles with grinding and fusing, but finds enough success to earn a qualified recommendation to Dragon Ball fans. For this reason, Fusions stands apart from the typical Dragon Ball game by being an RPG with an original story. That makes sense, considering the source material is about a collection of visually distinct martial artists who are constantly trying to prove who can punch the hardest. The Dragon Ball Z franchise has found a comfortable (and commercially successful) spot in the genre of fighting games.
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