Of course, even in bite-sized chunks, the game’s combat limitations are noticeable. Sure, it gets a little repetitive after awhile, seeing as a) the environments don’t change all that much and b) there’s no apparent rhyme or reason for why, exactly, you’re flying around punching bad (or, possibly, good?) guys, but it’s still a heck of a lot of fun in small doses - and, thankfully, for the most part small doses is what Battle of Z offers, with even the longest levels being over and done with in about fifteen minutes. I’m a bit of a sucker for superhero games, and it’s hard to think of something more superheroic than flying around, punching people through rocks and firing laser beams out of your hands.

This lack of story is kind of a shame, because the game itself is kind of enjoyable.

(Or, alternatively, it really is just a bunch of random characters thrown together, and none of it makes any sense even if you are a fan of the series…but seeing as I’m the novice here, it seems wise to give the game’s developers the benefit of the doubt.) At the risk of stereotyping, I get that fan service is big for anime-centred games, but Battle of Z seems to take that to an extreme, in that, as far as I can tell, it’s nothing but fan service. Occasionally they say a few things to each other, but if they’re saying stuff that’s advancing some kind of story, it’s totally lost on me. Every single level plops you and a few other characters down, then some more characters show up, and you fight. In Battle of Z, by contrast, there’s none of that. I mean, even if I didn’t totally get all the nuances of that aforementioned One Piece game, it still had some nods towards a plot structure that meant I could more or less get a handle on what was going on. Ordinarily, this probably wouldn’t be an issue. I loved Asura’s Wrath, I enjoyed One Piece: Pirate Warriors 2, and I have vague memories of watching Astro Boy at some point in the mid- to late-’80s, but if my life depended on telling you a single thing about Goku, Vegeta and Co., I’d be a goner. And by “people like me”, I mean people who have little to no experience with anime in general, or Dragon Ball Z in particular. Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Z really isn’t meant for people like me.

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