Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is the latest video game in the Dragon Ball franchise and much to the shock of just about everyone, it’s not only good, it actually adapts the story pretty damn well. Usually, Dragon Ball games will do the story an injustice, really adapting the bare minimum, but Kakarot goes above and beyond to present a fully fleshed out adaption of Dragon Ball Z.
If only as much work went into ensuring the game itself was up to snuff. Amidst a love letter to Dragon Ball that’s as gripping as it is engaging is a game littered with bugs, conceptual issues, and an endgame that’ll disappoint any RPG fan looking for something to do after defeating Majin Buu.
10 Difficulty Modes
Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot has a few sturdy boss fights that’ll really test what players are made of, but for the most part the game is pathetically easy. Even easier if you take the time to do any side quests at all. This is a game that can be comfortably beaten by fighting the mandatory fights and just the mandatory fights. That’s not great.
Does it make the game that much worse? Nah, not really, but it’s still disappointing. Some difficulty modes could have really helped smooth things over. Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is a game in desperate need of a hard mode. Hopefully that’s to come with either a patch or DLC.
9 Plenty Of Stability Patches
Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is an incredibly fun game, but wasn’t ready for launch– plain and simple. Not only is it shockingly buggy, with character models behaving erratically and often duplicating, but the load times on home consoles are also atrocious. The game takes its sweet time loading anything and everything, and it seriously sucks.
It kills the pace of the game completely during certain parts of the story. The Cell arc in particular has players entering and exiting the World Map constantly, which means sitting through two long load screens! A patch is on its way to fix the loading, but the game’s still a glitchy mess.
8 New Game +
Not all RPGs have New Game +, but all RPGs released after Chrono Trigger really should have New Game +. There’s just no excuse! It’s a system that keeps games perpetually alive, and a story like Dragon Ball is basically begging for New Game +. Imagine having an actual party for the fights against Vegeta and Freeza. Imagine if New Game + made them stronger!
Tragically, there’s really not much of anything to do after beating the Buu arc, but we’ll touch on that more later. Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is a great ride right until the very end, but it’s still a game that could have done with more content.
7 Button Mapping
Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is a game that inherits a lot of its action’s style and presentation from the Xenoverse games, which just makes it all the more jarring when the former does not play like the latter at all, featuring remapped buttons that’ll be sure to mess up anyone with any semblance of muscle memory for Xenoverse.
Some time with the controls will remedy any issues, but it’s notable that Kakarot does not allow players to rebind their controls. This is a game with fairly strange controls for flight as well, so not being able to button map can potentially make those early hours frustrating.
6 Young Gohan In Post-Game
Since the post-game rather notably brings Future Trunks back as a playable character after having been absent for the entire Buu arc, it’s not unreasonable to expect the post-game bring back younger versions of Gohan as playable characters. After all, Trunks’ time machine is there. Tragically, Adult Gohan is all you get to play as.
It makes sense why, but it’s still disappointing since Saiyan Arc/Freeza Arc and Cell Arc Gohan both play fairly differently from Adult Gohan. Hopefully that'll be remedied in a patch or DLC, because there’s no real sense in locking out two relatively unique gameplay styles.
5 A Meatier Post-Game
Speaking of post-game, outside of a few bonus bosses (who are honestly pretty light on both story and content,) all that’s really left to do is clean up side quests, level grind, and maybe goof around as Trunks.
It’s especially strange since you’d imagine a game with as much side content as Kakarot would ensure it had a healthy post-game, but it really seems the developers simply expected players to be content with everything that unlocks over the course of the game. To be fair, that is a lot of content, but post-game in an RPG is often something very special and Kakarot leaves much to be desired on that front.
4 The Script Is In Desperate Need Of An Edit
Dubisms aside, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is a pretty solid localization all around. That said, its script is a complete and utter disaster grammatically and experiencing the story would probably be a nightmare without the cast powering through typos, misplaced commas, a shockingly consistent lack of punctuation, and wrong cases of their/there/they’re and then/than.
What’s disappointing is that this is arguably Kakarot's biggest blemish. It’s so blatant that it’s hard to stomach how the script made it back any semblance of quality assurance. Whatever the reasons behind the shoddy script, hopefully a patch is worked on to salvage the text.
3 Better Subtitles For The Japanese Audio Track
Consider this part 2 of “Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot’s Script Was Not Ready For Release.” Seriously, it seems like minimal effort was put into making sure the text was actually up to any standard of quality for launch. Not everything the characters say is subbed on-screen, and the nature of dialogue in Kakarot means that a lot gets lost during gameplay.
This really isn’t a friendly game for any fans who prefer the Japanese voice cast (at least not during explorative gameplay.) Anyone who has trouble reading while playing will find themselves sorely disappointed with the fact that battles are often home to tons of story and character relevant dialogue.
2 Some Incentive Not To Avoid Random Encounters
When it comes down to it, there’s no real reason to engage in random encounters and fight overworld enemies. Even if you really love the core combat, these battles aren’t that fun, they aren’t that engaging, and they more often than not just grind your progress to a halt. Worse yet, their drops usually aren’t worth the time it takes to trigger the fight, kill them, and trigger out.
This sort of goes hand in hand with Kakarot’s inherent loading issues. Encounters with the average slow the game down and not in a way that’s either meaningful of engaging. If enemies encounters are going to be anything but irritating, their drops either need to be buffed or they just need to be less obtrusive altogether.
1 A Better Ending
Dragon Ball Z’s ending isn’t exactly popular, but it’s an ending that just makes sense. Dragon Ball was never this grand story with epic endings. It was always a story about Son Goku, his life, and the martial arts that defined him. It’s a story about bettering yourself, striving for more, and understanding there will always be someone better. That’s the whole point of Uub as a character.
For Kakarot to end right after the fight with Majin Buu is frankly disappointing in a game that otherwise adapted every single major beat from the story. The game feels incomplete because it ends partway through the last story arc. The series’ themes aren’t fully resolved. Spitballing here, this was likely done so Battle of Gods could be DLC– which would admittedly serve as a nice alternative ending.
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