DRAGON BALL Z: KAKAROT Review: Not Quite Super Saiyan

When Dragon Ball Z fans hear the name Kakarot instead of Goku, there is a sense of pride, strength and depth. His original birth name, Kakarot, invokes his family’s history of powerful Saiyans and shows how he lives up to that name while still embodying his friendly and simple nature as Goku. The reason why I bring this all up is because Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot does live up to the storytelling of the anime with fun and entertaining cutscenes, but doesn’t stand very well as a real video game experience.

Let’s talk about the story. It is really great to live through the main story lines, battles and events. Being a part of the battles, playing as various characters and also enjoying smaller story lines through side quests is very smart. It was nice to be able to take my time with the story (which I already knew) and explore the world around me. The actual cutscenes and story lines are very, very similar to the anime, which is both good and bad. In one way, it is a fun way to live a large amount of the show again through a video game, having to fight hard to win battles like our protagonists do. 

However, it also is fairly stale because most players have already seen Goku run across Snake Way and see Gohan fight Cell in the anime and through countless other Dragon Ball Z games before this one. The cutscenes also vary a lot in quality, with length and loading times making players wait for five seconds for a ten second scene. Then it loads to gameplay in which a player flies for ten seconds only to have another 20 second cutscene. These choppy scenes, accompanied by sometimes pretty bad graphics and revisited stories makes the cutscenes sometimes a chore instead of a treat.

Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is supposed to be and is marketed as an Action RPG. I would say that it fits the Action part fairly well in the fast paced and challenging gameplay. As for the RPG side, I found it to be fairly shallow. Yes, there are collectibles. Yes, there are progression systems. Yes, there are character relations that impact gameplay. Yes, there is item management, leveling and skill trees. And yes, there is an involved and progressing story. Even though all of these elements exist, I didn’t find them to be particularly well made or coexists very well. 

Let’s look at the skill tree section, players can obtain orbs throughout the open world and after accomplishing tasks and then buy a new skill or upgrade it for a certain number of the correct colored orb. That is great and fairly normal for games in general. But, the skills are locked behind your character’s level and leveling up or grinding for level was very obscure and difficult as there were not very many roaming enemies that were helpful in grinding, tasks like fishing didn’t increase experience and other things. Also, players often were forced to play as another character for a short period of time, cutting and limiting the progression to Goku himself. Then things like open-world controls being different than combat, cooking and fishing seemed like silly minigames to eat up time, and odd spikes in enemy difficulty just made the game feel like a fighting game with mandatory side quests to continue battling.

I wanted to enjoy this game a lot, but I knew where to put my expectations. I love Dragon Ball Z, the characters, the style, the story and the lore. But, I just couldn’t help but feel dragged down by the mediocrity of the RPG elements that dictated my ability to progress the story and game. That along with inconsistent cutscenes length, defeating an enemy to just be beat by them in a cutscene, texture quality dips and more made this experience sink below my already cautious expectations. I understand some people may really enjoy and appreciate playing through the story and be able to access the Dragon Ball Z universe more than ever before, but I wish it was a more complete and rich experience that honored the source material.