Which games are the most "shovelware?"

Discussion of all things related to Dragon Ball video games (console and portable games, arcade versions, etc.) from the entire franchise's history.

Moderators: General Help, Kanzenshuu Staff

Jord
Advanced Regular
Posts: 1474
Joined: Sun Dec 19, 2004 8:13 am

Re: Which games are the most "shovelware?"

Post by Jord » Mon Jan 18, 2021 8:30 am

The "collection" was a joke.
You can't call it a collection if you only include 2 of the 3 games. (4 if you count IW)

Heck, even if there were only 2 games in the series, calling it a collection seems generous.

User avatar
MrSatan2099
Patreon Supporter
Posts: 103
Joined: Mon Nov 20, 2006 1:42 pm
Location: Kentucky
Contact:

Re: Which games are the most "shovelware?"

Post by MrSatan2099 » Mon Jan 18, 2021 10:03 am

Dragon Ball Evolution on PSP.

User avatar
Yuli Ban
OMG CRAZY REGEN
Posts: 797
Joined: Tue Jun 09, 2015 9:07 am
Location: New Orleans, LA
Contact:

Re: Which games are the most "shovelware?"

Post by Yuli Ban » Sat Apr 03, 2021 5:31 am

precita wrote: Tue Nov 10, 2020 3:55 pm The entire PS3/360 era is the shovelware of Dragonball games.

After the franchise had a revival during the PS2/Gamecube/XBox era in the early 2000's due to the franchises popularity in the west, it obviously dropped off after that since the dubs were done and the whole PS3/360 era from about 2007-2013 came out when the Dragonball franchise was at its lowest point since the late 90's.

The PS4/One era started off meh too with just Xenoverse 1, but picked up when Xenoverse 2 came out and improved and of course Fighter Z. DBZ Kakarot is pretty decent for what it is too.
This is why the Naruto Storm series sailed a tesseract around Dragon Ball games of the day.

Dragon Ball's international popularity was spread out over two decades. The last major dubs were finishing up around the 20th anniversary of the series' creation. The Super Famicom games came when Dragon Ball was still new and white-hot in Japan and Europe and nerd culture elsewhere. The PS2 games came right when Dragon Ball went supernova in the Americas. The USA and Mexico basically gave the series a third wind years after it went off the air.

That's why the party started wrapping up for good around 2005-2006. DB was over. There was no other big market that could provide a big windfall unless DB suddenly exploded in Nigeria. So merchandise and syndication money was draining fast. And fuse the increasingly expensive costs of HD game development along with oversaturation, yearly game contract preventing a refinement of quality save through blundering through a series of games mildly iterating along the way, and a big great financial crisis for good measure, and you can see why things recessed.

Naruto, however, had a much more unified blitzkrieg of pop cultural success. Its huge inroads into the West weren't that divorced from its peak popularity in Japan, so everything aligned in the mid to late 2000s for those games to hold up.

Imagine if Dragon Ball was at its peak of popularity basically everywhere at the same time in the early 90s, as big in America and Mexico as it was in the early 00s right alongside Japan rather than it mainly being popular among international animation & kung fu fans here (which admittedly is a sizable number, but certainly not the big bulk of sugar-fueled kids that eventually followed it).

In that scenario, the Butoden games might've been more like Street Fighter Jr: tournament-tier games. And we may have even gotten a live action movie straight out of Hong Kong. Naruto obviously didn't have either, but the stars aligned better.
The Yabanverse
My own take on Saiyajins in a fanverse.

User avatar
Yo'Goodfella
Not-So-Newbie
Posts: 65
Joined: Sat Apr 11, 2020 3:32 pm

Re: Which games are the most "shovelware?"

Post by Yo'Goodfella » Wed Jun 09, 2021 4:36 am

Man, as OP mentioned, DBZ Kinect is just that, and what a brilliant idea to try to convey the sensation of doing Ki blasts like you tried to as a kid, but that failed because Kinect. Though I think the Kinect itself comes pretty close to Shovelware, considering it was purely done to try and upstage the Wii (to be fair, the PlayStation Move is even more of a rip) and... Has been embarrassing since the E3 showcase...

Man, and I REALLY liked the concept at first.
Pretty much a guy who has been really late on catching up with Dragonball and Fighterz.

I'm really not an expert on the matter, but I like to think.

User avatar
Yuji
Advanced Regular
Posts: 1107
Joined: Tue Dec 01, 2020 6:20 pm

Re: Which games are the most "shovelware?"

Post by Yuji » Wed Jun 09, 2021 10:19 am

The first of the Legacy of Goku games.

User avatar
Yuli Ban
OMG CRAZY REGEN
Posts: 797
Joined: Tue Jun 09, 2015 9:07 am
Location: New Orleans, LA
Contact:

Re: Which games are the most "shovelware?"

Post by Yuli Ban » Sun Jun 13, 2021 1:56 am

MrSatan2099 wrote: Mon Jan 18, 2021 10:03 am Dragon Ball Evolution on PSP.
PSP Evolution is a great example of what I was talking about when I said that "most shovelware" doesn't necessarily mean "worst." Evolution is quite literally a Budokai game on the PSP with random cosplayers bizarrely labeled with Dragon Ball character names. Its gameplay is effortlessly better than even Ultimate Tenkaichi or Battle of Z for that reason.

But it's probably the absolute definition of "Dragon Ball shovelware."

The raw amount of "they didn't give a fuck" is out of control.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qrNTPDXBBc

These cutscenes aren't even embarrassing. That would imply they actually cared.

Heck, the fact it's a copy-pasted Budokai actually is evidence FOR it being shovelware. They didn't attempt to do anything different. It's a Budokai model swap.
The Yabanverse
My own take on Saiyajins in a fanverse.

User avatar
RashFaustinho
Newbie
Posts: 23
Joined: Tue Jun 22, 2021 12:56 pm

Re: Which games are the most "shovelware?"

Post by RashFaustinho » Mon Jun 28, 2021 6:48 am

Even though it cannot be considered low effort, Xenoverse 1 was beyond broken and really an unfinished game under many expects, and the 2 was pretty much mandatory for, well, actually completing the game they were meant to create.

Sadly, I have to mention the Dragon Ball Heroes games as shovelware. Not the Arcade, but all the ports they made.
They didn't give a damn. The first port for 3DS was beyond horrible due to graphical issues, the next 2 games, that would be 2 and X, not only they didn't receive a english translation but they also failed in making a smooth experience from the arcade. Cards dropped randomly and slowly. It was a tedious experience.
And the same can be said for SDBH on Swtich.
I'll give credit that at least this time they bothered to translate the game, even though it's missing a gadjillion of cards from the old DB Heroes, and obtaining the cards is a bit better with the gacha system, but most of the problems are still there. The story is an absolute joke, the dialoge is unreadable, it's very grindy and unnecessarily long.

All these ports were made while not giving a single F. The card game is fun because the arcade is fun, but as far as it goes for the console versions, my god....

Post Reply