Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is based upon the manga and anime series. This is an action RPG that covers the events of nearly the whole Dragon Ball Z saga. Yes, nearly all of it, from the arrival of Raditz to the defeat of Majin Buu. There is a lot of content to cover, especially considering that it covers some of the more boring parts that you wouldn’t expect a game to cover (since it doesn’t have action). This results in a meaty game that’s much bigger in scope that you would first expect.
The game follows the open world RPG template. As it follows the events of the anime, it jumps between various playable characters. Each character levels up and comes with their own skill tree. The combat is a basic action RPG system with a melee attack, a ranged attack (ki blasts) and a dodge button. Each character has differentiation in their super attacks, which is executed via a combination of buttons. Battles may be joined by allies whereupon you can call for their support attacks.
The graphics are phenomenal for an anime based game. It looks amazing and just how you’d imagine an anime would be in game form. The character models are spot on, complete with their familiar expressions. While the open world still looks good, it’s definitely blander as it needed to fill in all that space somehow. Battles are flashy and seemingly fast-paced, but feels out of your control at times when the enemy executes their unstoppable super attacks. Thus battles can easily devolve into button mashing a HP sponge.
Unfortunately, the combat system soon becomes repetitive, not to mention unbalanced. Fighting against multiple enemies at once outright sucks because you’ll get stunlocked. Fighting against boss characters can become annoying when they constantly spam unstoppable moves with completely immunity. Their attacks will still go ahead even if they’re currently being attacked, or they’ll jump straight to their super attack in the middle of being pummelled. This contrasts with your own character who stops immediately and gets stunlock with even the slightly hit.
The open world aspect is complete with busywork quests and collectibles. There are plenty of orbs scattered around that are used to help unlock skills although you get more from battling story enemies. There are items to be collected to be used in making food for special effects. There are based to break down, dinosaurs and animals to hunt, and powerful enemies to fight. All of these are here just to fill up the space and aren’t particularly engaging. The enemy encounters on the map are annoying since they’re a waste of time with pitiful experience and being the same few enemies again and again.
With the huge amount of content to cover, the story moves at a quick pace. It recreates some of the most iconic scenes in the anime. However, it is expected that you’ll at least have watched some of the anime and are familiar with the plot arcs already as it only gives you a high level coverage. The way it tells the story is quite boring as well and there are times where it nearly reaches the same amount of emotion and epicness of the anime but ends up falling short and feels like a cheap attempt.
Going through the story at such a fast pace also shows how ridiculous some of the plot points are, and how quickly characters power up. They’re constantly getting more powerful as the story requires it. This is reflected in character levels as well since for example, Goku starts off at level 1 but will jump straight to level 10 after some off-screen training in the story. Story bosses gives out huge amounts of experience points, which is just about enough to keep you up to date if you don’t wish to bother with the boring side quests.
Going through the story is a mixture of anticipation from nostalgia, and realizing how silly some of the plot developments are. It doesn’t help that there are a lot of plot holes too. The developer seemed to want to follow in the footsteps of the original anime and created a lot of filler content in the story quests. They end up becoming dry and repetitive. Annoying fetch quests have no place in the main story and yet we get too many of those. While another type of quests has you watching loading screen by going from point to point to get one piece of dialogue in order to progress.
The first Saiyan arc is pretty boring, while the Frieza arc is better. Being set on Namek is a nice change but even by this point it uses the rinse and repeat formula. This continues for the Cell and Buu arcs. One thing that might surprise you is how long some cutscenes will be. You’re slammed with long ones and if it is the climax of that arc, you could be out of it for half an hour. Despite zipping through the events at breakneck speed, there is still so much content to cover that it needs that time.
Unfortunately, despite its positives, all of the negatives combine into a bland game. You feel that it should be awesome. It has all the ingredients to be amazing and you can tell a lot of money was poured into this game. Yet it somehow manages to still be boring most of the time. The beginning of the game was particular painful to play through, not helped by the terrible tutorial system. The game is actually bogged down with a lot of discrete systems that don’t mesh together well, you can safely ignore some or all of them without serious repercussions.
The final arc drags on and on, seemingly never ending. The player is constantly fighting against the same boss (Buu), who has the same moveset and constantly spamming the same moves. There is serious ending fatigue here. It takes around 25 hours to finish all four major arcs, depending on how much of the side content you do. The post-game is quite boring too since it just unlocks more of the same old boring sidequests and some superbosses which means grinding out the same repetitive things again and again.
Overall, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot had huge potential but ends up being an average game. It banks on nostalgia, and that value is massive, especially recognising all those small side characters or specific scenes. However, the combat system needs a lot of tweaks to make it more enjoyable and the quest design needs a serious overhaul to be fun. There are peaks but it disappoints on how it presents the story and ends up being bogged down by too many bland elements and bad design.
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