It’s been a while since I got to play a new DBZ game so now I’ve finally gotten to end that draught. It’s great that the Butoden series has finally reached America. DBZ has had many great series like Budokai and Tenkaichi so this just adds onto that list. The fact of the matter is, DBZ has a great track record with the video games. Battle of Z was a little disappointing and likewise with Ultimate Tenkaichi, but most of the games are all stars that didn’t just start out as amazing titles, but have withstood the test of time. This one is a portable incarnation so it may not have the same amount of depth as some of the other DBZ fighters, but certainly enough to keep you going for quite a while and the gameplay is solid.

There is a story mode in the game, which briefly covers the manga series. They cover it all in 10 battles so you can imagine that this is a heavily abridged version. It can be quite funny to go through if you pretend that you’ve never seen the show since you would be seeing a very different version of the events. There are also “What If” stories for many of the main characters like Goku and Vegeta. I use the quotation marks since they can barely considered What Ifs as you are mostly just going through the story mode from their points of view. A pretty big missed opportunity if you ask me. A fun What If was the final story that you unlocked after beating the others though, which shows it all from the villains point of view. We get to see Broly and Bardock with new origin stories to fit them into the canon universe and it’s pretty fun. The story doesn’t make a whole lot of sense though and most of the events have no real logic or rhythm to it, but these things happen.

The soundtrack is solid and there are quite a few good tunes to be found in the game. The action themes are memorable and there are a few good villain themes as well. It’s a very small soundtrack, but one that works quite well. The graphics are good as well and should remind you of the classic DBZ arcade games. It’s fun to see the characters standing tall, which makes the fighting gameplay more fun. It’s part of the appeal for the Street Fighter games. You like to have tall 2D fighters who aren’t minified so that you can really feel the combos. The opening cutscene that plays when you turn the game on is also really good and it’s always great when the DBZ games add this in for that extra impact. You can see some cool hypothetical battles this way.

As far as the character roster goes, there are 25 playable characters. You’ll be able to play as just about all of them in the story modes, but not all of them so that gives you an incentive to play some regular battles or enter the Adventure Mode. Adventure Mode greatly helps the replay value of the title since it’s quite long and should provide you with a bit of a challenge. There are around 75 support characters who will jump in to help you if things get rough. Naturally, these allies are extremely useful if you decide to increase the difficulty or if you want to play the game competitively. I never really used them and just focused on my standard combos, but that’s not technically the right way to go about this.

As for the core gameplay, think of it as your average 2D fighter. You have your normal combos and projectiles to mix things up. Each combo can be extended and you can also knock an opponent into the sky to start following up with some aerial attacks. The two dimensions are fun and having support characters naturally deepens the actual combat system. On easier difficulties, you can get by with just spamming the Y button over and over again (Which is what I did) but naturally that won’t work against stronger opponents. The gameplay is definitely solid and that’s certainly the most important part of the game.

As referenced earlier, there is definitely a lot of replay value to be found here. You can play through all of the stories and complete Adventure Mode. Doing all of the stories should take around 4 hours and I’m not sure how long Adventure Mode is. There are a variety of other modes to delve into and the fact that this is a fighting game also strengthens the replay value since it can be fun to just pop it in and start winning once in a while. If you have a friend who owns the game, then all the better!

I looked around and it seems like Japan has online play for this game. At the time, the U.S. version did not and I can’t tell if we ever got the mode. If we didn’t, that’s a little unfortunate, but certainly not a dealbreaker as I wasn’t really planning on doing online all that much anyway. If it does/did get patched in, that’ll still be a fun bonus though. Online play is the future and as long as it doesn’t come at the expense of local play, then it’s always worth it.

Overall, Dragon Ball Z Extreme Butoden is a solid fighting game and a nice way to continue the DBZ saga. It’s good to see the series alive and well as the franchise is getting its second wind with the new Dragon Ball Super anime and other merchandise that is now readily available. I look forward to getting some more Dragon Ball Z games eventually. I definitely recommend this title and any fighting game fan should definitely enjoy it.

Overall 8/10