Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is a great game, one of the best Dragon Ball games in recent memory. It calls back to the series’ RPG roots within the medium, presenting a story that encompasses all of Dragon Ball Z– and for the most part, it’s adapted rather well. Gameplay captures the intensity of the series’ greatest fights and the cutscene direction is genuinely spectacular.
But Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is also a very long game, with quite a lot of side content. Arguably too much, and very little of it is actually compelling. Kakarot is a game that will quickly wear out some gamer’s patience as nothing really revolves mechanically or functionally. Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is fun, but its cracks start to show around level 50.
10 Random Encounters Are Boring
Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot’s overworld battles aren’t particularly time consuming, but in a game with long load times (which we’ll touch upon later,) they wear out their welcome fast. Worse yet, random battles don’t reward much in the way of Z-Orbs of experience and generally just distract players from exploration.
Their worst quality, however, is that they’re just boring. It’s easy to just punch your way through most random battles, and few of them actually engage on a meaningful level. Even Villainous Enemies offer very little in terms of variety. The fact that defeating every Villainous Enemy is required to unlock the superbosses is irritating to say the least.
9 Characters Take Way Too Much EXP To Level Up
This really goes hand in hand with random battles rewarding little as far as EXP is concerned. Characters simply take so much experience to level up that the mere idea of grinding from random battles is downright silly. Side quests are a more consistent means of leveling, but just playing through the game will reward characters with enough experience to keep up.
RPGs with leveling systems typically thrive when they make leveling fun and engaging. When leveling is involved and consistent, there’s a constant feeling of progression. That just isn’t present with Kakarot, at least not in the conventional sense.
8 Party Members Will Always Lag Behind
Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot takes its sweet time introducing party members and it kind of ends up biting the game in the tuchus. By sheer virtue of accompanying Gohan to Namek, Krillin will naturally be able to keep up level-wise until halfway through the Cell arc, but Yamcha and Tien won’t be keeping up without a decent bit of grinding.
Anyone who skips Intermissions will end up with an incredibly weak supporting party. Tien and Yamcha might not even be in the 20s by the time players finish the game. In keeping true to the manga’s story, Kakarot leaves very little room for other party members to do anything but lag behind.
7 Kakarot Doesn’t Take Advantage Of Party Members
Which is just an enormous flaw in the party system in and of itself. It makes sense for the party to be so restricted on Namek, but there’s no real Yamcha, Tien, and Krillin couldn’t half been party members at some point during Gohan or Piccolo’s training in the Saiyan arc. Considering how much the game edits the Cell arc, there’s no excuse for Yamcha, Tien, and Krillin not being in the party at all times.
It just makes no sense that Kakarot would rearrange so many important key details, but something as simple as acknowledging the Earthlings by allowing them to participate in the action really undercuts the RPG at the heart of the Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot experience.
6 Character Availability Is Awful
Further detailing why the party system in Kakarot is such a bunch, the character availability is god awful– to the point where there may as well be no party system. Krillin’s the most active party member in the game, but even he’s missing from virtually every big boss fight. It’s just as bad with the actual playable characters.
Gohan is the most consistent playable character and the closest thing to a protagonist, but Goku hijacks the Buu arc from him big time. Goku dominates the last quarter in terms of playtime, but he’s completely absent from some pretty big chunks of the Saiyan and Namek arcs. Vegeta and Piccolo are playable at a rather scattershot pace, but it’s Trunks who gets the worst of it.
5 Trunks Might As Well Not Be Playable
The Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot staff don’t care for Trunks. That’s really the only logical explanation for why so much Trunks content is skipped. He has a boss battle against Mecha Frieza, but he pretty much does nothing for the rest of the game. His training with Vegeta is from Vegeta’s perspective, not Trunks’. Which is utterly ludicrous.
Trunks doesn’t fight 17 with a party while Vegeta fights 18; Trunks finding Gero’s lab with Krillin is a textbox; Trunks fighting Perfect Cell after Vegeta happens off-screen; and the literal end of the arc where Trunks kills all the Artificial Humans in his future, the plot point that ties the whole arc together… is skipped. Trunks was done dirty.
4 There’s Next To No Difficulty
As far as licensed video games go, Dragon Ball games typically have pretty good difficulty curves. If nothing else, most Dragon Ball games will actually try to engage with the player through some level of challenge. The majority are easy enough for even the most casual gamers to get through, but skill ceilings are often high enough to keep more seasoned pros entertained.
Not the case for Kakarot, one of the easiest games of the year! To its credit, there are a few key boss fights that are actually super hard. Plus, most of the bosses actually are pretty well designed (for the most part.) It’s just that getting through the game takes little to no effort.
3 Bosses Will Spam Attacks Like Crazy Near Death
If you’re amazing at the game, this is actually a pretty nice feature that makes the toughest boss fights really feel like they’re right out of the anime– capturing the gravity of the series’ many legendary showdowns. Otherwise, this is an enormous pain that turns the game’s ten or so hardest bosses into borderline nightmares to contend with.
The boss spam is real, and particularly nasty ones like Dr. Gero and Cell will spam moves that heal them. It’d almost be unfair if dying weren’t next to impossible. What it is is obnoxious, and painfully so. No one likes getting bodied at the very end of the fight. Worse yet if the boss actually pulls off a kill.
2 A TON Of Story Content Is Cut
Don’t get it twisted: Kakarot really is one of the best adaptations of Dragon Ball Z there is– if not the best as far as covering all four story arcs go. It is a museum of Dragon Ball history with a genuine love for the series. At the same time, many concessions are made to keep the game moving at a brisk pace.
One has to wonder if the right concessions were made, however, as quite a bit of story content is cut. The following are either heavily trimmed, relegated to a text box, or omitted outright: Goku on Snake Way, Goku training with King Kai, Bulma finding Kami’s spaceship, Goku training for Namek, virtually everything with Trunks, and the literal ending to the Buu arc. No Pan and no Uub.
1 The Load Times Are Horrible (On Consoles)
PC players rejoice! You got the good version. A patch is supposedly being worked on that’ll address the loading issues, but it’s still a pretty massive issue for a game that relies on a ton of loading. Simply heading to the World Map to change areas requires two loading screens. That gets old fast, especially when hunting for Dragon Balls.
The Namek arc is probably the best part of the game in terms of gameplay by sheer virtue of it featuring the least amount of load times on consoles. Here’s hoping this gets fixed sooner rather than later. Much sooner.