Super Dragon Ball Z (Japanese: ドラゴンボールZ, Hepburn: Sūpā Doragon Bōru Zetto) is a cel-shaded 3D fighting video game, based on the Japanese manga series Dragon Ball created by Akira Toriyama. It was released in Japanese (December 22, 2005) and European (2006) arcades running on System 256 hardware, and later for the PlayStation 2 (Japan: June 29, 2006; US, July 18, 2006; PAL, July 28, 2006). The game was developed by Arika and Crafts & Meister, headed by Noritaka Funamizu (a former Capcom fighting game producer who worked on the Street Fighter series and Darkstalkers). The game features 18 playable characters, destructible environments, and a game engine geared towards fans of more traditional fighting games.
The game sold 95,082 units in the first week of its release in Japan, ranking at #2 in software sales in Japan for that week, second to Nintendo's New Super Mario Bros. The game sold 370,000 global copies.
Plot[]
Gameplay[]
Shifting away from the gameplay of recent series such as the Dragon Ball Z: Budokai and the Budokai Tenkaichi games, Super Dragon Ball Z brings its style back to a more traditional formula made famous with the Capcom, SNK, etc., games of the 1990s.
"Fireball motions" and the like provide the majority of special move inputs, along with "dial-a-combos" (as seen in Mortal Kombat 3 and the Tekken series) for closer, hand-to-hand combat. Some characters (Goku, Gohan, Vegeta, Trunks, etc.) have brief power-ups into their Super Saiyan forms. Characters have "super moves", throws, juggles, dashes, etc. that can trace their roots back to these earlier 1990s games.