Hello. My name is Meemaw. I play videogames from time to time, but I don’t like many of them. Aside from Spider Solitaire, the only game I like is Dragon Ball Z: Sagas.
The story of the game follows Naruto as he tries to find the “One Piece” and become the next All Might. But if you die in the game, you die in real life! Really though, it’s the same storyline all of these mid-2000s Dragon Ball games run through. Your brother steals your shit kid and instead of thanking him, you kill him(?) and get your son(?) back. After that, you go on lots more adventures until you kill a big green bug. Voice actors are back because honestly, what else do they need to do? Dragon Ball feeds these people. If they ever made a Goku bean plushie, they’d still drag Sean Schemmel in to be recorded calling you gay.
Most games bore me. But not Dragon Ball. The rippling physique of these men keep me engaged even as my mind slowly leaves me. Dragon Ball Z Sagas is my favorite because it’s not too hard. To my knowledge, you only need two buttons to proceed in the game. Combat in Dragon Ball Z: Sagas consists of pressing the square button multiple times in a row until your PlayStation gives up on you ever getting your life together. The game even shows your button inputs on screen so you can really get into the meat of combos. Haha! Fuck You!
Every screen of this game is pretty much a locked room where you have to kill everything until everything is dead. Afterwards, you can leave to the next locked room. If you even try to get ahead of yourself like a little busy-body, that shrill bitch Bulma will chastise you until you turn around. Now, I don’t know about you, but I have enough women bossing me around in my life, thank you very much. Chatty things, talking about my sauce, how much breading I put in the meatballs. Vaffancullo. Let’s move on.
The bosses in Dragon Ball Z: Sagas are very resilient. They will not go down with even the most firm square button presses. These end up stretching into long, disastrously long battles where not much happens and you’re left to think. What could I be doing right now? How many more episodes do you think Judge Judy has left in her before she croaks? When’s the next Tyler Perry film coming out? Eventually, you’ll kill whatever you want to. But at a cost. Those brain cells aren’t coming back. They’ve had it with you.
The music in this title is par for the course in terms of how Bruce Faulconer-style music goes. So those of you who enjoy your butt-rock with a side of plagiarism, rejoice! It’s too bad it doesn’t fucking loop properly and that it’s in this game. The graphics are serviceable for the time but nothing really stands out. Model clipping and stupid-looking animations are abound, children. The sound design is what you would expect but its muted and muddied behind the music. Alliteration.
If there is one thing that Dragon Ball has, it’s a fanbase that has a hard time realizing everything from Super up is of a vastly lower quality than what came before. But there are also characters, it’s got those. Trouble is, every character acts the exact same in this game. Same energy blast, same square button combos. The only thing different between them are the voice lines but how much do you really care? You can’t even be Hercule in this game.
There are also collectibles in the game in the form of Z coins. I don’t know what they unlock but they’re there. These coins add meat and replayability to the game by forcing you search high and low for these little merda. And I mean high and low. They’re often floating higher than your player character can jump. “No worries,” you say “Dragon Ball boys can fly.” Well not really, they can only hover in this game.
In order to get up to the higher coins, you have to find a tall cliff, jump off of it, and then float on that horizontal plane over to the coins. As for the others, they’re under rocks. But not just any rocks, huge rocks. To get past these suckers, you must blow them up with a charged ki blast. But you can only throw three ki blasts at one time before you have to sit there and charge up power again. And these boulders are everywhere. So you’re doing this over and over, constantly charging and throwing blasts and climbing and jumping and it just never ends, there are always more coins, there’s always more to find hidden away and it just keeps going on and on.
Wait, I actually fucking hate this game.