General Gaming Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot - Information Thread (Launching 01/17/20)

[Pikachu]

 

Quote

Determination, Despair, and Hope -- Discover the story of the mysterious Dragon Balls in the all-new DRAGON BALL GAME – PROJECT Z! #DragonBallZ #Videogames #BandaiNamco

 

Join Goku and fellow warriors in the neverending search for the ultimate fight -- COMING 2019!

 

[Pikachu]

 

[TwinIon]

So you play through the plot of Dragonball Z? Nifty.

 

If it's coming out this year, why does it not have a name yet?

[NeoJoe]

After Fighterz, I'm all in. I hope it's good! 

[Remarkableriots]

I have been wanting something like this for years!

[Pikachu]

 

[Pikachu]

 

[GameDadGrant]

No Switch version, no buy.

[Pikachu]

 

[Pikachu]

 

[Pikachu]

 

[Pikachu]

 

 

[Spork3245]

I’m waiting on reviews before getting this. Looks like it’s just an open-world-esq Xenoverse.

[Spork3245]

Early impressions I’m reading seem to be pointing towards “meh”  

[Xbob42]

I'm really enjoying this one so far. I don't know if it covers the entire DBZ saga up through Buu or if it's just the Saiyan saga or whatever, but in any case, I've been enjoying it.

The combat is simple but fun, very fast and twitchy with big health bars, but not so big that it gets tedious, and you're not required to finish people off with special moves or anything, which I like. I never like it when a fight in a DBZ game takes a thousand years. You've got your basic attack, your ki blasts, your vanish dodges, your boosts to fly faster, your special attacks, your transformations, and HP/ki management as well as a focus mode that you can enable by landing enough melee hits to build a meter and then charging your ki that makes your attacks pack a lot more punch, and also allows you to cancel out of supers to lay on a ton of punishment in a super small amount of time. All of these things can be used together effectively, and dodging attacks at the last moment grants you some bullet time. You can block, including after an attack or combo has already started, with two different ways to expend ki to repel the attacker, vanishing behind them to get a big hit in or causing a small explosion around you to repel more than one attacker, although it's equally effective on just one.

 

The open world is more like an open level due to both its size and how fast you can move, and the fact that there are many of them, not just one huge one you explore. When you're flying and boosting you go very fast, and any small collectibles like ingredients are automatically absorbed into you as you pass them, and you also go right through trees and huge boulders, so you really feel the power and it's very freeing compared to most open world design. Again, it's also a bit simplistic, with orbs all over the place to collect that you can spend on super moves, occasional sidequests, etc. You can use your ingredients to make food, which grants both permanent stat increases as well as temporary ones, so it's similar to Bloodstained in that it's worth your while to eat lots of food.

 

I don't want to get too deep into it right now as my food just arrived, but if you're specifically a fan of DBZ, it seems like an easy recommendation. For me, I hate that almost every DBZ game is strictly about the fighting. This has a lot of the fun little side stuff and character moments (including characters from original Dragon Ball that we didn't see much in DBZ, at least not in the Kai rereleases, I can't remember all the old filler) that I find to be the best part of the series. All the fights are still there, and they're where the bulk of the cutscene budget went to, but doing side quests for smaller characters and exploring the world of DBZ is the part I really enjoy. Seems like most if not all the original voice cast is here, so that's a huge plus, and their performances are on-point.

 

If I had to level some complaints at it so far:

 

- There are a ton of tutorial windows that seem to take a lot of words to explain very simple concepts, and they throw them at you almost all at once in the beginning. It's very jarring and a little confusing, despite the systems being extremely easy and simple to figure out. A good example of an overabundance of data making something seem way harder than it really is.

 

- The cutscene frequency this early is pretty high. Fight a dude for a couple minutes, cutscene, fight a dude, cutscene, etc. While some of these make sense (I don't want to do some shitty QTE to charge a spirit bomb, so I'm happy that's just a cutscene) some of them are a little more confusing. It's not terrible or anything, and you can skip any scene, I just hope it finds a better balance soon.

 

- The flying controls are weird. Raising and lowering your altitude is RB and RT, rather than LT and RT, or just using the right stick to direct yourself. It's not a huge deal or anything, just makes it kind of awkward. You can rebind keyboard controls, but I haven't found anything for gamepad. If I could remap these two things, I'd be super happy.

[Xbob42]

As an added bonus, the game has had some minor bugs, nothing too bad. So far I've seen a character I was talking to kind of slide towards me while talking without animating, and they were supposed to be standing still. Only happened once. A much more amusing (and initially confusing) bug was that I ended a fight, and the following cutscene had this ridiculous background noise that sounded like a rock or something got trapped inside another object in the physics engine. I'm sure you know the sound, just the "object slamming into object" sound played over and over and over again.

Initially, since the cutscenes play at 30 FPS, I assumed they were all prerendered, but the sound kept changing location when the camera would cut to a different angle. This persisted for several cutscenes and in fact I'm still experiencing it. I'm almost done with this specific fight area so it won't last long, and I'm sure it'd go away if I reloaded my save or something, but I've found it very funny because it's actually VISIBLE and shows up inside cutscenes!

 

That explosion on the left isn't supposed to be there, and it's just going absolutely apeshit, it's so stupid, I love it.

[Jason]

On 1/17/2020 at 10:39 AM, Xbob42 said:

I'm really enjoying this one so far. I don't know if it covers the entire DBZ saga up through Buu or if it's just the Saiyan saga or whatever, but in any case, I've been enjoying it.

The combat is simple but fun, very fast and twitchy with big health bars, but not so big that it gets tedious, and you're not required to finish people off with special moves or anything, which I like. I never like it when a fight in a DBZ game takes a thousand years. You've got your basic attack, your ki blasts, your vanish dodges, your boosts to fly faster, your special attacks, your transformations, and HP/ki management as well as a focus mode that you can enable by landing enough melee hits to build a meter and then charging your ki that makes your attacks pack a lot more punch, and also allows you to cancel out of supers to lay on a ton of punishment in a super small amount of time. All of these things can be used together effectively, and dodging attacks at the last moment grants you some bullet time. You can block, including after an attack or combo has already started, with two different ways to expend ki to repel the attacker, vanishing behind them to get a big hit in or causing a small explosion around you to repel more than one attacker, although it's equally effective on just one.

 

The open world is more like an open level due to both its size and how fast you can move, and the fact that there are many of them, not just one huge one you explore. When you're flying and boosting you go very fast, and any small collectibles like ingredients are automatically absorbed into you as you pass them, and you also go right through trees and huge boulders, so you really feel the power and it's very freeing compared to most open world design. Again, it's also a bit simplistic, with orbs all over the place to collect that you can spend on super moves, occasional sidequests, etc. You can use your ingredients to make food, which grants both permanent stat increases as well as temporary ones, so it's similar to Bloodstained in that it's worth your while to eat lots of food.

 

I don't want to get too deep into it right now as my food just arrived, but if you're specifically a fan of DBZ, it seems like an easy recommendation. For me, I hate that almost every DBZ game is strictly about the fighting. This has a lot of the fun little side stuff and character moments (including characters from original Dragon Ball that we didn't see much in DBZ, at least not in the Kai rereleases, I can't remember all the old filler) that I find to be the best part of the series. All the fights are still there, and they're where the bulk of the cutscene budget went to, but doing side quests for smaller characters and exploring the world of DBZ is the part I really enjoy. Seems like most if not all the original voice cast is here, so that's a huge plus, and their performances are on-point.

 

If I had to level some complaints at it so far:

 

- There are a ton of tutorial windows that seem to take a lot of words to explain very simple concepts, and they throw them at you almost all at once in the beginning. It's very jarring and a little confusing, despite the systems being extremely easy and simple to figure out. A good example of an overabundance of data making something seem way harder than it really is.

 

- The cutscene frequency this early is pretty high. Fight a dude for a couple minutes, cutscene, fight a dude, cutscene, etc. While some of these make sense (I don't want to do some shitty QTE to charge a spirit bomb, so I'm happy that's just a cutscene) some of them are a little more confusing. It's not terrible or anything, and you can skip any scene, I just hope it finds a better balance soon.

 

- The flying controls are weird. Raising and lowering your altitude is RB and RT, rather than LT and RT, or just using the right stick to direct yourself. It's not a huge deal or anything, just makes it kind of awkward. You can rebind keyboard controls, but I haven't found anything for gamepad. If I could remap these two things, I'd be super happy.

 

So did you wind up finishing it? Curious how far into the DBZ story it goes and if you still liked it at the end. Thinking about getting it on this winter Steam sale, although I see there's also some pricey-ish DLC which I imagine means additional story content.

[Xbob42]

Nah I never finished it, I remember enjoying it for a while and then it just getting left in the dust by a deluge of releases.

[Jason]

1 hour ago, Xbob42 said:

Nah I never finished it, I remember enjoying it for a while and then it just getting left in the dust by a deluge of releases.

 

Well I see there's a demo so I guess I'll do that too (hey remember when demos were reliably a thing? ), but would you say reasonable value for $15 for someone who does really like DBZ?