Tag Team powered up
Well I will start off with the story, much like the other Dragonball Z games (not the movie based one which was horrible) it follows the storyline of the anime. But they do leave out some of the afterlife parts, where goku, gohan and vegeta train as well as the future storyline where they show gohan and trunks are the last remaining people left fighting against 17 and 18. From what I have played it goes to the end of the DBZ saga, which is the buu fight also after you finish the main storyline you unlock a "What if" showing the story from different characters POV. Also if you have the space in you memory stick, you can go through a 10 min install which will make the game load much faster than it would just from the UMD.
Okay, the main pull of the whole game is the "Tag Team battle" where you can fight 2 on 2 or 2 on 1 with the COM. I enjoy the concept, some of the fights in the anime was actually 2 on 2 for the most part is it fun. I cannot see myself going back to another DBZ game and not looking for this feature. You have limited control over your AI partner, you get to give one of 3 commands, Normal, Focus or Split. Normal the AI will do what it wants for the most part it works, Focus command is where you and the AI will take on one of the enemy characters you are fighting thus making it easier for you. In the Split command, your AI partner focuses on his opponent while you do your thing.
The character roster is quite amazing for the psp game, I am pretty sure it is the biggest one among all the dragonball games on the go. Tho I wised it had SSJ4 goku, vegeta but you cannot get everything you want. There are 40 base characters but 3 different version of vegeta, 4 version of gohan and 3 of trunks. There are some characters who have different transformation of themselves so I think they count that towards the 70+ characters they said on the box.
The controls of the game is fairly simple compared to other fighting game. Triangle is a KI blast, Square is punching, X is dodging and circle is blocking while the Left shoulder button is used to charge up and the Right shoulder button is used to switch lock on the characters. The analog stick is used for movement of the characters, some special moves are a combination of L+ analog stick moving up or down and choosing triangle or square. The lock on is good but when the enemy decides to move at hyper speed around you then the camera goes crazy trying to keep up, and I got a bit dizzy as it happens quite a few times in one round.
You get a lot of options to use from in the main menu,
Dragon walker, which is the story line where you can unlock new characters to use in other modes. Some of the fights you will either face it yourself or have a partner with you, sometimes you choose who you want to fight with. Like the last game on the PS2 (DBZ:B3 not sure about the others but this is will only one that came to my mind) you can fly around the world map going to different location getting into fights or saving someone.
You can engage in random fighter with characters you see flying around searching for you. They implemented a new system where you can hold down the triangle button to drag people towards you instead of going to them, the longer you hold it down the wider the area. But the only problem with this when you get the enemy to come at you they do not join. For example you have 3 enemy character flying at you, when the first one come in contact with you the fight begins. After you win, you still have 2 other characters flying towards you kind of annoying but a minor one.
Again like other DBZ games, there is a mini game in the loading screen but for the first time I think it plays some role aside from just killing time while waiting for the fight to start. Here you control either goten or little goku not sure, running from either end of the screen trying to catch leaves and a tomato falling from a tree. There are 2 different leaves, one red worth 3 D points and one green worth 10 D points while the Tomato is worth a 100 D points. The points can be used to purchase abilities at the item shop to upgrade your fighter of your liking. You get three different slots so you can go anyway you like.
One way they sort of limit how much you can upgrade the character is by adding ability limit. This can be upgraded but you will have to spend 10000 D points to increase it by one, and I am guess the higher to increase the more points you will have to spend. Most characters ability limit is at 2, some at 3 and the only one starting at 4 is cell jr. All this can be other in the Customize option.
Then you have Free Battle, where you can choose your character and the enemies as well as the stage, standard stuff for most fighting games. Another interesting option is Battle Selection. There is two fighting options and a ranking system where you can check you ranking.
The first one is Battle 100, where you have six pages of different fights where you can use in any order you can. Each fight has challenges you can do in order to get S rank and more D points, the challenge are not a must to win the fight but adds another level to some looking for 100% the game. The next one is Survival, standard stuff but one interesting change which I like. After you win a fight, instead of throwing you back to a loading screen it jumps straight into the next fight by having the next opponents fly into the stage.
The Training mode, has a battle guide where you read about how to do the move you want to do and then there is a free training mode where you try to pull the moves on the com. And you have the Ad hoc multiplayer where you can from 2-4 other friends.
One last Note about the level of difficult, some battles are so easy which is kind of sad but then suddenly it switches to the other end of the rainbow which makes you want to throw the psp at a wall. Also they added in the senzu beans into the fights, so you always have 2 beans at all times. This means if your health falls below zero you will be "reborn" and then sent to the middle of the battlefield, some fights are kind of drawn out mostly because the enemy also have the beans with you so you could fight them 2-3 times. One thing happened to me, both me and my partner "died" and used one bean but I was knocked out again. Once that happened, I assumed the fight would be done because I was out but it kept going on. Since the AI is not that smart the fight was over pretty fast, but from that I think there might be hope to win a fight even tho you are out but think it will happen.
Overall this is a good game for DBZ fans to pick up and if you are looking for a mindless fun fighting game to play with you friends this is worth the buy. Also since it is on the PSP you dont need to grind out the story in order to unlock the characters, you can just go online and take a save game file with everything already unlocked for you. That being said, there are 24 characters unlocked and if they can transform that is also there to choose from the start of the game. Which is a good thing for people who just want to play free battle.
This is not part of the review:
The last thing I am going to talk about it not about the game but the rarity of finding the game in stores. I looked in Best Buy, Future Shop, EB games and smaller game stores I know and could not find it anywhere. I finally found it in one of the last places I think will have it, HMV. I bought the game unwilling, only because the game cost 44.99$ while I saw online it will be 39.99$. I hate buying games at HMV mostly because they tend to mark up games. (btw this was in Toronto Canada)