Dragon Ball FighterZ has been making major waves in the fighting scene and for good reason. Arc System Works created a 3v3 fighter starring the cast of the Dragon Ball series that feels more like a spiritual successor to Marvel vs. Capcom 3 than Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite ended up being. While Arc Systems is known for creating technical and complex fighting game systems, this seems to be its most accessible fighter yet as people who aren’t too into fighters are having a blast. This is probably wise to make it accessible considering that Dragon Ball is what I consider to be one of the few “mainstream” animes out there. But one reason why the game has gotten so much attention is because of how dang good it looks. Building on what the developers created in the Guilty Gear Xrd series, Arc System Works created yet another beautiful fighter that looks almost identical to Dragon Ball Super. The graphics are polygonal, but you could easily mistake the look as 2D if you saw pictures and clips from a distance. Arc System Works put the time and effort to nail the look of the Dragon Ball franchise and masterfully transitioned a 2D anime into a 3D format.

As much as Dragon Ball FighterZ looks just like the anime, its actually not the first game to adopt an iconic animated series from 2D to 3D. I’m probably the only person on the planet to say this, but I’ll say it anyways, “You know what Dragon Ball FighterZ’s graphics remind me of? Those old Spongebob Squarepants PC games from 2001-2002!”

“Huh?” That’s probably what many of you are thinking right now after I typed that quote. To clarify, there were a couple of Spongebob video games that were exclusive to PC that attempted to transition the 2D look of Spongebob into a 3D, cel-shaded format, 17 years prior to Dragon Ball FighterZ mastering this art. The two games; Operation Krabby Patty and Employee of the Month, are actually completely different to each other and you probably never heard of them because they were games aimed towards kids ages 7-11 like me at the time. However, they both had these pre-rendered, cel-shaded cut scenes that tried present a Spongebob cartoon in 3D. While neat for its time, they…haven’t aged well. Actually some of the pre-rendered footage probably never held up anyways. But it tried to do something that Arc Systems is being praised for this generation, and that is changing a 2D source material into a polygonal look while maintaining the source material’s art style.

So as weird as this sounds, I’m going to evaluate Dragon Ball FighterZ as well as these two Spongebob PC games and see how well they mimic their franchises look in 3D.

Dragon Ball FighterZ:

Whatever I’ll type for Dragon Ball FigtherZ has basically been said already, but Arc Systems really killed it in essentially creating a 3D Dragon Ball anime. All the characters look incredibly identical to those of the show(s) and manga. Many of the animations the used match how the characters power up or attack like throwing fireballs in the Manga and anime. In fact, they even went as far as recreate notable moments from the different Dragon Ball Sagas. Admittedly I was never much of a Dragon Ball fan growing up and seeing footage of this game makes me want to watch all the different sagas. What would probably be best to show off this is to put the Jump Festa trailer for Dragon Ball FighterZ, which compiles a bunch of big moments from Dragon Ball and are animated in Arc System Works’ sweet, wonderful engine:

Perhaps the best thing about the graphics is that its not just the cut scenes that have these graphics. That’s just how the game looks period. In the 3v3 fighter, you can see your favorite Dragon Ball characters (in the roster) duke it out on what looks like a fantastic, hand drawn fighter at first. But the character models are in fact 3D and are fighting on a 2D plane. They even change camera angles to show off the fact that these models are 3 dimensional whenever somebody does a launch attack or a special move. The impressive graphics to this game is definitely one of the key reasons why more people are replaying FighterZ. They certainly want to have practice and find out which 3 characters are best for their team. However, they have to be delighted seeing these characters land their attacks and specials in all these awesome animations.

What’s also worth noting that there is a story mode that has all these cut scenes in between the fights. The cut scenes are similar to how they were done in Guilty Gear Xrd where it really was like watching a 3D anime. Some people may not like how choppy the animations may look in the cut scenes, but that’s also the point. Anime has always had this type of style in animation and one of the reasons that makes it stand out when compared to other forms of animation. Plus Dragon Ball fans are going to love the callbacks and jokes the characters give to one another during the story. From what I can tell, the tale itself has Android versions of the heroes and villains are trying to take over the world and the Z Fighters and bad guys are trying to stop the invasion. Also Goku has amnesia at first? What’s different between this and Guilty Gear is that you actually have some fights to play around with while GG just told a story with no gameplay. To showcase some of these story cut scenes, here’s a series of clips where Cell burns everybody with insults:

Bandi Namco knew exactly what they were doing when they got Arc Systems to make a new Dragon Ball game. B-N own the Dragon Ball video game license and have developers with strong fighting game pedigrees like Harada and Project Soul. However, they clearly saw what Arc System Works did with Guilty Gear and hired them to make an amazing looking Dragon Ball fighting game that looks almost just like the anime. ASW has mastered making gorgeous anime fighters that will fool you in thinking they’re 2D games, but are actually polygonal.

Spongebob Squarepants Operation Krabby Patty (OKP): The first of these Spongebob PC exclusives, it was released in 2001, published by THQ and developed by now defunct Florida based developer Awe Games. If you want a quick resume of what Awe Games is known for, they’ve made other Nickelodeon based video games and a series of Agatha Christie point and click adventure games. Operation Krabby Patty was a mini game collection where you had 5 different mini games that are based on activities that Spongebob does in the show. There’s a mini game based on Jellyfishing. There’s one on boating school. There’s even a mini game based on the “Hooks” episode, so the fan service is decent. Yes there are only 5 mini games, but there are two different episode plots similar to how a Spongebob episode is formatted that rearranges the order of those games to play. You also get to play as different characters based on the episode, but there aren’t really that different to one another. Plus because this game is aimed towards young kids, its dirt easy and even as I kid, I just played through it both episodes once or twice and didn’t touch it again.

But onto what we’re really talking about here and it’s the cut scenes. For 2001, AWE Games definitely tried what they could to literally recreate Spongebob in a cel-shaded format. However, its honestly indicated that this might have been rushed and also the base engine has aged like a freckled banana bought from the grocery store. Here’s all the scenes if you wish to see, well, some zealous smut let’s say:

So yeah, did you see Plankton get turned on by the developer’s logo? Funny right… Yeah okay that was a strange and lame joke to throw in before seeing the majority of cut scenes. So as you can tell, there were some super rough spots in OKP's footage. If the base engine wasn’t cringey enough, you had moments where Spongebob had a rather stoned look whenever he was suppose to sound excited. When he was saying his trademark “IIIIIIIIII’M READY!” catch phrase, he has those sleepy eyes when he should look exhilarated. Also in Squidward’s dream, Squidward is laughing at Patrick after he trips and falls, but his face doesn’t animate like its laughing but rather stays still. Squidward even unreasonably looks at the viewer with a scary dead look just for an excuse for him to collide with a pillar without him looking. I mean, 10 year old me was sort of into this at the time because I bought into the fact that this did look like the show, or at least at first. But even then I noticed the weird, faulty animations like Spongebob’s weed eyes and well, the unsettling animations of many of the characters. Also the in-game mini games don't look much like the cut scenes. You might get a few enemies or NPC’s that have the cel-shaded look, but the playable characters don’t maintain their pre-rendered versions in the core gameplay. Its not like Dragon Ball FighterZ where there’s a consistent look between the cinematics and the gameplay. Operation Krabby Patty’s in game character models were actually more accurate (and less scary) recreations of the Spongebob Cast and those pre-rendered graphics are only in the background of the levels.

I want to emphasis the fact that for a small, PC exclusive Spongebob game that got little to no marketing in 2001, I commend the developers for trying to recreate Spongebob into the 3D space, especially in ’01. However, the game’s cut scenes just look poor as certain animations don’t match the character’s emotions and it’s just haunting to watch now. And while its unfair to make this comparison to poor AWE Games’ work since they were a smaller studio, Final Fantasy 10 came out in 2001 as well. Now that was a game in that year that revolutionized how pre-rendered cut scenes should look.

Spongebob Sqaurepants: Employee of the Month:

THQ and AWE Games had another Spongebob PC exclusive that released a year after Operation Krabby Patty. It was Employee of the Month, which was a point and click adventure game set in the Spongebob universe. Story is Mr. Krabs gets two tickets to a theme park called Neptune’s Paradise and then decides to give them to Spongebob as a reward for being employee of the month at the Krusty Krab. Spongebob invites Patrick to join and Spongebob goes through all these point and click puzzles to get to Neptune’s Paradise. You know what, I remember this being an alright adventure game. Its not a genre defining experience like Grim Fandango nor as good as more comtemporary adventure games like Thimbleweed Park. However, for an adventure game set in the Spongebob cartoon, it was a lot better than it had any right being. Or at least I really enjoyed as a kid, but then again I was kid. It apparently got nominated for best adventure game of 2003 in Computer Gaming News, only to lose to a game called Uplink.

That said, the same cinematic engine used in OKP came back with a vengeance in Employee of the Month. Though I need to give credit where credit is due by saying there are major improvements in the cut scene animations when compared to the previous game. Spongebob is much more expressive in this instead of being a mostly sleepy eyed figure. In fact, many of the characters’ facial expressions match the dialogue they’re saying this time. Some of those expressions are, frightening, but they are still better than OKP. There’s also a few instances where some of the animations actually nail the look of specific characters. Its definitely no Dragon Ball FighterZ where the attention to detail is so near perfect that the almost look like the characters from the show, but they don’t look bad. I have to give props to AWE Games for actually taking the time to improve the quality of the animations in their pre rendered cinematics.

Even if I’m praising the developers for improving their cut scenes, they are still far from perfect and at times are still jarring to look at. There aren’t as many in cut scene glitches as OKP, but they are still present. There’s a particular scene in the game where Sandy Cheeks has a rocket ready for Spongebob and Patrick to get to Neptune’s Paradise. Not only does Spongebob have squinting eyes for no reason, but the camera turns to Patrick and he literally turns into Baraka from Mortal Kombat. Patrick’s even twitching his eye for a brief second. That scared me as a kid and makes me wonder, did AWE Games intentionally put that there to frighten the kids who were playing this or was that just a major oversight that they didn’t fix? Also that picture of Drunk Spongebob with Larry the Lobster that you saw earlier, that was from Employee of the Month. Here are the cut scenes for this game if you want to see (Go to 20:03 to see Baraka Patrick):

Admittedly, I feel a little bad about bashing AWE Games' 3D takes on the Spongebob cartoon. The reason why is because I can sense that with Employee of the Month, the developers actually cared a lot about their animations. I can’t find a link to it now, but I remember there were behind the scenes videos you could unlock while playing the game and saw how these pre-rendered or in game graphics were made. They even went as far as use the cut scene engine to recreate an early Spongebob Squarepants logo where all the characters are huddling around the show's title. I get the sense that the developers were actually pretty excited about their engine and the developers told themselves, “Wow this technology is great! We can create a Spongebob cartoon in 3D!” Sure it was ambitious for its time and their second game made big advances after how jarring the first game was. But ultimately these are only somewhat fascinating to go back to to see how this developer used the technology to recreate the cartoon and doesn't completely hold up as one of video game's greatest pre-rendered cutscenes. Especially compared to what Arc Systems is doing with their games currently.

Brief Comparison and Conclusion:

I mean, it’s a no brainer. Dragon Ball FighterZ is the best looking game of the 3 and also the one that best replicates its 2D source into 3D. Arc Systems clearly had the advantage in the first place since they were able to master this engine back in 2014 with GG Xrd, 12 years after THQ published Spongebob Sqaurepants Employee of the Month. Also its telling that Arc System Works certainly cared big time for FighterZ and had both the budget and the talent to make sure the attention of detail was spot on. The characters look great, they have sweet animations and the game might have some of the greatest production value to a licensed video game ever.

The old Spongebob PC games made by AWE Games should get some recognition for trying to do something that ASW is currently being praised for because OKP predates Dragon Ball FighterZ 17 years ago. However, while the animations look better in the second game, the overall engine just feels very arcane and nowhere near as polished and clean as ASW’s latest fighter. Plus think about those weird animations in the Spongebob games and how they might look in Dragon Ball. What if Vegeta looked all droopy eyed when he performs a Final Flash? That wouldn’t look right would it? That’s how I felt whenever Spongebob in OKP was excitingly shouting something despite having a sleepy-eyed look. But perhaps the folks who were at AWE Games have moved on and maybe got better with their graphics design in other games. Maybe they got better and soon got hired by Arc Systems to work on the graphic code for FighterZ. Kidding, but again the former AWE Games folks are hopefully on to better things.