Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout

The Good
After I played Dragon Ball Z Legends, I was loving Dragon Ball Z. When I heard of Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout, I was excited than ever. I spent my hard-earned money on a piece of crap that should've stayed in the buildings of Bandai.

Let me start by saying the opening cinematic is beautiful. It showed footage of Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball GT. Some of it was even made specifically for the game. It was really just like watching the series. You are introduced to the characters of the Dragon Ball world. When the cinematic is over, you are at the menu which is designed quite nicely. You see pictures of certain characters (And if you enter certain cheats you can change the picture) and introduced to the numerous modes you can do. There is the obvious arcade mode, the vs. mode, the tournament mode, and the options mode.

When you are at the character select screen, it is designed very nicely. There aren't many characters to choose from, but they are well drawn. When you pick the characters for a fight, they actually taunt each other. If you pick specific characters from the show, they will actually say things to each other. For example, say you picked Gohan and Piccolo to fight. Gohan will say "I'm gonna blow you away Piccolo" and Piccolo will reply "Is that you Gohan?" That was a really cool feature.

The graphics are in 3-D for the first time in Dragon Ball game history. You can shoot the obvious ki (engergy) blast, but what amazed me was the stages and how much of the show they put into the game. When you fly into the air, you get the sound effects from the show. All of the backrounds come from the show as well. You can fight from a dying Namek to a wasteland.

The enemies aren't your average enemies. They are tough. You need some amount of skill to beat them. No matter the difficulty, they are still tough. When you reach the end of the game, the ending boss is one of the most breathtaking bosses I've seen. I won't spoil it, but let's just say he can't fit your T.V. screen.

The amount of characters you can unlock amazes me. It really gives you a large variety of characters from Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball GT. There are some of the coolest characters in here.

To end what I liked about this game, I'll end with this. You can sell this game to get a large amount of money. (I did that in 2001 when DBZ was beginning to be a hot show)

The Bad
I'll start by saying this. THE AMERICAN VERSION BLOWS. The voice actors are new people who sound absolutely like little children who couldn't say something about Dragon Ball to save their lives. They really do suck. The original Japanese voice actors did the voices for their characters in the game. While the opening cinematic was great and all, the Japanese version is the one Dragon Ball fans want to watch. It has the original music from DB in it. What does the American Version has? Hard Rock. I was shocked. Just shocked.

I'll move now into the characters you can play as. Yes I said there are a lot, but guess what? THEY ARE THE EXACT SAME CHARACTERS. I swear. Take Goku for example. You get him in 6 FORMS. No lie. Goku makes up most of the characters. Well, him and Trunks anyway, who has 3 forms in the game. Some characters are missing since DB was made a video game. What happened to those favorite guys, Tien, Krillin, Yamcha etc.?

Now my next grudge is against the title and how this game was released. In Japan it was called Dragon Ball: Final Bout. In America it is called Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout. Why? Perhaps they called it GT was so it would spark interest and wonder in those who never heard of Dragon Ball before. Bandai probably hoped GT would make people say "I know what Dragon Ball Z is, but what is this Dragon Ball GT?" They probably just wanted more people to buy it. (Which probably explains why it's so rare to find nowadays). I have a problem about it's release date. It was released back in '97. Why would Bandai do something like that? DBZ was beginning to air it's first episodes on T.V. and they put out a game that is a sequel to that series?! My oh my....

MY BIGGEST PROBLEM IS WITH THE GAMEPLAY. It is the worst gameplay control ever!!!! You punch once, and you have to wait about 2 seconds for your fighter to react. There are incredibly tough combos called "Meteo" that takes lightning fast reflexes to do. There are the cool ki blast war where 2 people shoot ki blasts at each other and it collides together, but I always got hit with the blast. My biggest problem is with the CPU. They have no problem with these crappy controls. They can execute their moves perfectly and they WILL hit you with the Meteo more than once. (Especially Cell)

The Bottom Line
Please, if you want to get this game, get the Japanese one. It is a lot more faithful with the Dragon Ball series. This game is crap. If you buy it, sell it after you are done! Don't say I didn't warn you!

The Good
It's Dragon Ball GT!! It has GT characters! It's in 3-D. It's a game like no other. The opening animation sequence is awesome. The character taunts makes this game 1 of a kind. Not to mention the Meteo system! Fast flying punches going right at you!

The Bad
The slow gameplay is the one thing I think most people hate about this game. For me, it's their voices in English. It sounds very bad! Not to mention all those characters. 6 Goku's? 3 Trunks'? They all have very similar techniques and similar button hitting to do a move. And when they fly, it's just them standing the way they would on the ground but in the air. They also stopped making this game. Why?!?!

The Bottom Line
It's a decent fighting game. Just like a normal fighting game with DBZ/GT characters in it. Go ahead and search for it on the Net, get the Japanese version for the real Japanese voices and get the English for collecting.

The Good
Dragon Ball's videogame history is a mostly sad story. The series seems custom made for videogame adaptation, however the people that got the licenses for their development were mostly bigtime entertainment powerhouses that had little or no knowledge of how to properly do a good game out of it. Thus you had forgettable rpgs, arcade games, etc. etc. all bearing the name of DB, yet none capable of claiming the same fame the series did on the small screen. As for the fighting games available, the story is even sadder. A competent coding house like Capcom could have made the Dragon Ball games THE fighting games to own, (just look at their VS series and think what that could have been with the DB universe on top) however toy giant Bandai snagged the license a looong time ago and used it to churn out mediocre games for the sole purpose of claiming more cash. Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout is one of those games, but being the first in the series to ditch 2D graphics for a polygonal look made it sort of an event, and thus there were hopes among some of us that maybe this time Bandai would deliver.

The best things about Final Bout are those that came with the use of the Dragon Ball license, meaning not just the characters and mythos, but also the great animation style (which you can see in the AWESOME cel-animated intro) and the striking fighting style that made the series such a hit. Characters don't just punch each other here, they fly around shooting gigantic energy balls, unleash millions of combos in a flurry of hits and then smash each other against rocks and engage in power duels where they try to counter each other's energy rays. And guess what? All of those features are here at your disposal! You can fight mano a mano as in a standard fighting game, but you'll quickly realize that the dash key allows you to fly and levitate effortlessly, and a manually charged (a la King of Fighters) power bar allows you to shoot small series of fireballs as well as the gigantic Kame-hame-has and all those weird energy attacks which trigger a cutscene-like animation were your character charges up and then releases the attack with full pyrotechnic detail. At this time you can try to counter the attack by watching out for a "Counter!" sign that pops up, and if you press the correct combination of buttons when the sign appears, you can block the attack, slam it away or attempt to beat it with one of your own attacks at which point the game puts you and your enemy in a cool button-mashing race as you frantically try to push the energy ball back to it's sender.

Other cool features include the "meteo combos" which allow you to chain different attacks together for a spectacular finish where you can smash a player into the ground and see him break some conveniently-placed rocks as in the animé. Thanks to this, and the dynamic camera that nicely tracks the action (and doesn't break the screen up as in the 2D versions, but instead just zooms in/out) the game just oozes a dynamic coolness that makes the battles much spectacular and enjoyable than on the earlier games.

As for extra features the game comes loaded with a set of cool gameplay modes. You have the option to play in a straight-forward battle mode that takes you through all the characters and finally against a giant albino monkey in the end (no I'm not kidding, he's actually a saiyajin who... er... anyway, let's just move on...), then you have the standard vs mode, a cool Grand Master Tournament mode which is just that, a tournament mode, but which enables serious multiplayer matches of up to 8 players, as well as the now classic build up mode which allows you to continually improve a given character and save him for you to fight at a friend's house, or even continue building up on a character from an earlier game, provided he's on the new rooster that includes mostly GT faces, but also the most popular Z versions of each character as unlockable secret bonuses and even the first videogame version of Goku Saiya 4!.

The Bad
Lousy game, pure and simple. The new engine while allowing for much more spectacular fights and graphics drags the game down by not providing the smooth and responsive control you would expect from a game of this kind. You will press a button and half a second later your character will perform a stiff, jerky move that barely has the range to do anything. Thus a deductive player will quickly find out that for a fighting game this is a good Monkey Island sequel, with the only barely entertaining gameplay found on the mega-hyper power attacks that I mentioned above, which look cool and all, but are incredibly boring when used continually and have easy to exploit flaws. The action thus becomes an unbalanced mess where every fight turns into a simple exercise where you just try out the same old trick until you defeat your enemy and actually try to fight a little only when you get bored only to run back to the power attacks when the horribly slow controls and sluggish gameplay defeats your patience.

The graphics are a mixed bag, for starters you have some great character art and amazing special effects involving particle and lightning tricks, but the character models are poorly animated, with horribly visible joints and simple textures that make them look simply like smoother versions of the Tekken 1 character models. And speaking of Tekken, the backgrounds use the same "infinite arena" concept and are just as boring... The sounds and voices are the same as in the animated series tough... Guess I should mention that in case anyone tries to figure out why they are so high-pitched and annoying.

The Bottom Line
Lots of great features, gameplay modes and characters to cover up another fatally flawed Dragon Ball fighting game. Too bad Capcom didn't get the license instead of the bozos at Bandai, that way you could have a nice Dragon Ball product which also happened to be a great game, with balanced action, good controls and all that stuff that Bandai thinks can be replaced with a great opening.