Ultraman Powered (3DO)

 Sometimes, you encounter a game that's centred around a concept so obvious, you can't believe you've never encountered it elsewhere. Ultraman Powered (based on the Japan-US co-produced TV show that's also known as Ultraman: The Ultimate Hero) is a game that has two such concepts! And it's hidden away on a console nobody cares about!

 

The two concepts are kind of related, though, being both related to the fact that this is a fighting game that makes use of digitised sprites. Firstly, it's the first game I've seen that mixes them with live action FMV cutscenes, but the real shocker is that this is the only game I can think of that's based on a tokusatsu TV show or movie that uses digitised sprites! It's such a natural combination! Not to mention the glory days of the Mortal Kombat series coincided with the heyday of Power Rangers, VR Troopers, and all the other American "localised" versions of toku series.

 

So, is it any good? Eh, not particularly. To be more fair, it is fun to play, and there are positive aspects to it, like how the digitised look really does fit perfectly with the theme, but there's some real problems, too. In single player mode, you play as Ultraman, and you fight against various kaiju one after another, like you'd expect. You've got a couple of special moves that aren't particularly impressive or useful, and the controls are laid out very strangely: you've got light and heavy punches and kicks. The punches are assigned to the A and B buttons, while the kicks are assigned to C and the right shoulder button. This isn't an arcade port or anything, it's a 3DO exclusive! Why didn't they design the controls more logically based on the controller that they knew players would be using?

 

There's actually two modes for single players: visual and battle. The only differences between them are that visual mode has fairly long FMV cutscenes before each fight, while battle mode has "VTOL Shooting" sections before each fight. The sections play out like a very simplified version of Cobra Command/Thunder Storm FX. They're viewed through the windshield of a VTOL craft flying towards the next kaiju you're going to fight, and you move a crosshair around the screen to shoot at little targets that appear on them, slightly reducing their starting health during the fighting section. It's nothing spectacular, but it's fun little gimmick, and I can't imagine anyone ever picking visual mode over it more than once.

 

Ultraman Powered isn't a very good game, but it's not painful to play or anything, either. You'll probably get some mild amusement out of it for maybe thirty to sixty minutes? It is at least better than the 1991 Ultraman fighting game that appeared on the Mega Drive and SNES (and somehow also got a SNES-only sequel), though.

Shin Senki Van-Gale - The War of Neo-Century (Playstation)

 I was attracted to this game not only because it was a Playstation fighting game I haven't seen anyone talk about before, and also because it seemed to be an aerial, projectile-focussed fighting game, like the Psychic Force games. It's not really much like Psychic Force, though. I'd say it's more like a cross between Bastard! Ankoku no Hakaishin and Senko no Ronde.

 

This is an assumption based entirely on the game's low budget-looking intro FMV and the fact that both the developer and the publisher seem to have only released a few games each, all in a window of a few years in the late nineties, but it does feel like it's a bit of an enthusiast's project. It's undeniable what the aim of the game was: to recreate one-on-one mecha battles, specifically in the style of those seen in the Gundam franchise. There's lots of zooming around, shooting and dodging laser fire, ruching in close to attack with beam sabers, and defending with beam shields.

 

It's also heavily influenced by Gundam aesthetically: as well as the robots looking like Gundam designs (one of them looks almost exactly lke The O, for example), the stages are straight out of that franchise, too. There's space, with the Earth in the background, a stage where the two combatants are burning up on entry into the atmosphere, a big cylindrical space colony, and so on. One bizarre detail is that you can set a time limit in the options screen, but it only seems to apply on the re-entry stage.

 

Unfortunately, though the game looks and sounds great, it doesn't play so great. It's not painful to play or anthing, but it's just not particularly enjoyable, either. I think a big problem stems from something that Psychic Force has that Van-Gale doesn't. In Psychic Force, there's an invisible line connecting the two characters; their positions and how the directions work for them are always in relation to their opponent, and more importantly, projectiles always fire directly at the opponent, and melee attacks always connect when the fighters are within range and the defender hasn't blocked or dodged.

 

What this results in is really long fights where two robots shoot at each other, only occasionally doing damage. Even rushing in to melee attack isn't great, because melee attacks only seem to actually trigger sometimes, and when it does happen, it usually just awkwardly whiffs. Sometimes a little "LOCK ON" crosshair thing appears over your opponent, though it doesn't seem to actually do anything. Attacks that you're supposed to aim just fire straight ahead whether the crosshair is there or not, and homing attacks kind of vaguely home in on the opponent whether it's there or not. I don't know if it's just an aesthetic touch or it does something that I haven't figured out, or even if it's supposed to do something, but some kind of programming error prevents that.

 

Like I said earlier, Van-Gale isn't a terrible game, but it's also not a good one. If you're curious about it, you might as well take a look, just don't spend a lot of money on it.

Battle K-Road (Arcade)

 It's odd that of the two fighting games that Psikyo developed, it's Daraku Tenshi, the one that never got released, that seems to be the most well-known. Battle K-Road is still definitely worth a look, though, as despite its psuedo realistic setting (the only fantasy elements being that two of the playable characters are cyborgs, and the final boss is a bear, plus some silly joke endings. But the mood is still realistic, and there's no fantastical or super-powered fighting techniques), it's still a game that does some interesting stuff in terms of both mechanics and storytelling.

 

There are seven fighting styles represented among the playable characters, with two characters for each of them. The two characters for each style are just headswaps that play identically to each other, but the only reason this setup exists is for storytelling purposes. A single player game starts with you facing against the other representative of your fighting style in a match that's implied to be the final of a tournament, with each style's first fight taking place on a unique stage. Every subsequent fight takes place on the same stage, with the time of day changing as the fights go on. The implication here is that you're playing as the proven champion of your  chosen martial art, representing that art against all the others in the Battle K-Road tournament. It's a cool little touch that adds a lot to the game's atmosphere.

 

Mechanically speaking, there's some interesting stuff going on there, too. Special moves are performed by holding an attack button, then pressing a direction while you release. It's an input method not often seen (the only other examples I know of are Primal Rage and the SNES Ranma 1/2 fighting games), and though I've hated it in those other games, it really works well with the grounded playstyle of this game. A more unique quirk, and a nod towards the game's combat sport theme, is that whenever a fighter gets knocked down, the fight stops and oth fighters return to their starting positions. It really marks out that the fights in this game are part of a sports competition, as opposed to the unsanctioned fights in most fighting games, and it also means that there's very little scope for trapping an opponent in the corner or in some other disadvantageous position.

 

Battle K-Road is a game I've been playing a lot recently, and it's really a shame it still hasn't ever had a home console release to this day, as it's a really fun and interesting game that I think must have gotten lost amongst all the other fighting games that got released during the original post-Street Fighter II fighting boom. Unfortunately, its uniqueness didn't help it stand out from the crowd,  maybe because that uniqueness manifests in the form of deliberately being less flashy and extravagant than all its competitiors. Still, you should definitely give it a try if you get the chance, it's an excellent game, that's aged a lot more gracefully than a lot of its contemporaries.

Critical Blow (Playstation)

 I originally played this game just because of the graphics, which are amazing. It's got a lot of charm in its low-poly anime style. But not only did it actually turn out to be a fun game, but also an all-round aesthetic masterpiece that really captured the feel of a certain culture at a specific time. Maybe even more than Evil Zone/Eretzvaju, Critical Blow is like a time capsule of anime fandom in the late nineties!

 

The way all the characters look the world they inhabit, the high-quality animated FMV intro, and even the music will take you right back to that time. It even infiltrates the way the game plays to a certain extent! One of the modes on the main menu is "Theatre Mode", which I assumed would be just a menu where you can view unlocked cutscenes (as well as the intro, there's also an animatd ending for each character in Arcade Mode). What it actually is is a story mode in which you play as the game's main protagonist Ricky, and have the game's plot told to you via a mixture of still images with text captions, and yet more fully voiced, fully animated high quality FMV cutscenes! Of course, whenever a fight breaks out. that's when the actual game part kicks in. 

 

As well as Theatre and Arcade, there's also another single player mode, called Trading Mode. This is an instance of something that was very fashionable in console fighting games at the time: a mode where you take a character, fight lots of opponents, and gradually increase their stats and unlock new abilities. It was probably popularised by Street Fighter Alpha 3's famous World Tour mode, but I think it might have started in the Flash Hiders games on SNES and PC Engine. It's fine I guess, but I think it speaks to the quality of Arcade and Thatre modes that it's easily the least interesting part of this game, and that's coming from someone who can't even understand any of the text or dialogue in Theatre Mode. The art and FMV are really that charming!

 

There are some bad sides to the game, especially if you're hoping for a well-balanced, competitive fighter. Like how the super meter is filled by any blocked or connecting attacks, including super attacks. So one character in particular, who has a long range, multi-hit super, once they have one meter, they essentially have infinite supers as long as they either hit or get blocked (and the super in question does a not insignificant amount of damage even when blocked, too). There's also a possible issue with the camera: as the fighters get closer to one end of the stage or the other, the camera will tilt slightly to make a dramatic angle, which does look really cool, but might raise some questions regarding fairness, especially among the kind of players who insist on always fighting in plain training stages, or banning custom costumes in modern fighting games.

 

Mostly, though, Critical Blow is a game I strongly recommend, especially if you're nostalgic for the era in which it was originally released. I think the music especially is going to make a certain section of my audience lose their minds when they hear it! I learned only after already having played it for several hours that it's also the sequel to game from 1996 called Genei Tougi, so that might also be worth checking out too (though I haven't played it yet, so I can't say for sure).

Super Bikkuriman (SNES)

 A few years ago, I reviewed a platform game for the Game Boy based on this same property, and it wasn't great. But because the character designs are interesting enough to capture my interest, and because old licensed fighting games are also interesting to me, I decided to look at this SNES adaptation. Unfortunately, it's even worse. A lot worse.

 

In single player, it takes the old pre-Street Fighter II approach of having only two playable characters facing off against a bunch of CPU opponents in a set order, though all the characters can be played in versus mode. It's also like a pre-Street Fighter II game in that you don't get any special moves. All you get is punch and kick, a slightly stronger punch and kick executed by pressing forward at the same time as the button, and a flying kick that only works sometimes. I have no problem with simple fighting, I've recently been getting obsessed with Psikyo's arcade-only martial arts fighting game Battle K-Road, which doesn't have much in the way of moves, and half its roster are headswaps of the other half, but this is an incredibly barren effort.

 

It doesn't even look good! In still screenshots, it looks like it might have fit in among fanmade X68000 games from a couple of years earlier, while in motion, it looks even worse! The characters have barely animation, and when you look at other games coming out on the SNES and Mega Drive in 1993, it stands out even more. It's a shame, since, like the Game Boy Super Bikkuriman game, the box and label art are pretty nice, and probably suckered in some unfortunate victims back when these games were first released.

 

As I played this game more, and as I was thinking about writing this review, it gradually dawned upon me the best possible way of describing it succinctly: it's anime Rise of the Robots. The terrible animation, the lack of playable characters, and the complete absence of any fun or excitement, but this time you've got knights with very long hair fighting various monsters, instead of a blue ugly robot fighting different coloured ugly robots. Just like Rise of the Robots, though, Super Bikkuriman is a game that's not worth playing at all. It's not even bad in a funny way, it's just boring.

Ushio & Tora (SNES)

 It's yet another game based on an anime, but this time it's one that I have seen: the nineties classic Ushio & Tora, which tells the story of Ushio, a teenage boy who one day accidentally frees Tora, a tiger-like demon from his dad's basement. The two then team up to fight other, worse demons, Ushio fighting using the magic spear that had previously held Tora pinned to a wall, and Tora using his claws and ability to shoot lightning from his face.

 

This game is something of an anachronism, being of a subgenre that was mostly dead by 1993: the single player boss fighter. You know, like Yie Ar Kung Fu or Metamoquester. There's some very short scrolling parts where you fight a few weak enemies, but the bulk of the game is made up of one-on-one fights against bosses who are mostly a lot bigger than you. It's a little disappointing that with only two playable characters, the movelists aren't bigger. Each character only has a few slight variations on their standard attack. 

 

The graphics also seem like a disappointment at first too, as they look a bit drab and dull. This all changed for me once I got to the second stage, a fight against a centipede-infested suit of antique samurai armour that takes place in a dusty, abandoned school building. The colour pallete, which makes heavy use of browns and greys, works really well here, and the game continues to have a grim, gloomy atmosphere appropriate for its demon-killing action for the rest of the game from this point on.

 

It's not a particularly sophisticated game, but I really enjoyed Ushio and Tora, and I think it must have made a fine accompaniment to the show at the time. And since there wasn't a videogame for the 2015 remake (it seems like only the absolute biggest anime series get videogame adaptations these days. It's a shame, in my opinion, and the blame probably lies at the feet of the vastly swollen scale and budgets of modern videogame production), it's probably worth looking into for fans of that version, too. One weird little detail is that another Ushio and Tora game came out six months later for the Famicom. Releasing a Famicom game as late as 1993 seems odd on its own, but six months after a Super Famicom version of the same series is double strange. I won't be reviewing that one though, since it's an RPG with no English translation.

Tekkouki Mikazuki Trial Version (PS2)

 Obviously, "Trial Edition" means that this is only a demo. But it's a demo of a game that never got released! And that game would have been based on Tekkouki Mikazuki, Keita Amemiya's excellent big-budget giant robot miniseries that aired in 2000! You play as Kazeo, the young boy protagonist of the series, and in tuen, he controls the giant robot Mikazuki to fight off the melon kaiju from the first episode, Suika Idom.

 

To clarify on that explanation, you play as Kazeo, running around on the ground. At the start of the stage, Suika Idom shows up and starts stomping around and destroying buildings. For about a minute, you've got to run around trying not to get stepped on, until some gold text appears on the screen, heralding Mikazuki's arrival. When it shows up, you can press select to alternate between controlling Kazeo and controlling Mikazuki. However, whichever of the two you're controlling, Kazeo is still "you" in the game's world, and you see what Mikazuki is doing from his perspective, wherever you left him on the ground.

 

It's a pretty interesting way of getting across the fact that this is a fight between giantsized combatants, and really, you shouldn't have expected anything less, since this game is by Sandlot, the masters of making games about really big things, as seen in their most famous games, the Earth Defence Force series, and a previous Lunatic Obscurity subject, Chou Shoujuu Mecha MG. It's a shame this game never fully came into fruition, as the monster design in the show is incredible (but again, Keita Amemiya is one of the greatest tokusatsu monster designers of all time), and it might have been cool to have stages where you played as Akane piloting the Gekkouki series of robots. 

 

Though this specific game came out, Sandlot went on to make a bunch of other games, and two of their other PS2 titles in particular build on the concepts put forth in this demo: Gigantic Drive and Tetsujin 28 Go. So I guess I should really seek them both out and give them a try, right? It's very difficult to get ahold of this demo through legitimate means nowadays, but I'm sure that if it appeals to you, you'll figure something out. And if you do, you'll have a fun five or so minutes before it's over, so why not?

Dragonball Z: Idainaru Dragonball Densetsu (Saturn)

 Back around the turn of the century, when Dragonball Z was just starting to air on British TV, me and my friends were a bunh of teenagers with no money, so we mostly relied on the various software pirates in our vilage to supply us with videogames. Unfortunately, the only Dragonball game any of them had available was Dragonball GT Final Bout on the Playstation. Despite having great-looking gouraud-shaded graphics, Final Bout was almost unplayable garbage. Still, we played a ton of it anyway, and I even remember one weekend we didn't see one of our group because he'd decided to stay home and try unlocking a whole bunch of characters by completing it on hard mode nine consecutive times without losing a round. The method he was following turned out to be an April Fools joke from a popular fansite. Anyway, we longed for better DBZ games, and in the ads for importers that were printed in magazines at the time, the title "Dragonball Z Legends" always stood out. We had no other details on this game other than that it existed, it was too expensive for any of us to buy, and it had to be better than what we had.

 

Cut to about a decade later, and I've recently gotten a 4-in-1 cartridge for my Saturn, and I'm shopping around online for cheap imports that I can actually play. Amazingly, I find a copy of that mysterious Dragonball Z game for less than ten pounds, so I buy it straight away! I wasn't sure what to expect, but nonetheless, what I got was a pretty big surprise. Idainaru Dragonball Densetsu is a fighting game, though it's unlike any other fighting game I've ever played. For a start, most of your attacks don't damage your opponent at all. Instead, there's a momentum meter at the bottom of the screen, and attack moves it in your favour. When it goes all the way to one side, a member of the team that has the advantage will perform a super move, doing significant damage (usually about a third of their total health) to one of the members of the opposing team.

 

I should clarify the basic structure of the fights before I go any further. The fights are two-sided, with up to three combatants on each team, and they take place in a massive 3D space. You only control one team member at a time, though you can switch between them whenever you like with the left shoulder button, and you're always facing one of your opponents, among whom you can switch with the right shoulder button. You don't really control your movement in a traditional manner, instead up and down move you towards or away from your opponent. Your teammates you're not controlling will be controlled by AI. As well as just winning the fights, you can also unlock secret characters for the two player versus mode by re-enacting specific events from the show: having characters die in the right order, or having them be killed by specific moves, and so on. 

 

The whole re-enacting thing is a little too fiddly for me to have bothered with, to be honest, and I wasn't planning on playing versus mode anyway. However, of all the Dragonball Z games to do it in, this is probably the right one. The very unusual way it plays is probably the most faithful attempt I've ever seen of emulating the very specific way in which Dragonball Z fights play out. It even goes so far as having every attack deplete your ki meter, so you have to charge it up pretty often, just like what happens in the show! Despite how that sounds, it really does work in the game's favour, honest.

 

Dragonball Z Idainaru Dragonball Densetsu is a game I definitely recommend to anyone who's ever been a fan of Dragonball Z, and who doesn't mind playing something that's a little out of the ordinary and takes some getting used to. I guess the Xenoverse games and Battle of Z are the closest modern equivalent, but for all their graphical splendor, they don't capture the feel of the show in the way that this game does.

Super Chinese Fighter (SNES)

 If that title seems a little odd, don't worry: this is a fighitng game spin off from the Super Chinese series, which i think normally alternates between action games and RPGs. Or maybe action RPGs. I haven't actually played any of them. An extra bit of trivia is that characters from this series also appear as guest characters in the last couple of Hiryuu no Ken games (a series I once said I'd go back to someday, and maybe someday I will).

 

Anyway, like another game I recently covered, Ninku 2, Super Chinese Fighter places more of an emphasis on its single-player story mode than on its two player versus mode that most of its post-Street Fighter II peers focussed on. Of course, the big difference between this game and Ninku 2 is that Ninku 2 was on a low-powered handheld upon which multiplayer was expensive and inconveient, while Super Chinese Fighter was on a system where access to multiplayer was practically the default, with even some turn-based RPGs having some kind of multiplayer mode. (I am rememebering that right, right? A couple of the SNES Final Fantasies had a weird mode where you could let extra players take control of a character each during battles, didn't they?)

 

But anyway, what that means is that the developers specifically wanted to make this kind of single player fighting story game, and amazingly, the publishers allowed them to do so, even though it was a bit of an anachronism in the post-SF2 world. Rather than taking inspiration from other videogames, Super Chinese Fighter seems to take its inspiration more from TV anime, especially the original pre-Z Dragonball, and the imitators that followed in its wake. It takes place in a whimsical sci-fi martial arts world, with planets named after various Asian foodstuffs. Sounds familiar, right?

 

The plot is also pretty standard fare, that sees you travelling to those foodstuff-named planets in search of a bunch of missing martial arts scrolls, before going off to the final boss' base to fight his henchmen and then the boss himself. It's all pretty light-hearted, and the characters are all somewhat jovial goofs,  so again, if you've seen a lot of late 80s/early 90s kiddy adventure anime, it'll all feel very familiar. The only problem with all this is that the plot is told in the form of many, slow-scrolling,non-skippable dialogue boxes. A playthrough of single-player mode will take you about two hours at most, and it feels like at least half of this time is taken up by the dialogue scenes.

 

So anyway, the fighting. It's okay, but not great. Of the four face buttons on the SNES controller, you have strong and weak attacks, a button to hold so you can increase your power level, and a button for using the one-use item you equipped pre-battle, which could be a trap you place in the arena, health restoration, a bomb that explodes in a few seconds, and so on. There's special moves that are done in the manner you might expect, using d-pad commands and the attack button, though one thing I don't like is that in the single-player mode, you unlock more moves as you win fights and find the aforementioned scrolls. But that's something I hate in action games generally, as I'm sure long-time readers have probably noticed. It does kind of make up for this by giving you a cheat to input on the title screen that unlocks every character with their full movesets in the other modes, but that still feels like a solution to a problem that didn't really need to be there.

 

It's hard to summarise Super Chinese Fighter. It's a game that's not particularly good or bad, and it doesn't really have any great mechanical hook to make it an interesting curiosity, either. I guess the one thing I can say is that if you have a bit of nostalgia for the era and genre of anime to which it pays so much homage, then it's a game you might want to seek out. After this game, the series mostly seems to have petered out: there were no more entries into the main series, but there were two more fighting spin-offs, on the Game Boy an Game Boy Color, which sound interesting, just by being pre-2000 handheld fighting games.

Ninku 2 - Tenkuuryuu e no Michi (Game Gear)

 Ninku was an anime that ran for little over a year in the mid-1990s, but even though it's pretty much completely unknown in English-speaking parts of the world, in that short time it was somehow popular enough in Japan to have spawned seven tie-in games! This one's a fighting game, with a slight emphasis on single player, which makes sense, given how impractical it was setting up multiplayer on handhelds in those days (though it does have a versus link up mode, too).

 

There's two main modes of play: story mode, which has you playing as the three protagonists (an ugly little boy, a generic young man, and a guy in just his underpants) as you go through the story, watching lavishly pixel-illustrated cutscenes and fighting opponents (including one instance of that annoying little quirk of fighting game story modes: the unwinnable battle). It reminded me a lot of the Game Gear's most famous fighting game, Virtua Fighter The Animation, though it's actually a lot more fun than that, as the more traditional superpowered fighting game style of Ninku 2 fits the GG better than trying to squeeze the realistic martial arts of Virtua Fighter into a tiny 8-bit game. Then there's 1P battle, which is a standard arcade mode, allowing you to play as any of the eight characters in the game, and fighting the others in random order.

 

The cutscenes aren't the only thing that reminded me of VFTA, either, as the game has a quite impressive faux-zoom thing going on in the fights, too, as if the two characters get far enough apart, the camera zooms out to show everything much smaller at a distance. I'm pretty sure the only way they could have done this is making two complete sets of sprites for each character: one large and one small, as well as a large and small version of every stage. That seems like a lot of work for what is essentially a pointless visual gimmick, but I'm glad they did it, it really makes the game stand out! And it's not the only standout feature, as for an 8-bit fighting game, it's surprisingly complex! There's forwards and backwards dashes, power meters, multiple special moves for each character (and yes, you can do every move as the tiny zoomed-out sprite too!) and so on!

 

The power meter is something I have to take issue with, unfortunately, though. There's no super moves in the game (as far as I can tell, at least), and the meter instead limits your use of special moves. This alone wouldn't be an issue, but coupled with how meter is built, it becomes one. There's two ways of building meter in this game: charging it by holding punch and kick together, or getting hit. Hitting your opponent doesn't build meter. So all this comes together to de-incentivise using specials, and punishing players for trying to combo their opponents, or wear them down with specials. I can see why they might have done this, to disable "spamming" of specials and also to serve as a primitive comeback mechanic, but it just makes the fights a little less exciting, in my opinion.

 

Despite that one rather large flaw, Ninku 2 is a game I think is worth playing. It's a lot of fun, and most of the characters look cool! I think if a copy of this game had somehow come into the possession of my nine-year-old self, even though I'd never have seen the show, and wouldn't be able to read even the character names, let alone any of the story text, I think the visuals and the accessible fighting action would have been enough to capture my interest. And then I probably would have spent decades frustrated at how I couldn't get my hands on any English-language Ninku stuff.

Dragonball Z Gekitou Tenkaichi Budokai (NES)

 Most of the Famicom Dragonball Z games are RPG, which never really seemed like a good fit, in my opinion, so when I found out that the final Famicom DBZ game was a fighting game released as late as 1992, that really caught my attention. Then when I learned that it was also part of some gimmicky barcode trading card nonsense, I wanted to play it even more! Of course, actually playing such a thing on real hardware would cost a ton, not only for the peripheral itself, but also for the cards required to use it. Luckily, there's a romhack out there that just lets you pick which character you want to be ingame, as opposed to having to swipe the barcode on the character's trading card.

 

It's a pretty impressive roster, too, with thirty slots. That is, nineteen characters, seven of whom have multiple forms, since this is Dragonball Z, after all. That's still thirty different character sprites, though, which is impressive for a Famicom game! They're taken from the fight against Raditz, all the way up to the fight against Perfect Cell, too, if you're wondering. Now, since this is a game built entirely around a gimmick, and really the whole point of it is to have kids in early 90s Japan going to each others' houses to make their card collections fight each other, there's not much in the way of single player stuff, and definitely no story mode.

 

You can play a tournament mode, though, by picking the eight-man tournament option, and, after selecting your own character, pressing B on the controller, which will have the CPU pick seven random fighters to fill the rest of the spaces. The problem is that the CPU-generated fighters are all incredibly weak, and you'll be able to beat any of them within a few hits. Sometimes just a single hit is enough! After you've beaten three opponents and won the tournament, you get to see your character's face in the middle of a fancy winners' certificate screen! Then, Freeza turns up and demands a fight. As big as the gap was between you and your previous CPU opponents, there's a similar gap between this bossfight Freeza and you. I've fought him a bunch of times, and never beaten him, and in fact, most of those fights were over in less than ten seconds.

 

That's really all there is to Gekitou Tenkaichi Budokai. Unless through some strange cosmic happenstance you suddenly find yourself in the body of a Japanese child in 1992, and that child doesn't yet have a sixteen-bit console, but does have the expensive peripheral for playing this game, then I'm sure you'll hve a lot of fun with your new friends. If that incredibly unlikely thing doesn't happen, though, this really is just a gimmick of a game, and there are many much better Dragonball Z fighitng games. In fact, I'm pretty sure there were probably already better ones on the Super Famicom and Mega Drive in 1992, even.