In this latest offering, Super Dragon Ball Z, the gameplay goes in a different direction, striving towards a more Street Fighter feel, but with the Z fighters rather than the iconic Ryu and Ken. A port of the arcade title of the same name, Super DBZ is veering towards change, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's for the best.
The biggest issue that I can find with the game so far is that it doesn't really feel like a DBZ game. Rather than having kinetic, epic battles where you can have your character perform fantastic combos that devastate both your opponent as well as the various environments, you're placed in limited maps with stale movesets that don't really capture the absurd grandeur from the series. Rather than having Vegeta's "Galick Gun" attack that pummels enemies with a barrage of energy blasts, what you wind up getting is a glorified fireball. Other titles have Goku's Super Kamehameha send opponents flying, while here, it only inflicts a bit of damage while looking like a fizzle rather than the WMD it's known to be. It's disappointing to see characters who have literally destroyed planets be so impotent and weak.
The combat system itself relies mostly on combo attacks. Rather than jumping into a match and throwing a chain of punches and kicks, your only hope to have a decent offense is to learn specific chain attacks. The system is certainly simple enough to learn and once you figure out how to use a character, things definitely pick up, with the likes of "down, right, punch" combo for an energy attack being standard. Though the battle system is fairly easy, the flexibility of games like Street Fighter or King of Fighters isn't there - you can't button mash nor can you throw together a random string of punches and kicks to bombard your opponent.
