Unpopular DB opinions

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Re: Unpopular DB opinions

Post by Soppa Saia People » Sat Mar 17, 2018 2:19 pm

The budokai's games are legit solid fighters. Are they the best of the genre ? Not even close. Are they good, fun, fighting games ? I'd say so.
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Re: Unpopular DB opinions

Post by Sailor Haumea » Sat Mar 17, 2018 5:39 pm

Another unpopular opinion: I like the Garlic Jr. arc.

But Maron is annoying as hell.
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Re: Unpopular DB opinions

Post by SuperCyan2 » Sat Mar 17, 2018 5:48 pm

Sailor Haumea wrote:Another unpopular opinion: I like the Garlic Jr. arc.

But Maron is annoying as hell.
The Garlic Jr. arc is generally well liked outside this community.
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Re: Unpopular DB opinions

Post by Michsi » Sat Mar 17, 2018 6:59 pm

SuperCyan2 wrote:
Sailor Haumea wrote:Another unpopular opinion: I like the Garlic Jr. arc.

But Maron is annoying as hell.
The Garlic Jr. arc is generally well liked outside this community.

It...is? I'm fairly certain I've seen criticism all over the net. I mean, I liked it well enough, but I'm pretty certain it is the least popular saga.

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Re: Unpopular DB opinions

Post by SuperCyan2 » Sat Mar 17, 2018 7:02 pm

Michsi wrote:It...is? I'm fairly certain I've seen criticism all over the net. I mean, I liked it well enough, but I'm pretty certain it is the least popular saga.
Before Dragon Ball Kai arrived I remember most liking it but then there was Kai and the whole 'is it canon?' and that ruined the fun out of things.
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Re: Unpopular DB opinions

Post by Kunzait_83 » Sat Mar 17, 2018 10:21 pm

DBZAOTA482 wrote:Speak for yourself, webster.
When you open with name-calling right out the gate before any actual point you're not only not off to a great start, you're also kinda tipping your hand that you're motivated primarily by a gut emotional response rather than logic or critical reasoning.
DBZAOTA482 wrote:My gateway into the fighting game genre was Tekken and I still love Budokai. Please stop being a hater and generalizing Budokai fans as nostalgia-obsessed idiots.
I'm aware that there are people who know plenty of their fair share about legit fighting games who still like Budokai. I happen to find however, at least from experience, that those people tend to constitute a relatively small minority of Budokai fans overall. And regardless of that, I still happen to disagree with them anyway, because I can easily go point by point what makes Budokai a weak and shallow fighting game.

Also you're projecting: I don't think, and never said that I think that Budokai fans are "idiots". You're overly personalizing what I said to a great degree because you clearly feel personally threatened or attacked (and over something as silly and ridiculous as an opinion about a video game no less).

Do I think that most Budokai fans are idiots? No, of course not. Do I think that most Budokai fans are however, on average, blinded by nostalgia in their view of the series? Yes (and no, those two things are NOT the same thing). Why do I think that? Because I've read an endless, endless stream of their thoughts and breakdowns about why they like the games and what their continued appeal is: its almost overwhelmingly fueled, by their very own clear admission, by sentimental attachment from childhood or similar formative experiences with video games, rather than hard, raw gameplay mechanics.

Most Budokai fans, on average as I've seen it, don't tend to often be people who are very deep into other "serious" fighting games, nor do they know very much about what makes them play well (again, oftentimes by their very own admission): often they tend to be on the more "casual" side, and are primarily into Budokai both for the raw visual spectacle, the simplicity and shallowness of the gameplay that doesn't demand much challenge or skill, as well as their love for Dragon Ball.

Nothing wrong with that in and of itself: but I happen to be a more "hardcore" fighting game player, so that's the perspective that I come at any fighting game with, and my metric that I judge them on happens to be vastly different. I care very much deeply about depth, skill, competitiveness, and challenge: if a fighting game doesn't have those things, then its an abject and resounding failure in my eyes and I'm gonna have harsh things to say about it.

Zephyr earlier made the good point that if nothing else, (most of) the Budokai games at a bare minimum succeed at basic-most playability. I can't really argue with that (save for Budokai 1 at least; that game's a top to bottom embarrassment that's bolstered solely by attractive, polished, and fan-servicey presentation), so I concede to him that they don't quite belong on the same bottom-rung tier as stuff like Final Bout or Taiketsu (which are fundamentally broken and unplayable to their core).

Again, even among the relatively few Budokai fans I've come across who try to set nostalgia aside and look at the games from a gameplay perspective, I can very easily and handily refute most of their points: not because I'm a particularly gifted fighting game player by any means, but because its not hard at all in general to see through the Budokai games' unbelievably shallow mechanics and even shallower ways of trying to cover for them.

The games rely almost solely on canned combos (to a MUCH infinitely greater degree than even a series like the Mortal Kombat games, which still allow themselves for a MUCH greater degree of fluidity in strategy and approaches, even with their dial-a-combo mechanics), there's absolutely zero special moves to speak of nor very much of any variety among characters (characters are effectively just reskins of a very small minuscule handful of virtually totally identical "types"), and the combat flow is unbelievably rigid and linear (a charge you quite falsely throw at Super DBZ: again, projection). Even most of the "combo vids" on youtube from "high level" Budokai players is effectively just people who are exposing holes and glitches in the games' (almost otherwise non-existent) combo mechanics; and often with the help of Action Replay-esque cheat devices no less.
DBZAOTA482 wrote:Also, Butoden and Hyper Dimension are way overrated games if anything.
Almost virtually NO ONE plays those games anymore. I myself lament that, cause I think they're infinitely more rewarding and less intelligence-insulting games than any of the Budokai's: not masterful in and of themselves by any means, more on the average (but uniquely creative) side among the grand scheme of other fighting games... but certainly among the upper crust of non-FighterZ DB fighting games.

However outside of places like Kanz or other MASSIVELY hardcore DB fans (or perhaps more non-English speaking communities which got many of these games officially released in their neck of the woods), the Butoudens and Hyper Dimension are largely arcane and ignored relics of obscurity in today's day of English language DB fandom. So I hardly see how they can be considered "overrated". Overrated by WHO exactly? Me and the approximately 30 or so other people from around these forums that still remember they actually exist? There are VERY diehard DB fans in North America who've been into the series for nearly 20 years now and either have only VERY recently played some of those games, or STILL haven't played them at all.

Most DB video game discussions on average (and outside of more hardcore sites like this one) tend to treat everything before Budokai and LOG (or Final Bout at the very earliest) as if they never even existed. If the game didn't have a U.S. release, its much more often to be left out of the equation among most average, "casual" DB video game discussions (at least in U.S.-centric circles). So acting like there's this snotty, elitist stripe of DB gamers who are bandying those games around over everyone's heads is just totally made up to bolster your point. Such a thing, by and large, isn't happening almost anywhere.
DBZAOTA482 wrote:Clunky, stupidly unbalanced (Vegito always shits on everyone), and are Street Fighter II clones (the only real reason people seriously vouch for them as fighting games).
I assume the Vegetto point is in reference to Hyper Dimension, since he's not in any of the old Butouden games at all. And in Hyper Dimension... yeah, I've been playing that game for over 20+ years now (since its release), and I've NEVER found Vegetto to be particularly broken or dominant over the other characters. He's certainly very powerful, but if anything I tend to see most skilled Hyper Dimension players I've come across put forth Mystic Gohan, Goku, or Freeza as their go-to picks. If any character seems especially unbalanced, it might be Gotenks: but even then, he hardly "breaks" the game.

And even if Vegetto were overpowered... ok yes, and? Most fighting games overall have at least one or a few characters who have distinct advantages over the rest of the roster. That isn't necessarily a virtue mind, but that's simply a byproduct that comes with how INCREDIBLY difficult it is to 100% flawlessly balance ANY serious fighting game that has a bunch of characters with so much to distinguish between them.

The number of fighting games that are absolutely 100% watertight balanced to utter perfection is MICROSCOPICALLY tiny. So if having NO character who contains any HINT of too much power or too little power in their moveset is the standard you're going by for fighting games, then your list of preferred fighting games is going to be exceedingly and absurdly limited and narrow.

If anything, what this tells me is that at least Hyper Dimension is a genuine ATTEMPT at making a "serious" fighting game, regardless of its success or failure at it. Budokai may appear to be more "balanced" by comparison: but that's got nothing at all to do with its mechanics being (snrk) somehow exceptionally fine-tuned, and more to do with the fact that there's almost NOTHING to ANY of the characters or how they play from one another. This puts Hyper Dimension, warts and all, over Budokai in my eyes hands down.

And as far as the "SFII clone" remark goes: Butouden, for whatever its flaws as a game series (and it certainly has PLENTY: its hardly a bastion of design perfection, and the first game in the series is mostly dogshit) is notable for how WILDLY imaginative and innovative it was over most garden variety SFII clones of the day. Gigantic arenas, split-screen based combat, screen filling Ki attacks that could fry an opponent from miles and miles away, and a unique distance-focused approach to combat (where fights are largely decided on who can control the humongous terrain of the arena best to their advantage in order to land those massive, massive Ki attacks).

Really almost NO DB fighting games have almost EVER been out and out SFII clones. Not even Super DBZ. It only gets ignorantly slapped with that tag because it had SFII devs working on it, but it plays not a DAMN thing like SFII (SFII of course doesn't allow full 3D movement just for starters). And no, having quarter and half circle motions does NOT make something a SFII clone. That just makes it, y'know, a fighting game.

The only DB game that IS an actual outright SFII clone is the arcade title Super Battle: and the fact that its the only clear-cut SFII clone of the whole DB game franchise is what actually makes it UNIQUE within the context of DB fighting games, since none of the other games have gone that route (just like how Attack of the Saiya-jin is unique within DB RPGs because its the only one that goes the traditional turn-based Final Fantasy-esque route) but rather tend to implement their own decidedly unique and non-SFII-esque quirks and gimmicks to have the game's combat be more in line with the over the top insanity of their source material.

And furthermore: you make it sound like being a SFII clone is somehow inherently a BAD thing. SFII is only one of the single most celebrated, endlessly dense and consistently excellent fighting game franchises in the genre's entire history. Hell, its the game that singlehandedly CODIFIED the genre as we've known it for the past what, 30 years now?

Even though I disagree for various reasons, lets say for the sake of devil's advocate that the Botoudens and Hyper Dimensions of the DB gaming landscape WERE straight up clones of SFII: wow, so they're basically just copying the design philosophy of one of the most consistently deep, rewarding, and beloved fighting game franchises of all time. Oh the horror and humanity. :roll:
DBZAOTA482 wrote:There's a reason why TOSE don't make DBZ games anymore particularly with their 5th gen efforts and why every Butoden spiritual successor plays nothing like those obsolete games. If it's eating Budokai's "lunch" then it's eating its dust.
TOSE doesn't make DBZ games anymore because they don't really make ANY games anymore, at least not as a primary developer. Last I heard, they basically just do polishing work on other dev's games. How they got to that point I don't remember the story behind (there's a few articles on a few gaming sites out in the wilds that go into their history more, which I read forever and ever ago). Someone else in here might know/remember the full details behind TOSE's downfall and can better fill in those particular blanks for me.

But I do know that it was nothing that's related to or indicative of how they made their various DB games. The Butouden series sold like hotcakes back in their day (even among importers like myself, who gobbled them up) and were generally well received overall and considered the "flagship" fighting game franchise of DB back during the series' original run.

Ultimate Butouden is an oddity unto itself, but Extreme Butouden is basically an undercooked dry run/rough draft for what FighterZ would ultimately become (neither game of course being developed by TOSE). And FighterZ, while it doesn't play anything like the Butoudens, has even LESS in common with Budokai, if only by sheer virtue of the fact that FighterZ, like Butouden, is an actual stab at a "serious" fighting game, rather than the "baby's first training wheels" exercise that Budokai was.

Long story short: game franchises diverge and change over time and console gens. Sometimes times it has little to nothing to do with how "good" or "bad" the previous incarnations were perceived as (though for sure, certainly sometimes it does) : sometimes though its just developers stretching and trying out new things and new directions across long periods of time.
DBZAOTA482 wrote:Even Super DBZ isn't as hot as some people here make it out to be either. Very linear, mechanics that should be available from the start are locked to the customization system, and a roster that's pitiful even compared to other fighters. It's also missing a lot of DBZ fighting game staples.
I've already said that I think you've got it exactly backwards with regard to Super DBZ's linearity compared to Budokai's. Budokai is among one of the most unremittingly rigid fighting systems I've EVER come across: which is honestly why I was as harsh on it earlier in this thread as I was. While Zephyr coaxed me into acknowledging (most of) the games' baseline playability and control, I'm ultimately still beyond disgusted with how exceedingly, embarrassingly little in the way of actual divergent strategy and experimentation the game allows you with its superficially "large" roster of characters.

There's almost NOTHING to distinguish characters like Vegeta and Goku and Trunks. Trunks can bust out his sword for a few command normals (what pitifully little in the way of command normals there are in these games: the first few Budokais I don't think had ANY): that's about it. Piccolo in the later Bodukais can alternate between his stretchy arms and fighting normally, which for these games is an utter quantum leap of character divergence and uniqueness. But again, that's about it. In 95% of most cases, there's almost virtually NO character diversity.

Combo strings are INSANELY rigid and pre-canned to the nth degree, and allow almost NO real room for you to develop your own strategies or unique way of playing. The "canceling" is beyond clunky, and oftentimes most Budokai players you see on youtube are either exploiting glitches or using cheat devices to make the combos and combat flow seem more "deep" and modular than it actually is.

The locked customization aspect you mentioned I grant you is very dumb and is easily the single worst thing about Super DBZ in my mind, no question at all. By far and away though that aspect was definitely a product of its time: that being early/mid-2000s console fighting game design philosophy, which boils down essentially do "pad the game out with as much single player busywork as possible so as to better rope in non-fighting game players with non-competitive grinding".

Guess what though? As bad as that was in Super DBZ (and I'm no fan of it there anymore than I am of it anywhere else), it was a BILLION-FOLD worse throughout the ENTIRE Budokai series, which forced you to jump through absurd and ludicrous hoops to "unlock" everything from 90% of the main roster to even oftentimes the vast lion's share of the character's movesets (such as they were).

Throwing Super DBZ under the bus over a feature that was infinitely worse and more pronounced in the Budokai series that you're hoisting up is an absolutely stunning double standard. Again, I don't defend its use in Super DBZ at all. That being said though, beyond that unfortunate aspect of the game, Super DBZ at least remembers to otherwise be an actual fighting game, with a diverse and divergent set of unique moves and play styles for every character, and a minimal reliance on canned dial-a-combos (less than even some of the MK games).

And shitting on the roster number is just the most shallow and silly argument: the original Street Fighter II started out with 8 characters, and still holds up today as a defining classic with boundless degrees of depth. Even a more recent game like Guilty Gear Xrd has, what, maybe a little over a dozen or so characters? 20 at most?
Most of the best fighting games of all time have rosters not terribly larger than Super DBZ's.

At the end of the day, a roster of 10 to 15 or 20 characters who play WILDLY different from one another and take a long time to master is VASTLY more rewarding and preferable to a roster of hundreds who play largely identical and take minimal to almost no real effort, skill, or critical thinking to master. The average Virtua Fighter games have a roster of around 10 or 15 characters or so, and each and every one of them individually takes literally YEARS of practice to master properly.

FighterZ meanwhile has a roster of around 24 characters or so, with a few more DLC ones on the way. Compared to Super DBZ's what, 18 to 20 or so characters? That's not THAT far apart ultimately. And FighterZ is, rightfully and deservedly, being heralded as by far and away the single greatest DBZ fighting game ever made by leaps and bounds. I'm in 100% agreement with that consensus: I've played literally every single DBZ fighting game from the first Super Butouden onward upon their original releases, and I don't think its even remotely a contest between even the very best of them (which I'd consider to be Super Battle, Super DBZ, and Hyper Dimension) and FighterZ, which is on a whole other level of depth and technical grace by itself apart from its forebears.

My ultimate point here being, roster size ultimately means NOTHING, or at least VERY little. Its often times a shallow selling point, a way to dazzle people with am impressive-sounding number ("This game boasts a whopping 250 Characters!!!" Says NOTHING about how any of them actually PLAY of course.) without having to worry about actual technical gameplay nuance.
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Re: Unpopular DB opinions

Post by 8000 Saiyan » Sun Mar 18, 2018 7:42 pm

Damn, I love Kunzait's posts.
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Re: Unpopular DB opinions

Post by jeffbr92 » Sun Mar 18, 2018 7:49 pm

8000 Saiyan wrote:Damn, I love Kunzait's posts.
That's not unpopular.
Power levels are not just big numbers:

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Re: Unpopular DB opinions

Post by 8000 Saiyan » Sun Mar 18, 2018 8:02 pm

jeffbr92 wrote:
8000 Saiyan wrote:Damn, I love Kunzait's posts.
That's not unpopular.
I wasn't expressing an unpopular opinion. I was just stunned at his latest post that I just wanted to say that I love his posts.
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Re: Unpopular DB opinions

Post by MasenkoHA » Sun Mar 18, 2018 8:33 pm

Dragon Ball Evolution is bad but it’s not offensively bad. Just B-Movie bad

Frieza is the most boring of the 3 big bads of Z

I see nothing wrong with the Funi dub made Goku more Superman like (right down to turning Bardock into Jor-El) when the source material already apes Superman’s origin story for Goku.

Saffron Henderson is the best Gohan english dub voice. Nadolyn sounded like a chain smoker and Colleen is the typical modern anime dub try hard kid voice.

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Re: Unpopular DB opinions

Post by Sailor Haumea » Mon Mar 19, 2018 12:21 am

MasenkoHA wrote:Dragon Ball Evolution is bad but it’s not offensively bad. Just B-Movie bad

Frieza is the most boring of the 3 big bads of Z

I see nothing wrong with the Funi dub made Goku more Superman like (right down to turning Bardock into Jor-El) when the source material already apes Superman’s origin story for Goku.

Saffron Henderson is the best Gohan english dub voice. Nadolyn sounded like a chain smoker and Colleen is the typical modern anime dub try hard kid voice.
I disagree with all but the fourth point. I wholeheartedly agree with point 4.
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Re: Unpopular DB opinions

Post by Hawk9211 » Mon Mar 19, 2018 3:20 am

8000 Saiyan wrote:
jeffbr92 wrote:
8000 Saiyan wrote:Damn, I love Kunzait's posts.
That's not unpopular.
I wasn't expressing an unpopular opinion. I was just stunned at his latest post that I just wanted to say that I love his posts.
Especially his wuxia thread is just lit.
Why power levels are important?
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Re: Unpopular DB opinions

Post by DBZAOTA482 » Tue Mar 20, 2018 12:09 pm

Kunzait_83 wrote:When you open with name-calling right out the gate before any actual point you're not only not off to a great start, you're also kinda tipping your hand that you're motivated primarily by a gut emotional response rather than logic or critical reasoning.
That wasn't meant as an insult. It's just a moniker I gave for you because of your detailed posts and it's a way of saying you have a way with words, which you really do have.
Stuff
Sorry, but when you claimed Budokai fans think "large" rosters and "tedious" unlockables make a "deep" fighting game suggests a lack of intelligence... or at least a lack of judgement because honestly... who the fuck would think that? I also never heard a fan say something like that.

Of course, most of the Budokai playerbase are casual. It's like that for every major fighting game series- only difference the demand for a competitive Dragon Ball fighting game wasn't there back in the day. Also nothing wrong with gamers getting nostalgic over games they fondly remember playing in the past as long as it's based on something.

Glitches and holes? You mean cancel combos and infinites? I'm certain those were intentional and those combo videos are more for show. They have limited practicality in a real match.
More Stuff.
Their obscurity doesn't change the fact some fans make them out to be something they're not. Tbh I can't speak for the Super Butoden games (though I would never peg them as "legit" fighting games) but I've seen various fans put Hyper Dimension on a pedestal claiming it was on some Street Fighter level shit.

I mean... it's decent but it ain't all that.
More More Stuff
I'll admit Vegito isn't as bad in Hyper Dimension as the other games but he still stood notably above everyone else in the game. He can very easily juggle opponents and has insane corner pressure.

The first entry in a fighting game series usually play things relatively safe to avoid such balance issues including Street Fighter and Tekken.

Playing like Street Fighter isn't necessarily a bad thing but it isn't really incentive to creating a DBZ fighting game either. One could argue FighterZ is a Marvel vs. Capcom "clone" but it works a lot more in its favor because (aside from the obviously superior core mechanics) that style of gameplay compliments the action of DBZ more and it has a more accessible control scheme, a more interesting (and infinitely less awkward) combo system, and more unique playstyles.
TOSE doesn't make DBZ games anymore because they don't really make ANY games anymore, at least not as a primary developer. Last I heard, they basically just do polishing work on other dev's games. How they got to that point I don't remember the story behind (there's a few articles on a few gaming sites out in the wilds that go into their history more, which I read forever and ever ago). Someone else in here might know/remember the full details behind TOSE's downfall and can better fill in those particular blanks for me.

But I do know that it was nothing that's related to or indicative of how they made their various DB games. The Butouden series sold like hotcakes back in their day (even among importers like myself, who gobbled them up) and were generally well received overall and considered the "flagship" fighting game franchise of DB back during the series' original run.

Ultimate Butouden is an oddity unto itself, but Extreme Butouden is basically an undercooked dry run/rough draft for what FighterZ would ultimately become (neither game of course being developed by TOSE). And FighterZ, while it doesn't play anything like the Butoudens, has even LESS in common with Budokai, if only by sheer virtue of the fact that FighterZ, like Butouden, is an actual stab at a "serious" fighting game, rather than the "baby's first training wheels" exercise that Budokai was.

Long story short: game franchises diverge and change over time and console gens. Sometimes times it has little to nothing to do with how "good" or "bad" the previous incarnations were perceived as (though for sure, certainly sometimes it does) : sometimes though its just developers stretching and trying out new things and new directions across long periods of time.
TOSE made that Kinnikuman Tag Team game on Famicom which sold just as well as vanilla Super Butoden and we know how that turned out...

Again, playing like Street Fighter doesn't mean they were "serious" fighters. TOSE was just capitalizing on the popularity of both SF and Dragon Ball Z at the time which became blatantly obvious with Final Bout... showing they didn't actually know what they were doing. The Budokai series was created to show Dimps is just as capable in the realms of 3D as they are in 2D when it comes to fighting games and now they're co-developing for the Street Fighter series. What is TOSE doing now? Nobody really knows...

The only actually "serious" Dragon Ball fighting game prior to FighterZ was Super Dragon Ball Z which went wood outside Japan.
I've already said that I think you've got it exactly backwards with regard to Super DBZ's linearity compared to Budokai's. Budokai is among one of the most unremittingly rigid fighting systems I've EVER come across: which is honestly why I was as harsh on it earlier in this thread as I was. While Zephyr coaxed me into acknowledging (most of) the games' baseline playability and control, I'm ultimately still beyond disgusted with how exceedingly, embarrassingly little in the way of actual divergent strategy and experimentation the game allows you with its superficially "large" roster of characters.
Nah. I played the shit out of Super DBZ for all its worth and even saw plenty of high-level matches so I think I know what I'm talking about. The neutral of that game revolves around poking and launching projectiles to pressure the opponent into dropping their guard as there's very few ways to actually beat their defenses outside grabs. You can do that in Budokai plus there's actual room to be aggressive, employ intricate mindgames (moves that break guard, attacks that track sidesteppers, attacks with nullifying attributes, etc.), and resource management is more predominant.
There's almost NOTHING to distinguish characters like Vegeta and Goku and Trunks. Trunks can bust out his sword for a few command normals (what pitifully little in the way of command normals there are in these games: the first few Budokais I don't think had ANY): that's about it. Piccolo in the later Bodukais can alternate between his stretchy arms and fighting normally, which for these games is an utter quantum leap of character divergence and uniqueness. But again, that's about it. In 95% of most cases, there's almost virtually NO character diversity.
You can easily distinguish Goku, Vegeta, and Trunks from each other:

-Vegeta and especially Goku have more potent tranformations
-Goku and Vegeta are more "rounded" characters (Goku is Ryu, Vegeta is Ken) while Trunks is almost strictly rushdown
-Goku has mostly useless neutral P strings and has to rely on other moves to combo into them safely while Vegeta's are fast and varied.
-Trunks has two fireballs (which negate the beam clash) and a sword attack (Shin Budokai and following) for Death moves while Goku and Vegeta both have a beam and a physical combo move (anti-TC move in Shin Budokai and following for Goku in base form).
-Vegeta's dash attacks are all slow and methodological
-Goku's Dragon Fist is versatile while Vegeta's Final Impact is strictly okizeme and combo setup/ender.

So I don't agree on the character diversity (or lack thereof) in Budokai. I can understand if you're talking about the first two games since they were filled with genuine clone characters but later games did a lot to differentiate characters even on a basic level including different playstyles, ki baselines, unique transformations, and a greater variety of special moves.
Combo strings are INSANELY rigid and pre-canned to the nth degree, and allow almost NO real room for you to develop your own strategies or unique way of playing. The "canceling" is beyond clunky, and oftentimes most Budokai players you see on youtube are either exploiting glitches or using cheat devices to make the combos and combat flow seem more "deep" and modular than it actually is.
I don't get this either... Tekken for example is filled with pre-canned combos and its combo system revolves around juggles. If anything Budokai's combo system allows more freedom, especially when guard cancels are involved. And how is rigid? You can stun, combo reset, juggle, and counter (especially with later games which add stuff like teleport counters and quick dodges to the equation).

Guard Cancels... clunky? Sure, the timing takes a bit getting used to (mainly with more elaborate combos) but it's one of the most flexible cancel system I've seen in any fighting game and it established a huge gap between the average Budokai player from someone who's actually good at the game.
The locked customization aspect you mentioned I grant you is very dumb and is easily the single worst thing about Super DBZ in my mind, no question at all. By far and away though that aspect was definitely a product of its time: that being early/mid-2000s console fighting game design philosophy, which boils down essentially do "pad the game out with as much single player busywork as possible so as to better rope in non-fighting game players with non-competitive grinding".

Guess what though? As bad as that was in Super DBZ (and I'm no fan of it there anymore than I am of it anywhere else), it was a BILLION-FOLD worse throughout the ENTIRE Budokai series, which forced you to jump through absurd and ludicrous hoops to "unlock" everything from 90% of the main roster to even oftentimes the vast lion's share of the character's movesets (such as they were).
There's one thing about it- Budokai didn't lock basic mechanics such as armor properties and super cancels (which actually added to Super DBZ's mixup game). You mainly had to unlock special moves/transformations (though a good number of them are readily available), supplementary equipment/item capsules, and characters- most of which can be attained near effortlessly. Some required more searching than others but that's part of what gave the Budokai games replay value. Honestly, Budokai 2 is the only one really went overboard with unlockables. Unlocking Saibamen and Cell jr. in B3 also required more work than necessary but even then you don't need them to unlock everything else in the game so you can ignore them if you want.

I agree the first two games had tedious method of unlocking extras but later games addressed this issue... heck, Shin Budokai and Burst Limit even do away with the capsule system altogether so all special moves and transforms are integral to the characters.
Throwing Super DBZ under the bus over a feature that was infinitely worse and more pronounced in the Budokai series that you're hoisting up is an absolutely stunning double standard. Again, I don't defend its use in Super DBZ at all. That being said though, beyond that unfortunate aspect of the game, Super DBZ at least remembers to otherwise be an actual fighting game, with a diverse and divergent set of unique moves and play styles for every character, and a minimal reliance on canned dial-a-combos (less than even some of the MK games).
I don't think it's double-standard. It's just that Budokai offer a lot more in terms of single-player content. Say as you might about Budokai 3's Dragon Universe, but it gave the game a lot more longevity than Super DBZ's primitive no-story-having-rigged-bullshit-difficulty-curve-arcade-mode in the form of Original and Survival mode.

I'll give you this though- I actually like the Skill Tree system in Super DBZ- it's the only incentive to even bother with the lousy single-player content. My issue mainly lies in the console port of the game. It's fine for the original arcade version since every skill is readily available to you.
And shitting on the roster number is just the most shallow and silly argument: the original Street Fighter II started out with 8 characters, and still holds up today as a defining classic with boundless degrees of depth. Even a more recent game like Guilty Gear Xrd has, what, maybe a little over a dozen or so characters? 20 at most?
Most of the best fighting games of all time have rosters not terribly larger than Super DBZ's.
Except you can let it slide for SFII given its age and influence on the genre but it's still an old-ass game that nobody plays anymore outside nostalgia and for validation. It's like playing Tekken 2 when you could be playing Tekken Tag Tournament 2.

Guilty Gear Xrd is also an irrelevant game that only fighting game nerds and anime "otakus" care about. For how great its mechanics are, simple things like the small roster prevent it from reaching out to a wide audience.

This comment also implies Super DBZ even has 1/3 the level of complexity that you could find in GGXrd.
At the end of the day, a roster of 10 to 15 or 20 characters who play WILDLY different from one another and take a long time to master is VASTLY more rewarding and preferable to a roster of hundreds who play largely identical and take minimal to almost no real effort, skill, or critical thinking to master. The average Virtua Fighter games have a roster of around 10 or 15 characters or so, and each and every one of them individually takes literally YEARS of practice to master properly.
The paltry roster count for Super DBZ wouldn't even be an issue if it had more interesting picks and if every character was as unique as you imply they are. Aside from the badass 23rd Budokai Chi-Chi w/ Dragon Ball accessories and sword-wielding Ultimate Gohan w/ Kai outfit, it was missing various fan-favorites like Gotenks, Bardock, Super Buu, Kid Buu, and Broly.

Goku, Gohan, Vegeta, Krillin, Piccolo, Trunks, Chi-Chi, #16, and Cell are admittedly unique characters with reasonably diverse movesets between each other but #18 and #17 were effectively clones as are most of the secret characters (whom you can only unlock via the dragonballs) to the starting characters.
FighterZ meanwhile has a roster of around 24 characters or so, with a few more DLC ones on the way. Compared to Super DBZ's what, 18 to 20 or so characters? That's not THAT far apart ultimately. And FighterZ is, rightfully and deservedly, being heralded as by far and away the single greatest DBZ fighting game ever made by leaps and bounds. I'm in 100% agreement with that consensus: I've played literally every single DBZ fighting game from the first Super Butouden onward upon their original releases, and I don't think its even remotely a contest between even the very best of them (which I'd consider to be Super Battle, Super DBZ, and Hyper Dimension) and FighterZ, which is on a whole other level of depth and technical grace by itself apart from its forebears..
Except FighterZ's roster offers way more diversity and aside from the Super Saiyan Blues, none of them are "clones". 24 is also a considerably more respectable count especially we know a lot more characters are coming along the way.
fadeddreams5 wrote:
DBZGTKOSDH wrote:... Haven't we already gotten these in GT? Goku dies, the DBs go away, and the Namekian DBs most likely won't be used again because of the Evil Dragons.
Goku didn't die in GT. The show sucked him off so much, it was impossible to keep him in the world of the living, so he ascended beyond mortality.
jjgp1112 wrote: Sat Jul 18, 2020 6:31 am I'm just about done with the concept of reboots and making shows that were products of their time and impactful "new and sexy" and in line with modern tastes and sensibilities. Let stuff stay in their era and give today's kids their own shit to watch.

I always side eye the people who say "Now my kids/today's kids can experience what I did as a child!" Nigga, who gives a fuck about your childhood? You're an adult now and it was at least 15 years ago. Let the kids have their own experience instead of picking at a corpse.

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Re: Unpopular DB opinions

Post by ekrolo2 » Tue Mar 20, 2018 2:11 pm

The Kikuchi, Yamamoto, Sumitomo, Faulconer and Tokunaga scores are all good.
When someone tells you, "Don't present your opinion as fact," what they're actually saying is, "Don't present your opinion with any conviction. Because I don't like your opinion, and I want to be able to dismiss it as easily as possible." Don't fall for it.

How the Black Arc Should End (by Lightbing!):

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Re: Unpopular DB opinions

Post by Doctor. » Tue Mar 20, 2018 2:13 pm

ekrolo2 wrote:The Kikuchi, Yamamoto, Sumitomo, Faulconer and Tokunaga scores are all good.
NO. YOU MUST CHOOSE A SIDE.

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Re: Unpopular DB opinions

Post by ekrolo2 » Tue Mar 20, 2018 2:17 pm

Doctor. wrote:
ekrolo2 wrote:The Kikuchi, Yamamoto, Sumitomo, Faulconer and Tokunaga scores are all good.
NO. YOU MUST CHOOSE A SIDE.
Okay, Yamamoto :P

Yes he was a thief but his stuff is probably the most all around good for me with the others having certain problems that keep them from firing on all cylinders the way Yamamoto's OG Kai score did.
When someone tells you, "Don't present your opinion as fact," what they're actually saying is, "Don't present your opinion with any conviction. Because I don't like your opinion, and I want to be able to dismiss it as easily as possible." Don't fall for it.

How the Black Arc Should End (by Lightbing!):

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Re: Unpopular DB opinions

Post by Doctor. » Tue Mar 20, 2018 2:24 pm

ekrolo2 wrote:
Doctor. wrote:
ekrolo2 wrote:The Kikuchi, Yamamoto, Sumitomo, Faulconer and Tokunaga scores are all good.
NO. YOU MUST CHOOSE A SIDE.
Okay, Yamamoto :P

Yes he was a thief but his stuff is probably the most all around good for me with the others having certain problems that keep them from firing on all cylinders the way Yamamoto's OG Kai score did.
Boooooo.

Mark Menza all the way.

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Re: Unpopular DB opinions

Post by ekrolo2 » Tue Mar 20, 2018 2:45 pm

Doctor. wrote:
ekrolo2 wrote:
Doctor. wrote: NO. YOU MUST CHOOSE A SIDE.
Okay, Yamamoto :P

Yes he was a thief but his stuff is probably the most all around good for me with the others having certain problems that keep them from firing on all cylinders the way Yamamoto's OG Kai score did.
Boooooo.

Mark Menza all the way.
I like his score too, I'm not being sarcastic either.
When someone tells you, "Don't present your opinion as fact," what they're actually saying is, "Don't present your opinion with any conviction. Because I don't like your opinion, and I want to be able to dismiss it as easily as possible." Don't fall for it.

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Re: Unpopular DB opinions

Post by TobyS » Tue Mar 20, 2018 4:01 pm

8000 Saiyan wrote:
jeffbr92 wrote:
8000 Saiyan wrote:Damn, I love Kunzait's posts.
That's not unpopular.
I wasn't expressing an unpopular opinion. I was just stunned at his latest post that I just wanted to say that I love his posts.
That dude was obviously teasing you man. A joke.

The humans were mistreated and their inclusion was inherently misleading and thus a cruel trick to their fans.

If you add up the “fuck the humans” anime fans and the “powerscaling logic trumps an enjoyable story” manga fans, we are still a minority...
Yamcha almost certainly did not cheat on Bulma:
He was afraid of Women, Bulma was the flirty one.
Yamcha wanted to get married (it was his gonna be his wish)
He suggested they settle down in the Trunks saga.
Alternate future Trunks is not a reliable source.
Toriyama wanted new SSJ Kids and not make new characters.

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Re: Unpopular DB opinions

Post by MasenkoHA » Tue Mar 20, 2018 6:04 pm

ekrolo2 wrote:The Kikuchi, Yamamoto, Sumitomo, Faulconer and Tokunaga scores are all good.

Other than the Buu theme which is freakin amazing I can't get behind the Faulconer score it's just there. A lot of it just drones on and sounds same-y to me. But damn that Buu theme is fun.

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