Late to the party, but I would just like to say that the opening for me was very disappointing, not the animation, visually it's very good (though, I think they should've put Gogeta and Vegetto), but the music...
I remember when I came here months ago and said that I was hoping for this game to be the first DB game to finally have a opening theme with vocals after a whole decade, it was the final chance, but...no luck, they repeated what they did with Ultimate Blast, Battle of Z and Xenoverse 1, once again used a song from the anime for the opening, yeah, for me, this was the final chance, Kenji Yamamoto's scandal from 2011 truly killed the opportunity of any future DB games post-Raging Blast 2 to have their own theme song with vocals, since then they just refuse to create new ones, they'll keep using the anime opening themes eternally, truly a shame
As for the game, well, not going to play it, so can't say much really, but as far as I've seen in videos, the visuals look very good, though I think the character animations in some cutscenes look a bit awkward when compared to games like Xenoverse 1/2 cutscenes (not comparing with FighterZ or Kakarot cause it's unfair I think), it feels like the characters are trying to simulate how characters in modern Triple AAA games move to me, and I'm not even going to talk about the mouth animations
other than that, they look very good.
Really dislike how most of the story is told throughout static images, that was very underwhelming in my opinion, truly disappointing how all of the anime games are following this formula nowadays in order to cut costs and time, I'm not asking for them to make super complex and awesome looking cutscenes like the ones from Kakarot, but just do the basics, all of the games released before tried their best to make animated cutscenes, if Burst Limit, released 16 years ago, could do it, why wouldn't this one be able to do too?
The Custom mode looks interesting, though I feel it looks like to overcomplicated to create your own stories, not sure if it's going to work for the community for too long, I know it's hard to moderate what is written in the titles and dialogue, but I think they could've done a better way to choose them, these menus are too weird, also, speaking of them, the menus are very uninteresting, not the ones with animations of course, those look awesome, but the ones where you customize your character and where you choose your characters, the art direction for this game surely is something odd, also, speaking of art, It's been a few months since I already saw the character selection screen, but only now I can say that for me it's really lackluster, r.i.p Character Selection with Individual Characters and Transformations Arts
Now, for a fan like me, who already know the entire canon story, and is only going to watch others playing, surely the "What Ifs" may be the most interesting part of this game, and I have to say that I'm truly surprised, I only saw one of Goku's what ifs in full and some of the Goku Black what ifs so far, and while the Goku Black what ifs were pretty meh for me (nothing really interesting happens, some cutscenes are really cool to see actually, such as Goku's defeat, but story-wise there's nothing surprising going on, but I didn't see all of his alternate stories, so there may be a surprise for me), but now Goku's what if was truly a huge surprise for me, I was really expecting that these what ifs would only last a few battles and end very fast, but no, they are very long! I loved this, event though it doesn't cover up the entire story, it still covers a big part of it, I'm truly amazed, feels like I'm really following a alternate version of the anime/manga and not just a specific story point, I can say they put a lot of care here, thrilled to see the other what ifs!
In the end, when it comes to the gameplay and content, from what I saw in the reactions from those who played it, this may be indeed the best Dragon Ball game released in the last 10-15 years, feels very fun and flown, there are a lot of things to do, but when it comes to the artistic choices, like the way the story is told with its countless static frames and images or the generic menus, unfortunately it has to be one of the weakest if not the weakest DB game released in the past few years, even The Breakers had a better work in its artistic part, yeah, the Graphics and character models are good, but I'm talking about the overall art direction of the game, something just went wrong here, I can at least say that...well..it's kinda accurate to the original Sparking Trilogy when it comes to the cutscenes being "lazy", this is called production level and quality, and we can tell that the Budokai games, released before the Sparking Trilogy, had a bigger production (better and more complex character animations), they spent more resources in them, the 3 Budokais are all differente games, while Sparking 1, Sparking Neo and Sparking Meteor are all pretty much the same game, with each sequel just improving the gameplay, changing a few things and adding more characters/content, so that makes SM feel very complete.
Here they had to do everything from scratch, so you can clearly see how there are multiple notable quality and low production cost issues in the game, hope they improve these in the future, but they at least spent their resources very well in the most important part for the players, that must be enough.
I simply wouldn't want to imagine my life without Dragon Ball, thank you Akira Toriyama (1955-2024), you are now immortal ~☆
