DBZ (Working Title)

Intro

I'll admit writing a substantial review for this project is going to be a bit of a challenge in my opinion. This is because the demo instantly kicks things off by throwing the player into the deep end with a difficult fight against Frieza. In fact, I found this battle so difficult I gave up on it after a couple of failed attempts on both normal and easy difficulty. Though I'll admit that probably wouldn't have been enough to stop me on it's own. After all, I've subjected myself to some pretty frustrating games with really luck dependent battles where your just hoping you'll stun your enemies with a leg sweep. The problem here is the combat system is also highly reliant on the player mastering a timing mini-game in order to deal out basic attack damage. A decision that was probably inspired by games like "Legend of Dragoon", "Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood", and "Elite Beat Agents". The problem here is that your basic attack combo will instantly fail if your first button press is to early or too late. As a result you can find yourself botching entire rounds of combat in the battle against Frieza if your not very good at such mini-games and I tend to be pretty bad at such games. As a result I found the first battle in the demo impossible to complete.

Story

The demo may contain a story, but if it does it pops up after defeating Frieza. At least I have to assume that's the case since we don't even get a text crawl before the game tosses us into a fight with a powerful enemy that causes a game over if we lose. As such the demo effectively doesn't have a story as far as I'm concerned since I found it impossible to get past Frieza.

Gameplay

On the gameplay side of things this project sucks in my opinion. After all, a game employing a system like the one this has should really ease the player into things with a tutorial fight instead of just chucking the player into a boss fight and seeing if they'll sink or swim. To make matters worse the game includes items and summons the player can use, but doesn't explain what these things do upon being activated. So until you try a hamburger or tuna you won't know how much health it restores. Nor would you know that summoning Shenron heals the player and fully restores their ki while summoning Porunga drops a bunch of meteors on your opponent. And while the game does allow Goku to perform special moves like Spirit Bomb and the legendary Kamehameha. These moves are still trapped within the confines of mini-games since you have to mash the enter key as fast as you can in order to perform these moves at their full potential.

And while I imagine some would argue I'm being unfair towards this game because it has quick time events. I'd counter that very few people find quick time events enjoyable in my experience. They just tend to add random button mashing into stuff that should just boil down to being a simple cut scene.

Graphics

The game appears to use entirely custom assets though some of the animation sequences of the characters make me think the developer looked online for short sprite animations like the one shown below.



After all, I'm pretty sure I saw some of the stuff in this game on the Internet back in the day. Though I'd be hard pressed to say where exactly considering were talking about events that may have taken place well over a decade ago.

Sound

Sadly the music in this game tends to get drowned out by the voice clips used during the fight. So that might need a little more adjusting. Though I suppose that's still better than the total lack of music on the game's title screen which is comprised of a dark box with a white outline on top of a completely black screen. Though I'll admit I'm not entirely sure the voice clips lifted from the show and other sources is even worth including. After all, a lot of the commentary we get from Frieza just tends to boil down to "Just Die Monkey!". And the inclusion of meme voice clips where a character pops up just to say "Toasty!" gets old pretty quickly as well.

Conclusion

Though I suppose at the end of the day "DBZ (Working Title)" is just another RPG Maker XP project that has been abandoned over the years. A fate that is pretty common with fan games in my experience since the people making them rarely know what their getting into. Though I'll admit the demo for this project is especially annoying in my opinion. So much so that I wouldn't even recommend spending time on the demo. After all, who wants to spend their time fighting a boss that appears to be unkillable. After all, my last fight against Frieza lasted for over nine minutes.