The frame rate holds up well the majority of the time and never impacts gameplay. Kakarot makes the leap onto the Switch with a solid port. However outside of those moments there’s a heap of scenes where it feels like a far cry from recapturing the look of the series as two static characters have a chat. The action-packed memorable scenes from the series can look so good, it still feels exciting. After a few games you’d hope it isn’t even a concern any more. The visuals manage to capture the look of the series in cel-shaded 3D. Kakarot has a bad habit of throwing all of these different systems at you early on and the game doesn’t need most of them. I had written up a whole thing about the community board and soul emblem mechanics, but not only is it hard to explain, you could play the whole game without even touching that stuff. It feels unnecessary giving you another hoop to jump through for these extra moves. It feels quite arbitrary, given other moves are unlocked by progressing the story or become unlockable through the skill tree. It’s essentially fighting clones of Z Fighters, most often more than one at once. You’ll find training spots on the maps where you can learn new or upgraded attacks by winning fights. In the power awakens DLC there’s also an item which helps with an exp boost, the game will warn you that you might unbalance the game doing so though. It turns out as long as you can dodge and get out a heap of super attacks, the game levels you up enough to keep the game moving. Initially I took my time to grind out fights so I wouldn’t be left in the big fights underleveled. Although once you get familiar with the block and dodge, brute force can still get you surprisingly far. Once you start getting to the Vegeta and Nappa fights you’ll be schooled on what happens if you just rely on brute force. ![]() Mashing out combos of physical and energy attacks only got me so far, the block and dodge are vital. As you move through the story the Z Fighters' powers grow and evolve, and it introduces more to learn. I had a better time getting my head around the fighting mechanics in Kakarot over the fighting in Xenoverse. There are even more characters when you count support characters, they aren’t playable but will fight with you when the story allows it. Although having Goku out of the way does mean you get time with other characters like Gohan, Vegeta and Piccolo, who all provide their own moves. Don’t expect to be playing as Goku throughout the game, even the moments you figured might be a good chance to have more of him in the game are just skipped over. The series often keeps him out of the way until the big fights, and then once he’s had his moment they need to get him out of action. It’s something I noticed when I watched through the whole series a few years ago, Goku is frequently out of action. One thing Kakarot draws attention to is the lack of the titular character. Especially when the story is very selective of what made it into the game. Given how many filler episodes there were in the unedited original you’d think they’d have plenty to work with. Unless you enjoy flying around open worlds and collecting orbs, there isn’t much between the story quests. While some of the ‘filler’ episodes for DBZ were fun asides from the main arcs, the filler between the story missions has none of that. Some collectibles around the world help fill in what happened, if you don’t look it up online straight away.īetween the story beats of each arc which take the form of fights, there are side quests that usually have you collecting something or fighting generic enemies. Everything is here and I was surprised with the number of faces and references to the original Dragon Ball series. ![]() When the game was first announced I was worried they would be just focusing on a few of the sagas, and we’d be spending years just waiting to play through the whole DBZ series. It even goes beyond that and into the Dragon ball movies that came before DB Super (and subsequently made into DB Super arcs). ![]() Starting from the very beginning and going right up to the end, with the newly added ‘A New Power Awakens’ content. Kakarot is a fairly straightforward retelling of the Dragon Ball Z story. Does it rock the dragon, or does it deserve a place in the home for infinite losers? Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot (+ A New Power Awakens Set) takes us back to the beginning, to live out the series with an open-world spin. Although that never stopped many games retelling the DBZ saga, more recently the Xenoverse games which provide ‘what if’ scenarios. It’s a series that truly made it as a mainstream franchise, which only got a proper continuation in more recent years. It’s hard to imagine here in Australia it only started airing in 2000, whereas in Japan it was a decade earlier. With the amount of Dragon Ball Z or DBZ adjacent games you’d think that the anime series was still recent.
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