Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Z Review

Dragon Ball is one of those properties that's had its ups and downs when it comes to game adaptations. And when I say downs, I'm talking about pretty incredible lows: bottom-of-the-barrel material like Ultimate Battle 22 and Final Bout that frequently turns up on "worst games ever" lists. But it's had some highlights, too: The Budokai series made a lot of fans happy, hitting on a formula that satisfied what buyers crave from an anime-flavored fighter: a comprehensive cast, true-to-the-source visuals, and fighting that made you feel like a hyper-powered Super Saiyan.
Sadly, Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Z is not Budokai, instead following in the underwhelming footsteps of more recent DBZ efforts like DBZ Kinect. It's a confused, overly chaotic mission-based action game that tries to recreate the team-based camaraderie oft seen in its source material, but more often than not falls flat on its face.

Battle of Z offers three gameplay modes: a single-player, mission-based story mode that follows the various story arcs seen in the anime/manga series, a co-op multiplayer mode, and a versus mode. The multiplayer modes become available after playing a short ways into the single-player mode, but you'll probably want to play through a good amount of single-player to unlock characters, items, and status-augmenting cards you can equip on your Z fighters before going online. I say "going online" because there is no local multiplayer available: if you want to play with friends, you must play online.
You'll jump into single-player mode first--since you don't really have much choice. Once you navigate through confusingly-designed menus and get into the actual game, you immediately notice that while the character models themselves look fantastic, the environments are sparse and dull. To be fair, the anime wasn't exactly known for its lushly illustrated backdrops, but the fighting arenas in Battle of Z rarely go past the likes of "craggy, rock-laden environment" on the inspiration scale. You'll also likely struggle with the controls, which map everything to buttons that don't really make a lot of sense (such as ascending and descending via the face buttons), and have you executing special skills with further badly-thought-out button combinations.
Once you achieve some measure of competency with the controls, however, you start to see the way combat flows in the game. You and a posse of pals (either human or AI-controlled) zip around arenas pummeling waves of foes with your various superpowered attacks until you've finished them all off. Cooperation amongst your team is key: players can give and share energy and revive fallen teammates, as well as coordinate to execute high-damage team attacks like the meteor chain, which ping-pongs an opponent between fighters. Characters fall into four types--melee, support, ki blast, and interference--which helps determine both the effects and the effectiveness of their individual skills. Individual characters can also receive bonuses and special abilities through equipped cards and items, which can be either won during missions or purchased with points earned throughout the game.

The team-based focus is an interesting idea, but it just feels messy in practice, mainly because Battle of Z's combat feels unfocused on many levels. You have a decent arsenal of attacks at your disposal, but for most characters, only a few of these skills are actually effective in dealing damage to foes--the rest exist solely to help you regain meter to execute the aforementioned effective strikes. It leads to a frustrating cycle in which you try to land basic hits on an enemy to replenish SP energy--which can be quite difficult on some of the bosses--in order to actually perform the attacks needed to cause significant damage, all while your AI teammates seem to have no idea what they're actually trying to accomplish. Sometimes even knowing what you're trying to accomplish is hard enough--the camera can be dizzying, target lock-ons drop or fall behind objects for no good reason, and oftentimes there's just so many ki strikes and special attacks and characters flying in from offscreen that it's difficult to get a handle on just what the heck is actually happening.
Ultimately, every moment in Battle of Z feels is a struggle--not to overcome challenges, but simply to enjoy the game. After you wrestle with the controls and menus, you're faced with stage timers and tedious encounters in which you deal piddling amounts of damage with each attack, all the while battling a targeting system that actively hates you, and AI teammates dead set on not helping you when it matters most. Dragonball Z is all about straining, training, and eventually overcoming unfathomably powerful foes, but this is not so much an entertaining depiction of developing your latent talents as much as it is a simulation of a year's intense training in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber.

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Dark Souls II

Dark Souls II asks this question of you at every turn, encouraging you to press onward in spite of imminent death. And with each death, you lose a little of your humanity and become more hollow. Your maximum health slightly diminishes each time as well, eventually sinking to 50 percent of its full value, and yet as each sliver of humanity is sliced away, you heed the call to move onward. Eventually, you overcome the obstacle that stood between you and victory--that quartet of gargoyles swarming you on a rooftop, that arachnoid demon plunging poisonous pincers into your flesh, that disgusting mound of meat that defies description. You have triumphed! But your gain does not come without sacrifice. You have sworn, you have gasped, and you have sweated. You have forfeited your own humanity so you might collect the souls of the damned.
Like Dark Souls and Demon's Souls before it, Dark Souls II is not just a fantasy role-playing adventure, but a cloud that hangs heavy over your head whenever you so much as think about it. These modern classics developed by From Software have rightfully earned a reputation for being brutally difficult, but their beauty is derived not solely from difficulty, but also from dread. Dark Souls II is not a survival horror game in the normal sense, but few games can make you this afraid to peer around the corner, while simultaneously curious as to what awaits you there. Death is so very beautiful in this game, for it comes at the hands of amazing beasts and warmongers: hulking armored knights, shimmering otherworldly invaders, and tendrils that rise out of black pools of poison. Sure, each death punctures your heart, but one of Dark Souls II's many gruesome pleasures is discovering new ways to die.
The eerie blackness is front and center as you start up the game and enter the mysterious abode in front of you. Three old crones await you inside and ask you to customize your character and choose a class before venturing into the unknown. Like most of Dark Souls II's characters, these women offer vague advice and refer to events and concepts without filling in the details. The anxiety mounts as you weave in and out of the nearby caverns that fill you in on the basics of movement and combat. This area may teach you the fundamentals, but it also raises a number of questions. What are those odd voices you hear when you stand near the bird's nest that rests on a narrow ledge? What is the significance of the flame sconces scattered about that you are meant to set alight? How do you survive encounters with the monstrous ogres on the beach below that squish you like a measly bug when you draw near?
Welcome to Drangleic, a world that is not quick to whisper its secrets to you, in a game that trusts you to find the answers for yourself.

This introduction is not as soul crushing as the original Dark Souls' opening, but that's just fine, for Dark Souls II offers you an early taste of hope, a feeling that was quite rare in its predecessors. That hope arrives by way of Majula, a gorgeous oasis that's as close to a home as you will find in the game. My first glimpse of Majula was a revelation. As I emerged from the nearby shadows, the glowing sun blinded me, and I stood in awe of the world opening up before me. Whenever the bleakness of Drangleic at large overwhelmed me, I was glad to return to this hub for an emotional refresh.
Majula is more akin to Demon's Souls' Nexus than to Dark Souls' Firelink Shrine. It is your central hub of operations, and while it's mostly devoid of life when you first come upon it, it slowly fills out with the vendors you meet upon your travels, many of whom set up shop there. Your most important contact there, however, is the cloaked woman who allows you to level up in exchange for souls, the game's currency. But even Majula is not immune to mystery. There's an impossibly deep hole in the ground here, one that spells certain death if you fall into it. (Don't let it fool you; the boards that crisscross this passage may look high enough to provide a safe landing, but you will not survive that fall.) What's down there? Surely something valuable must lurk down there. Or something horrifying. You eventually make your way down, but Dark Souls II doesn't tell you when or how that may happen.

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Yawhg

The Yawhg isn't really about the Yawhg, as it turns out. Though the titular calamity is destined to ravage your medieval village in a scant six weeks, it's not half as important as the way that you spend your remaining time. And who could find the hours to make doomsday preparations anyway, when there are demons to be slain, magical potions to be imbibed, and artless lute players in need of some comeuppance?
The role-playing game by Damian Sommer and Emily Carroll confines itself to familiar grounds: a rowdy tavern, a gladiatorial arena, enchanted forests--eight locations in all, brought to life by a few whimsical drawings. Each locale houses two possible activities, and each activity occupies a week of your remaining six. At the arena, for example, you might while away the hours with blood sport or spend them in the grandstand betting on the matches. These initial decisions are a formality, conferring the expected benefits--some improved strength for the former, a bit of coin for the latter. But at week's end, there's always a further choice to be made, this one less rote than the first. Perhaps a bomb has been set in the palace, or you happen upon a gathering of magical talking rats. The Yawhg's four playable characters are tabula rasa, molded or warped by these decisions.

It takes a village to raise them. There's a communal quality to The Yawhg, not unlike a board game when you get down to brass tacks. Two characters must be fielded at minimum, the tacit implication being that the game is best experienced with a few local friends. The unnamed characters you can choose from are identical in every quality save physical appearance and coloration of attire; it's easy to imagine friends squabbling over them like Monopoly players arguing who gets to be the dog (spoiler alert: I do). The board game similarities only get more prominent as the action unfolds. You move your characters' tokens about their cartoon village, settling upon a fantasy trope of choice and seeing where the cards fall. A breezy sort of strategy takes shape for players keen on maxing out their abilities, who can play with an eye to the simple logistics of the stat bonus handouts and angle for the "best" ending. For everyone else, there's always the tavern.

There's a curiously inert quality to actions taken in The Yawhg, even a week spent binge drinking and bar fighting. It's owed in large part to the writing, which adopts an austere approach throughout. Mercifully, the scenarios it describes are not straightforward, and the scripting is careful enough to ensure that few decisions ever feel like wasted efforts, even as it deadpans that you've just, say, contracted vampirism. If you try to pay for something when you don't have any cash to your name, you're still usually treated to a bit of expository dialogue, even if it's just to say that you stumbled upon a lost bag of coins on your way back home. Plus-one finesse here, minus-two mind there--the effects act as rewards, consolation prizes, and, occasionally, punch lines. The Yawhg uses these statistics as video game shorthand, penciling in the rough structure of a personality over the six turns like an art student doing a 30-minute sketch exercise.

The art direction of The Yawhg reveals a practiced hand. The illustrations riff on medieval trappings, playing fast and loose with proportion and color like an illuminated manuscript filled with classroom doodles. The artwork turns out to be flexible too, perfectly comfortable capturing the highs and lows that the randomly generated storyline doles out. Ditto for the lilting, folksy musical score, which takes on an increasingly melancholic tone as the Yawhg approaches your town.
Six weeks pass in a heartbeat. There's something to be said for The Yawhg's spartan writing style, but in a game this short, it's asking a lot for it to weave a meaningful narrative. Despite the doomsday countdown, the stakes feel pretty low. It would take a bleeding heart to be much affected by a sentence or two telling you that you defused a bomb, or that a nameless, faceless character you happened upon once has died. And what about the third or fourth time it happens? Like any good board game, The Yawhg feels geared toward replayability, but you'll find the game's various scenarios repeat themselves too quickly for the liking.

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