OVERVIEW
You're likely wondering why a review for Dragon Ball Z Dokkan Battle is coming out over 5 years after its release? That's fair, and to be honest it's partly due to the game starting to peak out its potential. We also simply didn't exist as a site back when it released for Global/Japan and we plan on tackling some top mobile games for reviews. Lastly if this was actually done at release, the score would likely be a lot lower due to there just not being much content and a terrible assortment of acquirable characters to get. Just so you are aware of just how bad that really was, and yes we've been playing since then, we'll give you a very quick synopsis before we dive into the review of Dokkan Year 5 (and a half) Global Edition. Skip the next paragraph if you know its beginning history already.
HISTORY
To put it bluntly, there we no Fusion or Potara (Ex: Gogeta and Vegito) units in the game at release. None. So the best units right out of the gate until Agility Gotenks arrived (image on the right) to give his Ki + 2 to all units, were essentially whatever SSR unit you pulled to form a team. Now there were slight variations of team leaders but most being mono typed teams (teams of all one type, i.e. Agility, Physical). Really it came down to forming teams with a cap of about 90,000 HP and super attacks barely getting past 50,000 to 100K damage output. All this sounds like the stone age of Dokkan for any current or recent players as current teams dish out millions of damage. Essentially going from Dragon Ball power levels to second form Frieza saga and beyond. "Fighting Power: One Million??" for those Dragon Ball Z anime fans.
STORY & GAMEPLAY
With that out of the way, let's dive into Dokkan as a game itself. It gets tedious to dissect as there will be a continuing increase of content to this game until the company gives out on it, but after 5 years there's not really any surprises to this game. Release a new best unit ever, Bandai makes profit, have an event around it, awaken old units, World Tournament, repeat. We won't waste time talking about the so called "story" of Dokkan that made little sense and has been all but abandoned at this point. If you're a new player it's a great trove of free stones (in game currency) to collect in abundance but for seasoned players it becomes an empty section of the game until the recent link skills arrived and now it becomes a grind skill level pit.
Acquiring characters is like a gacha addiction you can't let go of (if you have the willpower to say no or be Free-to-Play, more power to you). The desperate need to get the next best thing likely factors into why this game is so huge. The fact that the Dragon Ball universe is so vastly loved across generations helps a lot too. If you replaced this exact game with any other IP not named Nintendo, it likely all ready hit it's expiration date. If you seriously take a back seat to what you can do in this game, it can be simplified down to get a new character, pop some bubbles of a certain color, and watch anime snippets of attack animations; the game. The variation on what we'll call levels outside of story mode are all mostly side quests to enhance specific characters in the game. In Dokkan these are labeled as "Challenge" and the "Growth" section is for getting supplies, money, or in game items to also enhance the characters.
So what's left after taking out character specific events and associated methods to enhance them? World Tournaments which allow you to indirectly compete against all other people playing the game without actually interacting with them for exclusive characters and more enhancement items. What else? A few events to test out your team building skills and time investment you've acquired throughout playing this game. With Bandai Namco abandoning the story mode and not bothering to revamp it, this game is just character grinder the game. We haven't mentioned the Japanese version of this game yet, which is in fact several months ahead in terms of content available for this game. Call the Japanese version the Beta essentially for what will arrive in future updates of this Global version. Even glossing over what the near future entails, is still more of the same. More characters, a few more similar events. At this stage in the game's life, would adding a true PVP component help this single player game? Some may say yes, and if that time comes (it likely will due to user requests), we will update the score accordingly. Until then we have to judge this game on what is there currently.
That last part was a bit of a drag to go over, and we say that actually as people who love this game and the Dragon Ball franchise as a whole. If this were any other game we'd tear it apart piece by piece as well, and we want this to be as honest and open to anyone familiar or curious about this game and everything in-between.
CONTROLS & PERFORMANCE
Lets discuss controls and overall performance of this game. After years of Bandai working on the game, it's safe to say it operates like a shiny smooth Krillin bald head. Weird to think about indeed. Not much to go over, game populates pages and screens fast (depending on your internet connection), game play itself does all bubble popping and animations fast. Slightly off topic is some of the animations can include very old characters with lower resolution artwork and the new character animations will be crisp HD fighting this blurry blob of an outdated character. That aside, it still operates great, some of the animations look like competing footage to the show and films but until they frame by frame animate every snap, it's a lot of trickery to look this nice. They easily could animate every frame, but that's not how game optimization works, so using the base necessity of frames to make it look nice is what will always be done.
AUDIO
This next part is very similar to what we just discussed, and that's a varying degree of quality that's leftover from when the game was first made till presently. Audio varies in the game. It has levels of varying greatness to downright silliness. Newer music and sound effects are easier on the ears, some things from the olden days have a bit of wear and tear, nothing too terrible but it can stick out a bit. I'd love if they were able to add some classic DBZ tunes to the game to make it really come alive. How great would "Rock the Dragon" be when you boot this game up? I'd be pumped, then immediately saddened as it means the game has a new best unit to summon for!
The world doesn't work in what if scenarios, but what could really revamp this game is to take a hint from another game performing very well, 7 Deadly Sins. Collaboration events in a nutshell. Dokkan has done this at least a couple times long ago with Arale and then One Piece (once a year with Heroes, but that's still a Dragon Ball IP). Sadly no characters from One Piece made it into the game, ironically characters from DBZ did get into the One Piece collab game counterpart. If Dokkan ever did this it could surge even more (or potentially ruin it as we know), but if done conservatively, say just adding one or two units from a well known IP, could really boost this game for the foreseeable future. Something we don't believe just adding multiplayer features will do. That'll fizzle out faster than Yamacha in a fight with Saibamen.
Example of typical gameplay
SUMMARY
With this game not really being anything but a gacha collect 'em all game (pushing over 9000 to get! Just kidding, we aren't quite to 1000 yet, pre-DBZ power levels here). There's really no substance, but an empty shell feeling to this game. If you don't have a character, either get it or not a huge reason to do the events. There are an excess of free characters to obtain, but they aren't the best in the game or likely the characters you care about getting. Unless you love Dragon Ball and all of its spin offs, there's no reason to play this game. If you have the faintest of interests in the franchise, you'll love seeing all the characters spanning all of the shows and movies including Dragon Ball Super and Dragon Ball GT.
SCORE
7.0 out of 10.0
▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▢▢▢
(Likely a 5.0 at time of release, improvements over time and additions to character roster improved the score)
+ Great assortment of characters and newer animations peel right out of the show/movies.
+ Nostalgic feel if you love anything remotely Dragon Ball related
○ Summoning characters can be exciting (if you don't care about this part it becomes a negative,
or if you have bad luck with RNG and never get what you want it can be frustrating, *this will
happen to you guaranteed at some point if you play long enough)
- Small percentage rates to obtain characters designed to get you to spend money to get them
- Variable quality of art and audio
- Limited and excessively repetitive assortment of things to do in the game
(although have been seeing improvements over last year to this)
Comments