3D fighting games had a weird period during the PlayStation era. Aside from a couple games like Tekken, most were just bad. Despite taking place on a 2D plane, Dragon Ball: Final Bout is still just as awful.
Everything you do is stiff. Characters shuffle around and awkwardly flail about. The developer even tried to add flying mechanics but you just kind of hover around. Actually lining up with the other player while airborne is pretty difficult.
I seemed to have lucked out getting the Japanese version. The English version features terrible voice acting. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the show, but none of them sound like any of the voice actors from the show’s English dub that I can remember. The opening animation is one of the only half decent things about the game and in the English version they changed the song to some generic guitar track.
“OH MY GOD! GOKU’S ON THE FRONT. I HAVE TO HAVE IT!” is all I was thinking when I was a kid. For this game alone, my mother went out of her way to mod my PlayStation to read region-locked titles. It was probably a big mistake back then considering it just opened the gate for me to play even more bad Japanese Dragon Ball Z games. However, it’s nice that today I can play import PlayStation 1 games. So I guess something good came out of it?
Well, minus the fact that I’ve continued importing nothing but bad games.
I just make bad decisions.
