Rating


Most of the time, the part of “Dragon Ball” lore that gets the most attention is “Dragon Ball Z,” but what many people don’t know, however, is what happened before “Z,” when the series hero, Goku, was young. “Dragon Ball: Revenge of King Piccolo” attempts to take players back through the majority of this story, sans the very beginning.

Unfortunately, this venture back to the series’ beginning is a complete dud that will make players want to go and watch the show more than play this game.

Despite the game’s title, the majority of the game’s story takes place during the “Red Ribbon” saga of the series, leading into and concluding with the “King Piccolo” saga.

In the Red Ribbon Saga, which is two-thirds of the entire game, players will spend the majority of their time going through a “2.5D” sidescrolling world as a young Goku.

In these segments, players run around into and out of the background as the camera follows while fighting off enemies and doing some platforming segments.

In these platforming segments, players tap the homing button to zoom into floating objects, sending Goku in different directions. The game’s touchy mechanics cause frustration in these segments, however, as the homing button either locks on to another object or nothing at all. By the time platforming segments finally evolve and become interesting, the game shifts gears entirely.

The last third of the game plays out like the sidescrolling levels’ boss battles. These boss battles take place in a small arena setting and use the game’s combat system which utilizes one button that branches off into different combos by pushing the thumbstick in different directions.

This combat system is rather intuitive, but because all the boss battles play out almost exactly the same way, players will quickly figure out the pattern that every boss shares and simply use the one combo that give the most hits, which gets boring.

This concept is also used in the game’s multiplayer battle mode, but the simplistic controls simply don’t work for a fighting game.

The story for the game is mostly told through either paragraphs of text or cut scenes that use still figures.

Only a few portions of the story are told through fully animated cut scenes, but these cut scenes are poorly animated with terrible lip syncing, when the lips even move at all.

With a poorly told story, mediocre platforming and fighting segments, “Dragon Ball: Revenge of King Piccolo” is a game even “Dragon Ball” fans would be better off skipping.

For a fun “Dragon Ball” sidescrolling game, players should check out “Dragon Ball: Advanced Adventure” for the Game Boy Advance rather than this shameless attempt at a quick-buck.

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