Dragon Ball Fusions

Note: This review is based on the EU version with the 2.2 patch added.

DragonBall Fusions is coming out at a time when the franchise is back from a revival. With the recent "Battle of gods" and "Resurrection F" films as well as the ongoing animation series "Super", there is a lot of interesting things a great video game can do with it's popularity. As a fan of the franchaise I always hope for the best for the games that are released. Fusions does smart things to differ it from previous games but is marred by grinding and bad explanations.

The game starts with you (custom character) and Pinch, a sayian, who find the last dragonball in order to grant your wish. The wish is to create a ultimate tournament to decide who is the strongest in the universe. This creates the timespace tournament! A place where almost all of the characters from dragonball series (orginal, Z, Super, GT and movies) arrive in order to fight eachother and hopefully in the end fight the legendary champion (You know who it is before you see him). Quickly gathering your own team of five characters (you, Goten, Trunks, Pan and kid Goku) you travel through the various realms to train, gather new fighters and experience various bits of dragonball lore with a twist. For newcomers the story told will be straight forward, but the game expects you to know who people like Cell, Frieza, Goku and others making this game not very friendly to newcomers. References to odd pieces of lore with an optional quizzes makes it a very solid fangame. The story mode however has it's twists that will make fans surprised and laugh, but make newcomers wonder what is this series really.

The best part of the game in general is the ability to fly around in seven mixmatched realms that include things like Hercule city, Master Roshi's house, Supreme Kai's planets and planet Vegeta. It's fun and easy to fly, with some scenery bonus for fans. Flying around these areas are other fights training and wishing to fight you. You can also explore to find people to talk to either for new missions or just see what they think about the latest story mission. There are some missions where you have to find specific items or people that can be fairly obtuse (Marron's lost property is an example where the game doesn't explain what it wants, and it is as of this version bugged as well). These missions difficulty can be anything from mindbogglingly simple to extremely frustrating.

Whenever you engage one of these fight through the story or of your own free will, you arrive in a arena (either a circle or a tall square) with all of your currently selected team. You take turns for each fighter to power up, use ki attacks or punch them trying to take out their hp. Battles in general feel good but can get stale after playing for a long time. There are however a huge amount of different attacks with various affects they can have with the characters. These effects can be everything from quite a simple power up to the very confusing such as scared, shock or other effects. The game doesn't go out of it's way to explain all it's effects which requires reading from a wall that has tips on it or read the internet. Worse off some missions in the game require specific attack types that the game entire fail to mention leaving the player trying to figure things on his own. Although the fights feel fast and solid, with characters knocking each other across the arena, setting up combos and beam struggles. It's a fun system but when you have finished the story mode you have pretty much fought a lot of battles and it can get tedious. If you also manage to knock out characters in a specific way (Zenkai attack) you can recruit them to your own team. You can also get new characters through side missions and the game sets limits on your progress until you've gathered enough team members as well as energy. Doing the same fight in order to recruit everyone can be a pain and the game doesn't expect you to gather too many, but for the completionist out there there is a huge amount of characters to unlock. There are over 330 different characters with their own backstories. From specific dragonball characters such as Gohan or Yamcha to characters that the developers has created.

So far we haven't mentioned the most important part of the game, as well as the title of the game. Fusions. Apart from well known fusions such as Gotenks, you can do a special fusion that puts two characters into one. Giving birth to odd fusions as Gohan and Trunks (Gohanks) or Piccolo and Pikkon (Picohan). Every character has atleast one other they can fuse with and certain ones are better then others with letter grading telling you how good they are. You as the main character can fuse with anyone so if you ever wanted to imagine yourself fusing with your favorite dragonball character you can do that. Fusions aren't also permanent so you can play a bunch with one fused character, unfuse then fuse that character with someone else. This can be very fun to see what odd fusions combinations you can use. However since some characters can only fuse with some specific ones you have to fight a huge amount of battles in order to find them and hopefully recruit them..

In the end of it all, this is a fun game that adds it's own story that's funny. This game is perfect for a dragonball fan, with references to various vauge lore bits and quizes that ask really hard questions only the most ardent fan can answer without checking. The characters keep in tone with their show parts and it uses these characters for both laughter and excitement. However with a battle system that slowly grows more dull as time goes on especially with the grindy nature of it. It's a game that for fans I would give it 4 stars and reccomend it if they want a fun, rpg fighter with certain frustrations. However I acknowledge that people who aren't fans of the franchise will see it as a decent game with a huge amount of characters. Therefore it deserves three stars.