Dragonball Z: Ultimate Battle 22 for PlayStation 1

Note: This is a review of the US version of the game and not the Japanese. The US version wasn't added so this was the only way.

8 years ago Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Battle 22 was released for Playstation in Japan. It wasn't ever going to get released in America until Infogrames decided to make a quick buck and come out with it over here. The game is just a port of the Japanese version with nothing new added, so if you already have the import then don't bother getting this version expecting something new. UB22 is far from being great but it's pretty fun for a few hours.

Story

UB22 doesn't really have a story. It's just characters from the show fighting. The closest thing to a story is the Championship mode. Play through a tournament, win or lose, it doesn't make a difference. There's no ending or anything.

Gameplay

It's a simplistic game. The game play is lame and there isn't much for replay value. There is a few modes, a lot of characters and really nothing else.

For game play modes, you've got a 1P vs. COM, 1P vs. 2P, Championship, Build Up and Build Up Battle. In the 1P vs. COM and 1P vs. 2P you just pick a character and fight a round. Repeat that process over as many times as you want. The Championship mode is the World Martial Arts Tournament in the show. It can only be play if there is two controllers in the Playstation. The tournament is meant for 8 players as each control represents four characters. I find that pretty queer and I think it should be able to be played single player. You choose 8 characters to play for the 8 players and the AI randomly picks 8 characters to make a 16 person tournament. After the tournament, you just get sent back to the title screen with no ending or anything.

Finally there's the Build Up and Build Up Battle. In the Build Up you choose any one character. You then choose another character to fight. Each time you fight someone and win, you go up a level. Along with going up levels your attack, life bar and defense also increases. That's pretty cool but to bad it doesn't work in other modes and the leveling up is only for Build Up modes. It's easiest to fight the characters in order going by their levels. Each characters level is shown by their name so you can see how strong they'll be. Once you defeat a character they'll then become gray or camouflaged in the character selection screen to show that you beat them. The goal is to defeat everyone once. When you have done that you'll unlock a hidden character. Defeat that hidden character and go on the next Block. Defeat everyone again to earn another hidden character. Keep doing that until you unlock them all. It may take a couple of hours and it's not really worth it. The Build Up Battle is where you and your friend each use your own memory card to use your built up characters against each other. This sounds pretty cool but I've never tried it.

Ultimate Battle 22 has 22 characters to start off with plus 5 to unlock which comes to a total of 27 fighters, not bad. Available at the start is Goku, Gohan, Vegeta, Goten, Kid Trunks, Future Trunks, Gotenks, Supreme Kai, Fat Buu, Super Buu, Dabura, Perfect Cell, Frieza, Recoome, Android's 16 & 18, Piccolo, Krillin, Great Saiyaman, Tien, Zarbon and Captain Ginyu. You can unlock Master Roshi, Hercule Satan, Kid Goku, SSJ3 Goku and Vegeto from playing the build up mode. All the characters seem to be different from each other. They each have there own set of moves, although some characters share moves like Goku, Gohan, Vegeto, Master Roashi, Krillin, Goten and Cell with the Kamehameha Wave. Some characters seem to be a little stronger then others which adds some challenge to the game. By biggest complaint relating to characters was that the hidden ones can only be used in the build up mode and not in anything else.

The actual fighting is just mediocre. The game has 2-D characters and 3-D backgrounds. The goal is the same as any other fighter, beat each other up until one of you has no life left. Doing so if pretty easy to. All you have to do is trap your enemy in the corner and keep throwing kicks and punches at them and you should have the match won. So to say, the AI is pretty pathetic. I'm not sure if this will work on the hardest difficulty though, I've only tried easy, normal and difficult. You can do basic things like jumping, blocking, punching and kicking plus a dash like thing, levitate (fly or float) and each characters list of special moves. It just wouldn't be a DBZ game without levitating. Just press the triangle to go up in the air way above your enemy. You can throw energy balls and other special attacks down to your opponents until they knock you back down or fly up there to. Fighting in the air is the same as fighting on the ground, it's there to make things a little cooler. There is a few things that I didn't really like about the special moves. For one, all the energy balls look almost the same. Throwing a basic energy ball (by pressing the circle button, something every character can do) looks just like a small orange version of a fireball in Street Fighter. A Kamehameha Wave looks like a slightly bigger orange version of a fireball but in the show it's a big blue beam, not a ball. Every energy move I've seen so far has looked like that except for Fat Buu's special. Another thing was that the moves were also weird to do. It lists all the moves for each character in the book but they seem to be a done a little different. To make things a little less simplistic, you can't just keep dishing out energy balls and other attacks using energy. Just under your life bar is your energy bar. Each time you use an energy move it goes down, and pretty fast at that. You can recharge your energy just like in the show by holding square or x, it looks pretty cool to.

Another cool thing was the special blocking. I'm not sure how it's done but you surround your body in energy and it block energy attacks, it drains your energy bar fast though. The game play is also not that fast. DBZ has very fast fighting and I don't expect the game to play nearly as fast as they fight in the show but this could have been slightly faster. The only real fast things in the game is the combo attacks that certain characters can do. It's not combo like in the VS. series games but more like just rapid attacks with no counts of hits. An example of this is a really cool looking attack Vegeta does. I don't remember every step of it exactly but it's something like, he throws you in the air, brings you down, gets on you and throws a ton of energy balls in you face then does some other stuff.

Graphics

UB22 is an 8 year old game so the graphics are pretty much out dated. The character's animations suck. They look like they do in the show for the most part but have some messed up details. Super Buu moves around drunk and doesn't really look good at all and most of the kids have big heads. The backgrounds are pretty terrible. A lot of the ground is really pointy and full of pixels. There places from the show like the World Martial Arts Tournament arena and the palace in the sky. The game has pretty bad graphics but I put up with that because I don't care much about graphics.

Sound

Well, the music is average, nothing from the show. The sound effects are average as well. There just your basic hit sounds. All the characters have their Japanese voices since the game is the same thing as the Japanese version. For a Dragon Ball game, this isn't really good. Goku, Gohan and Goten's voices are all done by girls which make them sound like fags. The only real talking you hear is when they do there finishing attack. While it doesn't sound that great for some of the characters, other sound pretty cool. It sounds really cool when Trunks say "Burning Attack" which is one of his finishers.

Final Comments

While it's not even nearly perfect, Ultimate Battle 22 is a pretty fun fighting game.

Release: March 25th, 2003
Developer: Bandai
Console: Playstation
Genre: Fighting
1-2 Player(s)

Final Rating: 5.4/10