Pros: Completely free, the 2 music soundtracks are really catchy (presumably taken from the anime)
Cons: Grind based gameplay, pointless combat where NPCs win for you, weak story, average graphics
Gameplay: 4
Graphics: 5
Performance: 6
Overall: 5
Dragon Ball Z Online recently went into a closed beta and we got the chance to check it out, the browser based free to play MMO from AnimeGame is a traditional team building RPG where players must acquire their group of heroes, train them up, equip them and generally work towards completing content that grows more challenging as you progress.
We played the game for some hours, reaching level 25, and so our experience is a little more than just early game first look gameplay, but in all honesty our actual gameplay and the content we encountered was pretty much the same throughout and focused mostly on the PVE campaign (PVP only unlocked around level 24). Whilst there are undoubtedly end-game features we didn’t see them and both the website and forum are a desert wasteland when it comes to information about the game.
As mentioned the game is a fairly traditional Asian RPG, you get heroes (graded D, C, B, A and S) and get to put them into your team formation, equip them with gear that can be refined all of which go towards your “Battlepower” score and then you generally focus on clearing PVE stages or fighting in the Arena against other assembled teams in automated combat. As you can see by “traditional Asian RPG” we in fact mean “essentially the same as every other Asian RPG”; Dragon Ball Z Online is no different, there was nothing that stood out about the game, it was just the same as every other that we’d played with little else added and just put into a Dragon Ball Z skin.
This game, in our opinion, will appeal to two types of player; firstly those that like the mindless grind that these games generally bring, and those who like DBZ, as the PVE Campaign is really designed with a presumption that you know who most of these characters are and what they’re like in the anime. The biggest example of this was early in the PVE campaign where we had already picked up our second hero, one of the shows main female characters Bulma, and had then met some old dude called Master Roshi. After meeting this guy and learning he is some awesome trainer he then, out of the blue and with no context, gives us a quest to try and steal Bulma’s bikini bottoms. What the hell? Weirdly random. It was only after checking out some DBZ stuff online that, actually, this seems to be a running theme between Master Roshi (and others) and Bulma with them constantly sleazing after the female protagonist, but in the game it definitely comes across as just creepy and out of place. The backgrounds and entire history and relationships between many of the characters was forced into a couple of lines of quest dialogue upon meeting them, it just didn’t fit together well at all.
Continuing on with our sub-par PVE experience our gripes didn’t stop there. The flow of the campaign was extremely disjointed, mainly due to the fact that the campaign was broken down into linear stages that you complete one after the other in order; and different areas with their own story-arc unlock as you reach set level milestones. Instead of heading to a new area and completing the stages in order then coming back to the main “Novice Village” quest hub, after each stage/quest we would go back to the village to pick up the next quest and then head back to the world map to travel back to the area we were just in. For an MMO that’s not so bad (albeit a little excessive when it comes to the number of load screens between picking up a quest and fighting), but for the story element it made absolutely no sense due to the story from one stage carried on to the next stage as if you had been in the region all the time. This was best highlighted by being in a castle region and defeating a boss, leaving the castle to go back to the village, to pick up a quest that tasked us with… escaping from the castle… which meant going back to the castle region on the map and completing the stage to escape!
So story wise the PVE campaign was paper thin, but the combat was worse. Now we’re not a fan of automated combat anyway, but some RPGs manage to get a decent enough balance where it does feel like there’s some strategy and actual hands on team management needed. This was not the case with DBZO; every battle you were either definitely going to win, or definitely going to lose. We had our three key heroes that were part of our formation who we could upgrade their gear, manage their skills, choose their position in the formation; we had some control over them to try and defeat the content. However, every so often we’d be accompanied by an NPC in our team completely out of the blue, not mentioned in the quests, not even met, and simply not part of the story at all (we randomly had Piccolo join us who is one of the biggest badasses in the series). Every battle without a random NPC we’d just steamroll and typically beat the stage in one or two rounds, when these NPCs turned up in our group unannounced this only meant one thing: we can’t beat this stage without them. Literally. The enemy would destroy our three characters, often one shotting them, leaving just the NPC character and the opponent fighting them, essentially the AI fighting itself and us just watching with our strategy and management rendered completely pointless.
It is unfortunate but there are not really many saving graces about the game that we experienced. The quest hub is tiny (and pointless), the regions are the same backdrop typically fighting the same enemy over and over in different stages until a boss turns up, the story is weak, the graphics are mediocre and the music (which has no volume adjustment and can only be muted) has a grand total of two songs on constant loop; one for the quest hub and one for battle. When you head into these grind based MMOs it can be alleviated with some thoughtful features, some interesting story-arcs and decent visuals, new areas, something unique, but DBZO lacked all of that. If you like these types of games then there are better ones out there, if you like Dragon Ball Z then you might get a kick out of it.
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