Taiketsu Was the First Video Game to Feature a Playable Broli

When the game was first announced and released, Atari hyped up Dragon Ball Z: Taiketsu — WebFoot’s upcoming foray into the land of fighting games, coming off of The Legacy of Goku, also on the Nintendo Game Boy Advance — as being the “first game” to feature “Broly” as a playable character.

This claim was perhaps most notable for its inclusion in a promotional pamphlet packed in with FUNimation’s initial 2003 DVD release of the eighth Dragon Ball Z theatrical film:

Well, that is half true.

Taiketsu was certainly the first American-made game to feature Broli as a playable character, but hardly the first-ever game to feature him at all. Back in 1993 (nearly a decade before Taiketsu), Dragon Ball Z: Super Butōden 2 was released for the Super Famicom (SNES) in Japan, and debuted a couple characters that Americans would not see in either anime or especially video game form for nearly another decade.

The sequel to the popular 2D fighting game from the prior year, Super Butōden 2 has a story mode that takes place around the time of the Cell arc from the manga as well as Dragon Ball Z Movie 9. The game has a secret code (Up, X, Down, B, L, Y, R, A on the screen as Gohan flies forward with the overture music) that allows the player to choose Son Goku and Broli (the former being dead at this point in the story, and the latter being another movie-only character).

Of course, most (newer) American fans had never heard of this game, never mind played it enough to know of the hidden characters available to them.