3/5 ★ – LankyDragoon's review of DRAGON BALL Z: KAKAROT.

Dragon Ball Z Kakarot has some glaring issues, but overall I found myself immersed in the anime world I fell in love with almost two decades ago. The combat is fun but a little too simplistic, it’s similar to the Xenoverse games. For anyone that hasn’t played those entries in the Dragon Ball franchise, it’s a lot of mashing O/B to basic attack, using L1/LB combined with a face button to perform super attacks that use Ki. The game’s combat really shines when you near the end of the story and have nearly maxed out abilities and transformations at your disposal. Although, reaching this point can be taxing as there isn’t too much diversity in the types of enemies you’ll encounter in free roam for each Saga/Area. Side quests or “Sub Stories” are another portion of the game that can be taxing because they too don’t have enough diversity. They typically require you to “Go to this area and find this item” or “Fight this character” or a combination of the two objectives. Another downside is that in order to progress in the story you’ll need to be completing a healthy portion of these sub stories or the enemies will be too strong for you to defeat. The game states that if you don’t complete sub stories by a certain story beat that they’ll be locked off. Unless you want to mindlessly grind some Saibamen, Frieza force soldiers, Red Ribbon Robots or Babidi’s henchmen (I’ve found myself in the mood to do so once or twice but it gets old quick) to level up, make sure you complete sub stories. My biggest disappointment from this game is actually one of the game’s strongest features. There are beautifully rendered cutscenes of the most iconic moments in the Dragon Ball Z story, typically during the last section of each saga (I’m sure fans can guess these moments easily.) I would have absolutely loved to see the majority of the main story cutscenes rendered in this way instead of having in-game somewhat janky cutscenes where dialogue boxes pop up that don’t auto-advance so you have to hit X/A at the end of every sentence or grunt. This would’ve hit me with a heavy dose of nostalgia so much more than the few rendered cutscenes did. As someone who hasn’t watched the series since it was on Cartoon Network, this game did a great job of reminding me of all the story beats without using too many of the filler episodes. The environments were recreated well enough but I think they could’ve used more content within them instead of the developers relying on filling the empty space with collectible Z Orbs that you really don’t need to collect at the end of the day. There are other ways of obtaining enough orbs to level up abilities like getting good combat scores on enemy encounters, or using the dragon balls to get 10K of each kind. Obviously we won’t be getting a Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot 2 (we’ll likely see DBZ Super DLC for the season pass), which makes the flaws in this game more damaging. Overall, I wish that more time was spent by Cyber Connect and Bandai Namco to make a great polished DBZ single player RPG. | Pros | + Great Atmosphere + Fun Combat + Rendered cutscenes | Cons | - Empty environments - Repetitive gameplay - Lack of diversity in side quest objectives - In-game cutscenes don’t auto advance dialogue