Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is an OK video game, but an excellent DBZ experience

Dragon Ball Z: Kakaro takes the Dragon Ball Z series of video games to where it needs to go: the fluff.

People who like the great outdoors might think that the Dragon Ball Z anime is a crazy, violent show with lots of hits, energy balls, yelling, and power levels over 9,000. Fans know that a good, crazy fight is an important part of the show, but they also know that Dragon Ball Z is more than just bad guys punching each other crazy. It is about hours and hours of filler material, like watching characters charge up for a few episodes instead of fighting or watching Piccolo and Goku learn how to drive a car. The important things that happen between the fights take up most of the time, and those minutes were never really shown in the games.

While accepting that fluff mostly works in Kakarot’s favor, it might make it harder to sell the game to people who are not already fans of the program.

Kakarot tells you right away what it is all about. I became Goku after a short training fight and some story cutscenes. Kakarot then tells me to go finish my task. I am not going straight into a new fight, though. Instead, I am standing on a path and watching Gohan, Goku’s little boy, waddle off into the sunset in search of apples. I walk behind him and pick apples with him as a dad and a kid.

We fish together, cook a meal over the fire, use our Flying Nimbus cloud to collect resources around the world, and then head home to make Goku’s wife, Chi-Chi, happy.

As always in Dragon Ball Z, some kind of threat grows and needs to be dealt with, but not before Master Roshi gives me a side task to find his dirty picture book, which was stolen by Turtle, the talking sea turtle (who Goku calls Tortoise by accident).

That is kind of the point: video games used to be rushed to get to the “great things,” but Kakarot is good at matching the speed and flow of the show.

Say, I take a break to do a few favors for some old Dragon Ball characters, like Eighter, the robot that loves peace and looks like Frankenstein’s monster, even though Gohan is in grave danger. Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot cares more about the world and characters of the show than about the heroes’ lives in danger, which makes the story less serious while also making it more fun for fans.

After Raditz and Goku both die, Raditz shows how dangerous it will be when Nappa and Vegeta become stronger than him, and Piccolo takes Gohan to train. The real fluff starts then. Get ready to wait for the next big fight, hunt, cook, fish, and train.

It took me about six or seven hours to finish the first Saiyan story in Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot. I am now seven of 33 chapters into the game. During the break between the Saiyan and Frieza stories, I spent a lot of time searching for apples, which are apparently the only food on this version of Earth, and fighting other Z fighters.

In the earlier Dragon Ball Z games, this year-long training did not take up much time. Every time you fight Raditz and the two other Saiyan fighters in Kakarot, it takes hours, and you are busy with other tasks the whole time. Nappa, on the other hand, is the second battle in the popular Dragon Ball Z: Budokai game. Raditz is the first battle.

I do side jobs for some of Dragon Ball’s other characters as I run around the world of Dragon Ball Z.

The tasks themselves are not very fun either; you have to get active ingredients for food or play a weird mini-game to hunt a dinosaur. For some tasks, you can spar with other warriors who are also training for battle. However, it seems like nothing is happening during most of the training time. Despite this, the conversation in these missions is often funny and interesting, even in the sillier side missions where Piccolo thinks Yajirobe wants to fight him.

In both the show and Kakarot, this part makes it seem like everyone is wasting time while they wait for the Saiyans by trying to get stronger. That may seem like a deal-breaker, but as a long-time fan, the fan service and big fights keep me going. I am always thinking about taking up the game more.

Dragon Ball’s characters would just look like muscles with spiked hair if the show did not have its funny and quiet moments or the thoughtful explanations of training points of view. Some of the fluff that is not necessary can be boring, just like the show, but it helps me connect with my heroes and their friends more. Even though I am not having a lot of fun, as a fan, I think that is worth my time.

Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is a fun Dragon Ball Z game, but that only works if you already know and love Dragon Ball Z.

Whenever I finish a fun Dragon Ball Z game, I immediately want to watch the show again to catch up on all the details I missed while playing. Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is all about combining, and a 2020 watchthrough does not make sense after playing the game.

As a computer game, Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot works well. It takes some time to get used to flying around the world. If you practice, you can skyrocket like Goku and his friends in the show. This is true even if all you want to do is collect upgrade orbs and look around the huge Dragon Ball Z world. Also, the fight is trickier than it looks at first. Even though there is only one button for punching, the mix of dodges, punches, Ki blasts, and special moves makes fights interesting and sometimes hard. The fight is still the most important part of the game, and it is still on par with some of the best brawlers out there.

I feel like I am getting better at fighting while I play because of the cool new RPG features like the Community Board, where I do side tasks to earn the trust of Goku’s friends. I can level up my character’s stats by taking them through fights and side missions that give me XP. And collecting orbs in the open world, which is similar to the Crackdown games, gives me money to improve my skills in the ability tree. It feels like work to fish, hunt, and get event components, but the food you make from them gives you long-term stat boosts, so it is always worth it.

Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is not a disaster, but it is also not the first Dragon Ball Z game I would suggest to friends who are not into the show. I thought this was my chance to get my partner interested in Dragon Ball Z, but some of these chapters are moving so slowly that it is not working.

Fans of Dragon Ball Z are glad to see this world come to life in a game, especially one that does not just jump from fight to fight. If you want to avoid punching your way through problems, Kakarot lets me spend real time in the first magical world I ever liked as a child. What would have been dull in any other setting was relaxing for me because it was familiar and because it was so cool to see this part of such a big dream re-created so well in a video game.

Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is not a great video game, but it is exactly what Dragon Ball fans like me have been hoping for as a Dragon Ball experience—a kind of “program model.” It seems like a video game that is so closely based on the show might not have been the best idea in the first place.