Dragon Ball Z: Sagas Review

Other than the Budokai games which are pretty good, pretty much every game based on the DBZ universe has been an embarrassment and DBZ: Sagas is right there with the worst of them. Part of it has to do with the weakness of the series itself and the reluctance of its creators and fans to change and part of it has to do with developers getting lazy and hoping to sell a game based on the license rather than actual content. Sagas fails at just about everything and isn’t worth your time or money.

Gameplay

Dragon Ball Z: Sagas follows the DBZ storyline from the Saiyan saga through Cell Games. The hook behind the game is that you can now play as your favorite characters from the series and take them through large 3D worlds while still beating up the bad guys in traditional DBZ style. It combines adventure game-style exploration with fighting game-style combat to give players a new perspective on the DBZ universe. It sounds like a good idea, but the execution here is pretty much horrible.

The most important aspect of any game with a large 3D world is the camera. If you can’t see what you’re doing, you aren’t going to have very much fun, right? In Sagas, the camera gives you a fairly limited view of the world and you also don’t have any manual control over it. This means that enemies can and will attack you from far offscreen and you will miss a ton of important items simply because you never saw them.

The other huge, game breaking problem with Sagas is that the gameplay suffers from being too simple and repetitive and the controls can only be described as clunky at best. Combat in Sagas is extremely simple as you have a punch, kick, and energy button and different combinations of these create combos. You can buy new moves from time to time, but all these do is add an extra punch or kick to existing combos so you see the same stuff over and over again. Button mashing is the name of the game here and after the first level or so the combat becomes mind numbingly boring. The game loves to throw tons of enemies at you at once and the fighting engine can’t keep up. Sure, you can take out the baddies in front of you but the three behind you and beside you are beating you senseless and there isn’t anything you can do about it. Enemies can also launch projectiles at you but blocking is practically worthless and you aren’t fast enough to actually dodge their shots, so you almost always wind up getting hit. You spend a lot of time getting your butt kicked in Sagas and that isn’t all that fun.

Graphics and Sound

Graphically, DBZ: Sagas is a complete mess. The characters are detailed enough that you’ll recognize them but they are by no means good looking. The environments are incredibly simple and the same objects (such as the same car or tree or bench) will be repeated multiple times in a level. The texture maps in the environment are also incredibly low-which gives the game a washed out and blurry look. A friend of mine saw Sagas in action and swore it was an N64 game. That is definitely not how an Xbox game should look.

The sound isn’t much better. The voice actors from the series lend their talents once again and they sound great, but the sound effects and music leave a lot to be desired.

Simply put, this is a horrible looking and sounding game.

Bottom Line

Dragon Ball Z: Sagas is the first DBZ game to appear on the Xbox so it is a shame that it is so poorly put together. The gameplay is frustrating and repetitive and clunky and the graphics look like something from the 32/64 bit era rather than what we should be expecting at this point in the Xbox’s life cycle. The developers flat out dropped the ball with this one. Budokai 3 on the PS2 was a labor of love from people who really love DBZ and wanted to give fans the best game possible. Sagas, on the other hand, reeks of quick cash in and it was made by people that apparently don’t have any idea what made the DBZ series popular in the first place. Rent it if you must, but even if you are a huge DBZ fan there isn’t very much to like in Sagas. Whatever you do, please don’t reward mediocrity by buying it.