It’s a fun story that is meant to be treated as light entertainment, more akin to Dragon Ball than the later series, but it means that the story feels somewhat inconsequential and lacks the grandiose moments that truly made Dragon Ball Z great.Īs you can imagine, any game featuring a massive inter-dimensional tournament is going to have a strong focus on combat, and that’s certainly true in Dragon Ball Fusions. The writing is lighthearted, staying away from the more serious tone that was sometimes evident in the anime and manga, focusing on humour rather than drama. What results is a story that is both nostalgic and fresh at the same time. This allows for a sense of familiarity in the world and narrative design, while also allowing for new characters to be added in and scenarios to be changed. This results in fighters from throughout all of time and the universe being sucked into portals and deposited into a new world that roughly follows the timeline and design of the story of Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball Super. Upon collecting the second Dragon Ball, you and your rival, Pinich, wish for the world’s greatest tournament ever.
This new fusion system is coupled with a story that allows fighters from every era of Dragon Ball to come together, giving you access to hundreds of characters to collect and fuse. I would have much preferred to have had my hands on this portion of the game earlier on. If you’re completing sub-quests and grinding to get new characters, this means you could be without the most compelling part of the game for 7+ hours. The only issue with it is how it’s gated off until you reach the Cell Games section of the game. The ability to pick any two characters for fusion results in some humorous character models and ties in well with the character collecting aspect of the game. This type of fusion allows the characters to stay fused permanently, however you’re able to reverse it whenever you want and split them again. Dragon Ball Fusions does away with this, introducing a new type of semi-permanent fusion that allows you pick a much wider variety of characters and fuse them together, but it’s not quite the ‘any two characters’ that was implied prior to release.īy spending some energy, which you gain from completing fights, and reaching a certain level you’re able to fuse the two characters together in EX Fusion. The dual requirements of matching power levels and perfect synchronisation means that few fighters can fuse together and it’s only seen infrequently. There are other, more permanent forms of fusion, but this is the most common example in the series.
The resulting fighter is more powerful than the two individual fighters and has the potential to turn the tide of any battle. If you’ve watched Dragon Ball Z in the past you would already be familiar with fusion, but for those that aren’t, two fighters can fuse together temporarily by perfectly matching their power levels and performing a special synchronised dance. Does the focus on wacky character fusions, a massive roster of characters covering every era of Dragon Ball and turn based positional combat create an engaging experience? Read on to find out. There’s been a six-year gap since we’ve seen a Dragon Ball game with the same sort of story driven experience and RPG-stylings, but Dragon Ball Fusions is finally here to fill the gap.
DRAGON BALL FUSIONS RECRUIT GUIDE SERIES
Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku for Gameboy Advance and Dragon Ball: Origins for the Nintendo DS traveled the world of the series and replicated all of the various moments of the anime that had captured my heart.
The series translated well into the fighting games that many know, like the Budokai series and the more recent Xenoverse games, but it was the handheld titles that really captured that sense of adventure that is inherent in Dragon Ball. The adventures of Goku and his friends as they persevered through all manner of catastrophes got me hook, line and sinker, and I’ve loved the franchise ever since. I’ve loved Dragon Ball, ever since high school, when I can remember getting up early to watch the morning cartoons on Cheez TV.