PS4 Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot

Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot was released worldwide for the PS4, XBOX One and PC on January 17^th 2020, with a Switch release coming September 24th 2021.

It’s made by CyberConnect2 of near-countless Naruto games fame, so not a major departure from their usual affair, though this game’s use of flying characters is at least a little different… Maybe?

Gameplay:

The core of Kakarot is labelled as an “open world RPG”, but beyond increasing skills in a very limited skill tree via levelling up there isn’t a lot of RPG elements. There are a LOT of open world elements though, but I’ll get to those in second because the other key part of the game is the combat; which is not a turn-based thing, it’s not a basic 3D fighter like so many of CyberConnect2’s anime games, instead it’s pretty much just the Xenoverse series again, which in turn was very similar to the Raging Blast, which is turn was very similar to the Budokai Tenkaichi series. So a fresh company getting their hands on the license did not lead to a fresh take on Dragon Ball combat, but hey-ho. So you can move freely in a large 3D space, unlike most games however they never programmed for fighting on the ground so every fight begins with a cutscene talking on the floor and then cuts to everyone oddly hovering above where they were talking… very weird, especially since walking and running on the ground is present in the open world side of things!

Otherwise you have the standard health bar and Ki bar, punch combos, blocking, the old “vanishing attacks” where you can dodge and counter at the last second, dashing forward and up, the ability to fire small ki blasts, a couple of swappable super attacks and the ability to do greater damage once you fill up a special meter that charges between fights, plus a team attack if you’re lucky. You can also add very Xenoverse-like items to your characters to buff them up or heal them, the latter becoming so common that the idea of dying in a fight becomes all but impossible. What is really annoying is how badly they clearly realised they’d made the combat as they put in a system where A.I. opponents have an ability they frequently activate that just blocks all attacks and responds with an long-reaching strike that stuns you. It’s not something you can do, just the CPU and therefore clearly the only way they could think to stop you from just wailing on them instead of just… programming them to fight and block like you do? Basically it just makes you not want to get in close so you end up long-range beam spamming opponents…