Dragonball Z

Dragonball Z, the video game, was inspired by the wildly popular Japanese anime cartoon of the same name. The cartoon characters were featured in their own cartoon, which ran very much like a soap opera series, comic books, action figures and the like. The actual Dragonball Z game was a freeware, fan made creation, since this installment never was officially licensed or released to the market. It was put out in the late nineties and follows the Dragonball themes very well. There are dozens of variations of Dragonball Z games for virtually every format available, including PC versions that are only playable over the Internet.

Dragonball Z is a classic two-dimensional fighting game that features one of two characters going head to head with numerous other opponents. There are only two characters from which the user can choose, despite hundreds of them being featured in the actual animated series. The user can play as either Goku, or Krillin (which was not nearly as popular a character as Son Goku was.)
As mentioned, Dragonball Z is a fighting game, and it features typical manga warrior fighting, only not at the hardcore, gory level of Mortal Kombat or the Streetfighter series. Still, the colorful little warriors can jump, kick and punch. Both playable characters also have the ability to harness the power of air and create huge, cool blasts of air to knock out their opponents or help block their opponents’ attacks. The characters can also morph into heroic versions of themselves for special attacks.
Dragonball Z does, however, have some drawbacks. The most obvious one is the lack of playable characters. With a choice of two, the user is extremely limited, and the replay value is severely reduced. The game play itself is also choppy and not especially fluid, sometimes making accurate attacks difficult to achieve. The graphics are also very simplistic and pixilated, and the backgrounds are quite plain. Still, both the backgrounds and the characters feature very bright colors typical of Japanese anime, which helps defray this deficiency.
In short, Dragonball Z has some good, fun action-packed qualities that will appeal to many fans of fighting games. It also has several aspects that can certainly be considered set backs. The graphics are poor overall, with brief flashes of brilliance, and the game play is not very fluid. Still, it has merit due to the subject it used as inspiration, which is a very popular series. It is not a bad fighter, and should be considered for download.