What was the worst era of DB video games?

[orbitflux99]

I’d probably go with the PS3/360 era too, although I wouldn’t say everything from that period was outright bad. I actually liked Burst Limit, I liked Raging Blast, and I put a decent amount of time into RB2 back in the day. It was just around that point that I first started getting the feeling that next gen didn’t necessarily mean bigger and better anymore. On PS2, you could really see Budokai and Tenkaichi growing from game to game. Then the new generation came along, everything looked nicer, the effects were better, the character models were better, but the roster was smaller, there were fewer modes, and you were left wondering where the rest of the game went.

I don’t think that was just a Dragon Ball problem either. A lot of games around that time felt like they were paying some kind of HD tax. So many resources were going into simply making everything look next gen. Because of that, some older PS2 games look pretty basic now, but they still feel much more packed with content.

BT3 also kind of backed the series into a corner. There was already so much stuff in that game that making “another Tenkaichi, but bigger” was probably getting difficult. Raging Blast tried to make the combat more technical, and I get why some people liked that, but personally I never played Tenkaichi because I wanted some serious competitive fighter. The fun for me was that it was basically a giant box full of Dragon Ball characters where you could set up whatever stupid matchup came into your head.

Somewhere after RB2, I really started losing interest. With Ultimate Tenkaichi and Battle of Z, I kept looking at them and wondering why I even needed another DB game. It wasn’t that everything was terrible, that feeling of I need to play this just wasn’t there anymore. That’s probably why I remember Xenoverse more fondly than it really deserves. The first game is far from perfect, but at least it felt new. Your own character, the hub, online, Time Patrol, changing the timeline, all of that was enough to make the series feel interesting again after a few years of circling around the same ideas.

P.S. I was recently browsing some casino game reviews on https://befizetesnelkulibonusz.org/, mostly out of curiosity, and the first thing that stood out to me was how technically similar a lot of them seemed to be. The theme changes, the graphics change, there might be a few different features, but underneath it all you can often tell that they’re built on a pretty well established foundation. At first I thought that was just a lack of imagination, but then I realized there’s actually a big production advantage to it. If you don’t have to rebuild the foundation every single time, you can keep what already works and just build on top of it.

Compared to that, the jump from PS2 to PS3/360 feels almost like the opposite situation. A lot of things had to be rebuilt or reworked for the HD generation. So it doesn’t surprise me as much anymore that a newer DB game could look significantly better than BT3 while still having a smaller roster or fewer modes. Part of that “progress” wasn’t going into what the player would recognize as more game. It was going into making the game possible at that new technical standard in the first place.

[angeldreamZ004]

1997-2001. Because it lacked any games and the big one we got was Final Bout which all know how much of a masterpiece it is.

As for the games you mentioned I agree with all the points you gave but I also hugely blame retelling Raditz-Boo over and over and over for that, it becomes boring and uninteresting really fast to me and doing it for sequential games is crazy in my view. I can at least understand it by looking through the perspective of those games actually being the DLCs / expansions of their time, upgraded versions, not real intention of being new games. It becomes more understandable especially with the title of the Sparking series in Japan, Sparking "Neo and Meteor" making a lot more sense than "Budokai Tenkaichi 2 and 3" and helps you understand that this is the previous game updated similar to how it was done to games like Street Fighters 2 onwards, though those sequences also had the problem of removing content.

So I think it contributes to your feeling of "Why I need another Dragon Ball game" if the previous games already covered and brought the Raditz-Boo stories and characters in a more complete format.

They at least tried from time to time to deliver something more, like Raging and Ultimate Blast with their Galaxy and Hero mode.

Battle of Z had the excuse of including Battle of Gods content, but then Xenoverse came.

[Thanos]

I remember by the time Ultimate Tenkaichi rolled around, there was some question at least in my mind whether they were getting ready to shelf Dragon Ball games for a while. Then, Battle of Gods came out of nowhere and set in motion what feels like an indefinite regular cadence of releases.

It’s wild how successful FighterZ, Xenoverse 2 and Sparking! ZERO ended up being, because for a few years there it really felt like things were winding down. Who could have predicted back in 2011 that eventually there would be games with decade-plus support and big budgets.