Dragon Ball Z: Extreme Butoden Review

The Verdict

Mechanically, Extreme Butoden is a solid fighter, with moves that not only look DBZ but feel DBZ. It's still fast and frantic, even without being able to fly wherever you want.

However, the most disappointing thing is the tiny roster of characters. The previous DS game that was never released here, Ultimate Butoden, had over 50 playable characters. That's double the amount of Extreme. What happened there?

If you don't mind the low character count, and want a fun DBZ fighter for the handheld that hasn't gotten one here in the US yet, then Extreme Butoden is certainly worth checking out.

The Positives

• Year after year, Bandai tries to make a bigger and better Dragon Ball Z game, and it doesn't always work in their favor. For every good game like Burst Limit, we get a horrible one like Ultimate Tenkaichi. This year, however, Bandai scaled back. Gone are flashy cutscene animations for super attacks, flying around a 3D evnrionment and destroying the battlefield, and instead we get pure 1-on-1 2D battles with a tag-team mechanic. Trust me, that's a very good thing.

• The character sprites are gorgeous, both in how they look, and in motion. It makes sense considering Arc System Works were the people behind it. Those same people brought you games like BlazBlue, Guilty Gear and Persona 4: Arena.

• Performing moves in Extreme Butoden is closer to games like Tekken and Dead or Alive (though nowhere near as deep) instead of games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. No quarter circle right and punch here folks. Here, you'll have to master the art of timing your combos with light and heavy attack, as well as your beam attack.

• What's also great about this system is that every fighter has the same combos, so you won't really have to spend any time learning each character, as they all have the same move combos. While that may sound negative, the characters differentiate from one another by actually having different movesets. So while activating those moves is done the same way universally across every character, the move itself will be quite different. That also means the timing for every character is slightly different as well.

• While there aren't a whole lot of characters (see negatives), I am glad that the likes of some newer characters like Beerus, is in the game.

• Some support characters are pretty great. Normally you'd never expect to see Chi Chi or Yajirobe going up against the likes of, say, Frieza, but in Extreme Butoden, you can summon them for a one-off move.

• Adventure Mode is a good distraction once you complete the main story mode. This harks back to (very slightly) the second Budokai Tenkaichi game, where you moved across a game board and battled, except here, it's treated simply as a world map in order to get you from fight to fight.

The Negatives

• Why is there a story mode even present in this game? It tries to take you through all the arcs in the span of only 10 fights, and then unlocks individual character stories to play through, that do more or less the exact same thing. It's ridiculous.

• Extremely low character count. Why is only Android 18 playable? Why only Ginyu and not the whole force? Sure, the game has nearly 90 support characters that you can summon during battle, but that isn't the same.

• Unlocking some of the support characters through achieving an S-Rank in Adventure Mode is bonkers. There are so many factors that play into getting an S-Rank, that attaining it usually means you have to be completely flawless during a match, and pull off your super move.

• The super-moves have a long wait time until it reaches the opponent. This is most likely there for other players to retaliate with their super-move, but against an AI opponent, it creates an awkward pause in what would normally be an epic move.

• Extreme Butoden has a similar mechanic some fighting games use which allows you to power-up beyond your normal capabilities when you're low on health, which in turn allows you to pull of an even cooler Ultimate attack. Except, in other games, when you reach that state, you no longer have to power up in order to pull that attack off. Here, you're locked behind a 150% gauge. Only after you have low health, can you power that up to 200%. But trying to power up while already having low health seems counter-intuitive, since it leaves you open to attacks and thus open to defeat.

The Neutral

• Japanese-only VO is odd, to me at least. So far, every DBZ game released has had English VO. I don't mind it, it's just odd that this game got overlooked.

If you were computer-savvy by the mid-1990s, chances are you stumbled upon the wonderful world of Emulators. These programs were built to emulate consoles on your PC, which meant you could play games from systems like the NES, SNES, Gameboy and Genesis, directly from your computer. Of course, downloading these and playing them was illegal unless you owned the actual physical disc (like that stopped any of you though).

It was thanks to the SNES emulators that I was able to discover some pretty decent Dragon Ball Z games that we never got to play here in the US. Three of them in fact. Dragon Ball Z Super Butoden 1, 2 and 3 were all 2D fighters that had some impressive mechanics. And even though they were in 2D, they were leagues better than that garbage Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout game we got on the original PlayStation in 1997.

It's perhaps thanks to the original Super Butoden games where my fondness for Extreme Butoden on the 3DS stems from. After all, Dragon Ball Z: Extreme Butoden is essentially a sequel to those games, mechanically and aesthetically. But does its gameplay hold up?

Let's find out.

The Positives / The Negatives

The Verdict