Supa Saiya-Jin Tullece wrote:It seems as though everyone is skirting around the completely obvious: None of these games are competitively viable save, potentially, for Super DragonBall Z.
Budokai 3? Infinite World? Sparking? Burst Limit? None of them have any real depth. Nearly all of the characters are identical and the mechanics themselves are shallow, if not entertaining. For years DragonBall fans have been scared of inputs that require more than tilting a stick and pushing a button. The lack of meaningful, depth adding mechanics leads to an unentertaining metagame with a horrendously small skill gap.
Budokai 3/Infinite World/Shin Budokai's combos involve tapping one, maybe two buttons for five consecutive attacks. Once you land a kick, if you guard after finishing a combo you can cancel in to another combo. This continues until the damage scales to 1 damage per hit, unless you reset it with a special which, like Gohan's Dragon Punch and Bardock's Heat Phalanx, can be chained in to each other. That's pretty much all of the depth that exists in those games. Once you understand that and get a decent grasp of Ki management you have no where to go. That's literally the entire metagame.
Sparking/Raging Blast depends heavily on imperfect information, which is why people hated SFxT's gems. There are a few more cancels and a bit of depth through the sheer number of options available, but that's relative to its other DragonBall brethren. It's still infinitely more shallow that most of the games being played at EVO. Add in the MvC2 level tiers evident in S!/N/M/RB/2 and suddenly you've got even fewer reasons to watch the game.
Maybe if Bamco got it together and decided it was going to make a competitive game with actual depth in the metagame it would have a chance, but as it stands there's just no way.
Thank You!
I've been meaning to say this about the "Budokai" games for quite some time now. They get a lot of praise for being "Deep" especially compared to the Tenkaichi games but really they're about equal. Punch, Punch, X, Punch, Punch, X, Punch, X, Punch, X is all I see when I watch "Pro" Budokai Players and its nothing special.
Tenkaichi 3 and Budokai 3 have about same level of depth if you ask me Infinite World is a bit better than both and then Super DBZ shits on all of em but still isn't up to par with the likes of Tekken, Street Fighter etc like you said.
It's not too late. One day, it will be.
Peace And Power MF DOOM!
Peace and Power Kevin Samuels