Dragon Ball Z Team Training

August 26, 2022

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What if you could play Pokemon, but instead of Pokemon you have your favorite Dragon Ball characters. It's goofy fun, but not great execution. Fun to play through with some cheats though.

A lot of work went into this, and you'll keep seeing new things.
Combines Pokemon and DBZ in a surprisingly good way.
Fun evolutions like using moon stones on saiyans to make great apes as well as a full fusion system.
No real type system to speak of, but what little is left makes it worse (dark types are almost unusable due to their weakness to fighting).
Overworld graphic changes are very obvious and clash with existing tiles.
Gameplay grows quickly stale as you gain very powerful moves early and little strategy.
While Surf has been replaced with an item, other HMs have not, which is fine except so few fighters learn Cut it can be difficult to navigate the world.

2/5 Stars

Summary

Pokemon Fire Red, but all the Pokemon are now Dragon Ball Z characters. All Pokemon and most moves have been completely replaced and the dialog, story and world have also been modified. You can hunt for the dragon balls, visit capsule corp, raid the snowy red ribbon base (the gym) in vermillion city, and hunt for rare fighters in The Babidi Zone.

Major Features

Over 200 fighters from all Dragon Ball media.
Fusion system to combine two fighters into one.
Battle backgrounds to look more like dragon ball locales.
Overworld maps and names modified to follow Dragon Ball theming.
Lots of new items and evolution stones.

Review

This is a weird one, but it's fun for the novelty. If you're a big Dragon Ball fan, it's fun to run through. It's fairly easy through most of the game and you can easily use Fire Red Rare Candy cheats if you want to keep rolling through. The new sprites are mostly good, but the overworld items have a very noticeable clash with their surroundings, not really matching the Fire Red style. The fighters look pretty good for the most part, but some of the back sprites are not pretty.

The fighters are only within a few types (mostly fighting, fire, steel, and dark) and most of the weaknesses and resistances are non-existent. The ones that are still present make it actively worse. When I realized Frieza was Dark/Ice and dark still had a weakness to fighting (a move type that everyone learns) I realized I could just not ever have him on my team. The only real appearance of strategy along these lines is some of the androids being able to absorb ki like they could in the show. Which is a fun touch, but just meant I finished them off with a single physical attack instead of a single kamehameha.

It was fun seeing what changes were made to the overworld and what evolutions you could get. Every saiyan being able to become an oozaru via a moonstone was fun and meant I kept Raditz through a lot of the game. I also enjoyed the somewhat janky later in the game feature of fusing two fighters together and being able to choose between potara and fusion dance. The fighters mostly follow canon (gohan though has a Super Saiyan God form in order to balance him along the Vegeta and Goku starters), so you know which characters are completely worthless. You will never use a saibaman. To help out with this, the Namekian elder and old kai and maximize the IVs and EVs of certain weaker fighters, but this just means anyone in the mediocre range is completely outclassed by people better and worse than them.

If you are not into Dragon Ball, this isn't worth a play through, the game's main feature is the novelty of it combining two things you love: Pokemon and Dragon Ball and holds nothing for people not into both. It's number of features and graphical work are impressive, but I do wish the typing system had been either completely thrown out or overhauled to improve the actual play experience.