Yet another disasterous DBZ fighting game hits the PS1.
In fact, DBGT: Final Bout is one of the most cumbersome fighters ever made. Its poor graphics, below average character selection, stiff controls and broken fighting system make it a game that should be approached with caution by even the most hardcore DBGT fan.
Graphics: 2/10
DBGT’s graphics are very poor. If we would be to compare the graphics in Final Bout to other games that were released during the same time period we’d probably come to the conclusion that this game has more in common with first generation PS1 games. The characters are horribly deformed, as they use most of the techniques used in games that came out back in 1996: Small joints, over large body parts, disjointed clothing, etc. Unfortunately the characters are also very small, this situation is worsened by the animation which is atrocious, skipping frames on several occasions. The resolution which too is very small is also equally as detrimental due to the low polygon count of the characters and their small stature.
Despite the obvious problems however, the character design is very true to the show and it shows that the developers had a few good ideas in mind as far as design was concerned. The game also doesn’t suffer from any framerate problems which is always a plus.
However, the problems don’t stop there. The arenas are barren and feature very little diversity being split between the same sorts of things you’ve seen in DBZ fighters before: Wastelands, plains, and cities in rubble. What’s worse, the arenas are just simply a bunch of backgrounds, without any interactive parts or original themes, where characters duke it out. Colors are very bland and feel washed away. On several occasion the colors also “dripped” as well as overlapped other colors. The attention to detail is almost universally absent which is clearly displayed through the poor quality of lighting, smoke effects and the lack of discernible facial expressions.
Sound: 3/10
Arguably the sound is the most serviceable component in DBGT: Final Bout. There's some decent battle tunes, inspired by the anime along with your standard battle cries that you'd expect from a DBZ/GT battle. There is nothing necessarily original about the sound but the music’s upbeat tempo keeps the battles moving while the use of real voice actors to portray the characters is a nice touch. However, I wish the characters would do shut up because, simply put, they make the guys at Funimation seem good.
Where the sound falls apart is in the quality department: The quality is well beyond anything on the PS1, but not in a good way. The sound quality is, at best, comparable to the sound chips on SNES cartridges.
Gameplay: 1/10
Final Bout has one feature worth your time: It has GT characters. That's all that DBGT: Final Bout has to offer fans of both DBZ and fighting games. And if it’d even do that right…
Let's discuss the characters: There's quite a few of them and that's nice and all, too bad that most of them are just repeat versions of the same character, for example there are 3 forms of Gokou, 3 forms of Vegeta, and so on. Luckily, there's a whole slew of characters to unlock and they make for a nice diversion from the fighting engine. Though, one thing must be mentioned above all else: The only reason these characters pass as decent is because Final Bout is about the only DB:GT game ever made. Otherwise the characters are nearly identical, while their moves have little variety and most combos which work for one character work for every other character from that group (i.e. all 3 Gokous).
The arenas and the game modes, on the other hand, are a very underdeveloped and lack any variety. All of the arenas in this game are completely lifeless with far off structures or mountains in the background that you can't really see and play more like 2D battlefields in a 3D game than anything else. The tilesets suffer from the same tired DBZ cliches that have been seen in this type of game over and over again: Mountain ranges, cities, rubble, etc. There’s nothing even remotely original here. To boot, the arenas are also very small, so that most characters will get to one end of the arena to the other in 2 or 3 leaps.
The game modes fare about the same, with the exception of the blaze arcade mode and a build-up mode where you take a character from lv. 1 to 100, there’s a VS. mode for the prerequisite 2-player battles. These game modes lack any originality, anything that can even be called a “story”, as the characters do nothing but spit insults at each other and the go ahead and fight each other to death without even much of a reason for this (why is Gokou fighting Gohan?) and serve only to emphasize the game’s faults.
The next obvious thing to talk about is the fighting system… which makes everything else in this game seems outstanding by comparison. The producers of this game were uninspired enough to take every negative aspect of other fighters and melt them ALL together to give you what is, perhaps, one of the worst fighting games ever made!
The basic fighting takes place in what can be called, at best, pseudo-3D, as the fighters just go at each other much like in the Budokai series. You can’t dodge, or walk into the backgrounds, or anything else that might make give the combat a 3D feel. What’s even odder however deals with the flying system. For some reason that’s completely unknown to me, every time you attempt to fly during a fight against the AI it will almost automatically attack you with an unbeatable combo which makes the flying feature fairly useless.
Combos are canned, unfortunately adding insult to injury, and are presented to the fighter in the form of moves from the DBZ series… which if you’ve seen DBZ aren’t all that many. Move variety, super move variety and everything-else-variety (even in terms of combos) is appalling. Probably in no small part due to the same character template being used many times over this lack of variety makes for an even more mind numbingly boring experience than DBGT already is due to its pacing. The characters also move at the speed of a crawling zombie. They hardly move at all, in fact, as the nimble, quick aspects of DBZ fights are switched out for fights in which two tanks charge at each other and hope to do some damage. As you'd expect, the controls are also extremely unresponsive and they'll make your fingers bleed as you attempt to initiate even the smallest movement, like turning the fighter around.
Unfortunately however, that’s not all! If the pacing wasn't atrocious already, the game comes to a grinding halt every time a character uses a super move. This is done in order to allow the other character to enter a command and either try to absorb, counter or block the beam. In the case that the character counters the beam a famous "beam struggle" ensues which bogs the game down even more. Unfortunately what this leads to is that Final Bout feels more like DBZ’ infamous filler episodes rather than the actual fighting that happens in the show. At the same time, when characters go up in the air they assume the same stance as they would on the ground making flight even more useless that it already is, as there are no special advantages for being in the air. Ahh, but I almost forgot one last element: The camera. Usually I leave this for the graphics section, but combined with Final Bouts horrible, choppy, and unresponsive controls, the camera which can, at one time be standing right besides your character and in the next second it'll do an 180-degree-spin and turn upside down makes the game nearly unplayable at times.
The AI in Final Bout does exactly what is expected from an AI in any fighting game: It puts up a good fight. Safe for the air-combo, the AI is actually fairly well balanced and is a stark contrast to the rest of the game.
Multiplayer: 1/10
Simply put, in a fighting game the multiplayer mode is only as good as its gameplay: That means that DBGT has a serious problem in this section. Not even the most hardcore DBZ fan is likely to enjoy this, and in 2 things can get a tad worse. Since most human players don’t abuse air combos, and they can counter beams efficiently, fights in multiplayer can bog down to the point where they take 5-10 minutes to complete. That’s a major no-no for any fighter.
Overall:1/10
It’s not necessarily that this game is broken that hurts it more, but it’s the fact that clearly no one even tried to improve the gameplay before shipping the game, relying solely on the games’ DBGT pedigree to bag as much money as they could.
Stay as far away from this game as possible, fan or not, you'll regret buying it and you'll just encourage companies to keep pushing this stuff on faithful gamers.