RETRO REBOOT | Dragonball GT Final Bout (Sony PlayStation)

In an episode of The Simpsons, Chief Wiggum once said "it's only going to get worse before it gets better". That could not be a more appropriate phrase to describe the 90's period of Dragonball fighting games. They were stiff, rocky, visibly silly, and unappealing. I suppose they had a charm to them, if you have a hankering for lousy games. They have nothing on Dragonball GT Final Bout.

While the SNES and the NES saw a tone of Dragonball games released, the PlayStation only saw three. Mostly because by the mid 90's, the franchise was past its point of popularity, and GT (Grand Tour) was smoldering tire fire of a production, it was rushed to an ending due to sagging ratings. Akira Toriyama was not a part of Dragonball GT's production, and it was a hideous show, plagued by terrible creative decisions. Though I feel it's worth pointing out Toriyama is not that great of a writer in the first place, occasionally forgetting details and plot points he established. May an editor or Toei forced him to make changes for the sake of marketability, but I'm getting off topic. GT Final Bout is the last Dragonball game released for the PlayStation, and the only game in the franchsie's entirety to be exclusively based on the GT series...yet the only GT exclusive character featured as a playable character is Gohan's daughter Pan. No Uub, no Rildo, no Super 17, and none of the Black Star Dragons. No loss, no gain, I say. But Uub deserved better.

Goodness, where to start? At least the opening animation is neat for the time. But around this time, if you lived in the United States and may have just discovered DBZ on syndication in 1997 and even during the first run on Cartoon Network, you'll play this game and end up being very confused; by this point, kids in North America would have had no idea what a Super Saiyan was, who Cell is, why Frieza is purple, where a Vegetto comes from, and why a third of the roster is Goku variants (a problem that still plagues Dragonball games as of this writing).

The character models are passable for 1997 standards, but considering by this point two Tekken games had existed on the same console and saw graphical enhancements with each entry.To a degree, they captured the character’s likeness on the models well enough, slightly putting it above the decals on Lego faces. At the very least, they nailed backgrounds down to perfection!

Since 99.6% of Dragonball fights take place in desolate wastelands, it probably wasn’t hard for Bandai to rally together a couple of fourth graders to slap together some barely garish watercolors to render into a “3D environment” You could argue that it looks good, but much like the show, it’s like sensory deprivation! There’s only a given amount of time that I can tolerate looking at the same shades of pee-colored yellow-green and blue looming the damn horizon before I’m holding hostages at gunpoint, begging for a fight scene to take place in the middle of a metropolis!

There’s only a given amount of time that I can tolerate looking at the same shades of pee-colored yellow-green and blue looming the damn horizon before I’m holding hostages at gunpoint, begging for a fight scene to take place in the middle of a metropolis! If you can make out that the other half of these backgrounds are lifted from any of the three series, you’ve done better than me. Room of Time and Space and dying Namek are easy to spot, but not familiar with rotting leaf grey dirt and what looks like knocked over stack of foam plates in the background/city.

I assume that since FUNimation decided to go out of their way and reprint the game with their logo on it, I that they would get the voice actors of the more modern run to reprise their roles and redub English voices! I collected some of the best examples of the amazing dub work done here for the pre-battle sequences.

If you’re familiar with the Ocean Group of Dragonball Z from Pioneer, who handled the first release of the series in the U.S., you can draw some parallels to some of the performances provided, like Piccolo sounds vaguely like Scott McNeill. Other notable names like Steven Blum and Lia Sargent provided voices!! Those are two of my VA heroes!! Trunks and Cell both sound really good and Mystic Gohan sounds like Kyle Hebert. The idiocy stem from the fact that the in-game voices remain in Japanese, so the Z Warriors can go from sounding like legitimate voice acting to scratchy recordings in the original dialect that sounds as if it was recorded in 1984.

The controls. They don’t work. Simple. These are some of the most busted, unresponsive controls I’ve ever played on a Playstation fighting game. This is like the video game equivalent of choreographing a fight between your G.I. Joes. The only difference is that you can make your toys do what you want them to. Press a button, and a half a second later, Gohan throws a punch. Leap behind your opponent and you can bake a ham in the time it takes for them to maneuver around and face each other.

Try and have one of DBZ’s patented midair clashes and squeeze the controller into a fine powder as you struggle to even get on the same plane just to HIT them! Take your pick from the many “special moves” that either don’t work at all or work too well. Even after thoroughly reading the manual and trying to digest this information to utilize it properly, I still cant get certain things to work!

More often than not, if you launch a Kamehameha, the CPU will COUNTER with a blast of his own. When this happens to you for the first time, you’re not sure what to do, so you mash buttons until his beam hits you and you look like a jackass. Well, when the word COUNTER appears, that’s an opening for you to try and retaliate with a blast of your own or defend. Even after practicing and getting the timing down, I can’t counter it. I just get hit, over and over. Even during the energy clash, they don’t tell you that rapidly hitting Triangle can return the fire. Well, unless your fingers are powered by nitrous oxide and you have the reflexes of a hummingbird, you’re gonna get blasted every time.

More often than not, if you launch a Kamehameha, the CPU will COUNTER with a blast of his own. When this happens to you for the first time, you’re not sure what to do, so you mash buttons until his beam hits you and you look like a jackass. Well, when the word COUNTER appears, that’s an opening for you to try and retaliate with a blast of your own or defend. Even after practicing and getting the timing down, I can’t counter it. I just get hit, over and over.

Even during the energy clash, they don’t tell you that rapidly hitting Triangle can return the fire. Well, unless your fingers are powered by nitrous oxide and you have the reflexes of a hummingbird, you’re gonna get blasted every time.

This game sucks something fierce. I would rather play War Gods or Pit Fighter.

It’s ugly as all hell, you would have an easier time getting a kite to fly in the direction you want it to go during a hurricane, the audio is downright terrible that someone should be legally arrested for it. None of the modes provide any kind of enjoyment on any conceivable level. This game is something that does nothing right. It might be a worse PlayStation fighter than Star Wars: Masters of the Teras Kasi. Fortunately, DBZ fans get much better games a generation later, but was the dark ages.

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