[SDCC 2015] “Dragon Ball Z: Extreme Butoden” Hands-On

Dragon Ball is always a hit at the Comic-Cons throughout the world, so of course it’s always huge at San Diego Comic-Con, but we were surprised to see Extreme Butoden playable at the Bandai Namco booth, and the content available…

Dragon Ball is always a hit at the Comic-Cons throughout the world, so of course it’s always huge at San Diego Comic-Con, but we were surprised to see Extreme Butoden playable at the Bandai Namco booth, and the content available was quite enjoyable.

While Dragon Ball Z: Extreme Bukoden is a Nintendo 3DS exclusive, it’s also worth nothing that the game was also originally a SNES title that never made it to the United States, and back then, it was awesome.  Now?  It still is, especially compared to other Dragon Ball fighting games.

Extreme Bukoden is essentially a tag fighter.  The demo featured at SDCC only included Goku, Young Gohan, Piccolo, Vegeta, and a few others, with the addition of supporting Z-Characters.

Arc System Works, the folks that brought us the Persona fighters as well as BlazBlue and Guilty Gear, worked on Extreme Bukoden, so what we played was really quite solid.  Like other DBZ fighters, fights can be taken to the sky giving the game a different kind of dynamic, but it’s still fair considering you have full control of your character on a 2D plane.  We can’t say the same about the newer 3D DBZ fighting games.

It’s not going to win anyone over with its Circle Pad, but the tag and assist features make a nice home on the 3DS touch screen.  The controls seemed pretty fluid and there really wasn’t any slowdown, except for when characters used their Supers, which pretty much force you to watch a clip of a character get destroyed.

The game is available now in Japan, so it’s largely a finished product.  All we know for now is that the game is due out in October, and we’ll have our review up when it does.