Dragon Ball Z Ultimate Battle 22

First off, the intro is absolutely spectacular. It's an all anime intro done by the actual animators of the show and displays all of the characters in the game. And if you input the cheat code for the hidden five characters, the game will even show an intro for them too!

The graphics in this game are a toss-up. Each character is cell animated so the movements are pretty well animated and lots of detail to them. The backgrounds are all computer rendered and don't really fit in with the characters. They rotate to give the game a "3-D" feel to the game but really doesn't do much for it. Meteo attacks have been replaced by fireballs the size of a Ryu/Ken fireball. If you do throw one, it's not all great and doesn't stop action. Same goes for their super moves (though some are quite nice like Future Trunks' and Gogeta's). The battle intro's are just a characters face and the only thing that moves is the mouth, unless you pick a special fight from the series like SSJ 3 Goku (or regular Goku) and Vegeta, now these are well animated and well drawn out though some still lack detail like Son Goku and Freeza's intro.

The sounds overall are pretty awful. Much of them aren't from the show like the fireball and meteo sounds. The sound of your characters charging his chi sounds like an earthquake. The character voices I guess are from the show (I haven't seen the original Jap versions) and are pretty well done, even if they aren't. Music is nothing at all spectacular. 8-9 tracks that are repeated over and over. And none of them are from the show.

The gameplay is quite different from previous DBZ fighting games. First of all, the split screen action is gone and is replaced by the characters being scaled down. You can't get very far away from your opponent. There are no combo moves unless you count the special moves that smack your opponent 3-5 times. The all new build-up feature is odd because if not done right, your character will be unbalanced in power meaning if you are for example Future Trunks and you use his one move where he kicks you rapidly all the time, that's the move that will be powered up. All of your other attacks lose power if you do this as well.

All in all, this game could have been what Great Fighting Story for Saturn is. That version has all 27 characters (no code required), split screen action, and a lot more goodies. Though this one isn't too bad (it grew on me) I wish it could have had more depth to it instead of it being a rush job. Fans looking for a good DBZ beat em' up should maybe look elsewhere.

Overall: 4 1/2 out of 10