
	Platform Xbox 360 Genre Fighting Publisher Namco Developer Spike ESRB T (Teen) Released November 2, 2010

- Captures Akira Toriyama’s style perfectly - Excellent voice work and music

- Overly complex control scheme

Review: Dragon Ball Raging Blast 2 (PS3) Review: Dragon Bal Origins 2 (DS) Action Figure Review: Berserker Clan Dragon 4 (McFarlane's Dragons)
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Dragon Ball Raging Blast 2

Score: 6.5 / 10

The Dragon Ball series, both in manga and in anime, has grown to such an overwhelming size that it's closer to a daytime soap opera with the number of relationships, deaths, resurrections, alien invasions, and destroyed planets. But with all that material, you have to figure that you've got quite a lot to work with in terms of what to put into a fighting game. Spike draws heavily from Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball GT to bring us the sequel to Raging Blast. As a tribute to all things Dragon Ball, the title works really well, even packaging in a remake of a previously released Dragon Ball movie. As a fighting game, however, it lacks technique.

One complaint that cannot be leveled against Raging Blast 2 is a lack of visual fidelity. Each of the 100 characters available for players looks like it just stepped off

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the animation table, losing none of the personality and style of Akira Toriyama’s original character designs. The backgrounds and playing fields are equally true to form, almost giving a sense that you’re controlling the characters in custom made cartoon episodes under your direction. While fidelity to the source material can’t be argued, the visual quality is slightly hampered by the 360’s graphics hardware. The

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character models, object models, and backgrounds don’t look quite as sharp as they could.

In the same vein, the sound carries the same strong fidelity to its source material as the visuals. It certainly sounds like they got the Funimation voice cast to come in and read for the game. The music, if not directly from the series, certainly feels inspired from it. Probably my only complaint is one that the anime shares: past a certain point, the grunts and the “charge ups” just completely turn you off. Thankfully, you’re not having to listen to them for a whole week before the characters do anything in the game.

Gameplay in Raging Blast 2 certainly captures the feel of the anime, and it’s not as good as that might sound. The rapid fire and over-the-top fighting action from the series is translated into the game but requires overly complicated button sequences delivered at a speed that requires a couple pounds of meth and a degree of precision better suited to cybernetic limbs to actually pull off anything more spectacular than a few different flurries and maybe one or two special attacks. The challenge level during the single player Story Mode segments where characters are facing off against some of their historical nemeses or friends ramps up very quickly, discouraging players from completing a single character’s storyline in a single pass.

Not all of the 100 characters are immediately unlockable, which is understandable, but with the brutal difficulty curve it approaches a level of effort that falls somewhere between Sisyphean and masochistic. It’s a game that seems better suited to be played with friends in Vs. Mode, where everybody can commiserate on the difficulty and nobody feels quite so bad for not pulling off the Spirit Bomb or Kamehameha Wave. Compared to games like Soul Calibur, Raging Blast 2 feels like it’s trying to equate complexity with depth and not succeeding very well.

Playing Raging Blast 2 reminded me of all the fun from the anime series, but it also reminded me of all the shortcomings of that series as well. It’s visually impressive but top heavy with needless complexity. If Spike decides to try a third entry in the series, they might be well served by taking a page from Funimation’s Dragon Ball Z Kai and pare down the complexity to try and make a more enjoyable fighting experience.

- Axel Cushing

(February 10, 2011)