095 · DRAGON POWER
Goku and Nora are on a quest to find seven crystal balls. By finding all of these crystal balls, the Dragon Emperor will grant them one wish. It won't be easy though, there are rumors of a mysterious army that is also looking for them. FOR MORE NESTALGIA as well as show notes and links check out www.NEStalgiacast.com
- Back of the Box
- Manual
- Introductions
- Development
- Dragon Ball: Shenron no Nazo
- Made by TOSE, but DB doesn’t come to the US until 2001 to the States and 1996 for DBZ
- Dragon Power tries to remove the Dragonball References, but fans will realize most of the first arc is still in tact
- Goku was changed to more closely resemble an Americanized Kung Fu stereotype, being pictured on the cover artwork with a white gi and blue headband.
- Overview
- You control GOKU through 14 Top-Down stages exploring different regions of Earth as you try to track down the Dragon Balls. Gameplay is equivalent to a linear style Legend of Zelda consisting of an overworld and caves or houses. Occasionally for boss fights, you will enter a traditional 2D fighter view to face off against your opponent.
- Tales from the Manual
- Goku has to find Pudgy - But can’t tell who is a guy or girl
- Gameplay
- Overworld Combat
- Constantly Depleting Health
- A nod to Goku needing food because he’s always hungry
- Magic Pole
- Finally some range
- Wind Wave
- Not consistent to trigger/worth it
- Swift Wave
- Constantly Depleting Health
- Boss Fights
- Narrative
- Terrible Translations
- Nora: "OKAY, OKAY. LET'S GO ON A TRIP."
- Goku: "HOW DO WE SEARCH?"
- Nora: "USE THIS! DRAGON RADAR. NOW, LET'S GO."
- More
- Hermit: "Okay. Give me your sandwich."
- Turtle: "Why do you and Hermit want it?"
- Hermit: "Quiet!"
- Nora: "Okay! Here!"
- Nora: "Will you give me your Crystal Ball?"
- Hermit: "Okay."
- Nora: "We did it! This makes four."
- Terrible Translations
- Dragon Power makes absolutely no sense in its current form.
- But there is an attempt
- Certain objectives are given in an otherwise traditional style area. Track down the missing Dragon Balls, explore caves, find all the carrots. Get keys.
- It’s just not really communicated well
- But there is an attempt
- Checkpoint at Stage 7
- Wishes at Stage 6
- You summon the Dragon who looks a lot like the one from Karnov
- WELL, I’LL GRANT YOU ONE REQUEST
- Move Dragon in the title - Dragon now appears on the title screen
- See the Future - Get a look at upcoming levels
- Power Up - Upgrades Power to 250
- I want the sandwich - Shows Hermit floating with sandwiches
- Wishes at Stage 6
- Sandwiches
- Master Roshi, similarly has been changed to look more like a traditional martial arts master, and to censor scenes deemed inappropriate, has a fondness for sandwiches, especially Bulma's.
- This is a censor for panties
- Same damn song all the time
- Ending
- WELL, I’LL GRANT YOU ONE REQUEST
- Move Dragon in the title - Dragon now appears on the title screen
- Continue Game - Keep score going
- I want her sandwich - Shows Hermit floating with sandwiches
- Get Hamburger
- WELL, I’LL GRANT YOU ONE REQUEST
- Overworld Combat
- Sequels and Spinoffs
- Dragon Ball: Dragon Daihikyou
- Dragon Ball: The Great Unexplored Dragon Region" is the first Dragon Ball console video game ever released. It was developed and released by Epoch in September 27, 1986, for the Super Cassette Vision console, making it the only Dragon Ball game not produced or distributed by Bandai or the subsequent Namco Bandai.
- Overhead SHMUP
- Dragon Ball Daimaō Fukkatsu OR Dragon Ball: Great Demon King's Revival
- 1988 JPN RPG/Card Game. Board Game
- Mostly the Piccolo Saga
- Dragon Ball 3: Gokuden or Goku’s Story
- 1989 JPN RPG/Card Game. Board Game
- Everything up to the Piccolo Saga
- Dragon Ball Z: The Assault!
- 1990 JPN RPG/Card Game. Board Game
- Just the Sayain Saga. Ends at the Great Ape Vegeta Saga
- Dragon Ball Z II: A Fierce God Freeza!!
- 1991. Same System - Up to Freeza Saga
- Dragon Ball Z III: A Violent Battle of Artificial Humans
- 1992. Same System - Up to Imperfect Cell
- Dragon Ball Z: Gekitō Tenkaichi Budōkai
- Also 1992. Came with the Datach Joint Rom System which allowed users to scan trading cards into the Famicom Game.
- Dragon Ball Z Gaiden: Plan to Eradicate People of the Saiya
- 1993. JPN.
- Original Story which then got an OVA release a year later
- Dragon Ball: Dragon Daihikyou
- EGL
- A better Deadly Towers
- legacy of goku
- Dragon ball kinect
Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.
Dragon Power! The adventure begins!
And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Sean. And I'm Joe. And guys, today we are talking about the hit franchise Dragon Power, as it's known here in the States, but you guys might, in Japan, know it better as Dragon Ball. Dragon Ball Z? You know what's funny?
That's an important issue to bring up, too, because we do know it better as Dragon Ball Z, because that's what came to America, like, first. Yeah. You know, Dragon Ball Z came first and was a huge hit on Cartoon Network, and then Dragon Ball, like, came as like a, well, if that one was successful, let's give them the prequel. Yeah, and then everybody that watches Dragon Ball acts high and mighty when they hear that all I've watched is the Cell and Boo Saga, and that they think that I'm worse than them. At least you're not there, though. You've watched the Cell and Boo Saga, but not Frieza?
I got in late. Okay, no, because I think that's interesting, because I wonder when you were watching Cartoon Network, if you could just tell me which specific days you were watching Cartoon Network in, like, maybe, like, the 2000s. Because I grew up on the Saiyan Saga versus Vegeta and then Frieza, and then they went off the air for a while because they didn't continue with the Cell Saga and everything, and I missed the Cell Saga completely.
And only ever saw Dragon Ball Z again on the air, like, several years later when they were showing the Majin Buu Saga. Yeah, it was middle school. I remember seeing random Saiyan and Frieza Saga stuff, but, like, whenever I saw episodes in order, it was Cell and Boo. And we're going to have more thoughts on Dragon Ball as a franchise, I'm sure, throughout this episode and maybe as, like, a post-show. I thought that's what we wanted to talk about.
Well, yeah, I mean, we're talking about the game. Oh, the game. Yeah, yeah, the game, which, you know, if it hasn't been clear yet, Dragon Power has nothing to do with Dragon Ball. Joe, your thoughts, though, on the Dragon Ball franchise? Any familiarity there? Yeah, I mostly watched the Kabloo Saga, and then I watched a lot of the Garbanzo Chronicles.
That's not why. The first one gave me such a puzzled look, I was like, I'd never even heard of that, but I'm willing to accept it. Yeah, the reason I'm quiet is because this has been a blind spot of mine. And when I was a kid, there was this weird, when I would see it, I would always think to myself, wow, I would love that show. And then I never watched it, I don't know why.
Because you were into Pokemon. I was into Pokemon. And I feel like Pokemon, Dragon Ball Z, and, like, Sailor Moon are, like, three very accessible Japanese shows for Western audiences. For real otakus. Yeah, yeah. All right, that's a whole other conversation. But let's just get into the development of Dragon Powers, so we can start talking about the game. In Japan, it was released as Dragon Ball Shenron no Nazo, and that's because they weren't afraid to use the Dragon Ball name over in Japan.
Dragon Ball had already been out for two years at this point, and actually already had a game made for it, but this is the second one. And they decided, like, well, the name's big enough, we'll just do this whole thing, and it covers the first arc of Dragon Ball, the anime. It was made by Tos, who we know as, like, this shadow developer that develops a lot of games that we're only just now finding out about.
But because Dragon Ball didn't come to the U.S. until 2001, and the States really just got, like, Dragon Ball Z in 96, we get Dragon Power, which tries to remove the Dragon Ball references, but leaves in arguably the most important detail in everyone's head that the main character's name is Goku.
Well, I mean, the name Goku isn't going to make people confused. But neither is the name Dragon Ball, right? I think that people will get the idea of a magic ball from Crystal Ball better than a Dragon Ball. That's true, and on top of that, too, Dragon Power sounds like more of a martial arts thing, which if you look at the front of the box for this game, they've changed Goku from, like, a child to, like, just basically a kung fu stereotype of a guy wearing, like, a white gi, something he never wears in the game. And I think, though, if they called it Dragon Ball, we would think it was some sort of fantasy sport. Not fantasy sports, but... I think it was a billiards game. It's called Dragon Ball. We're getting so many of them. We've got Dragon Pool.
Dragon Pool would have been a terrible name, you're right, so at least they didn't do that. Yeah, I do think, though, that if you can check out the front box for Dragon Power, it's pretty funny how, you know, this is no better than... Mega Man. Or, yeah, Mega Man, sure. Yeah, it's pretty bad box art, actually, you're right. But I guess I meant, like, remember how Chubby Cherub was actually, like, that other Japanese series about ghosts? Yeah, that weird thing. They at least took the time. And, you know, that was a Bandai thing as well. They took the time to be like, well, we should adapt this for a Western audience. In this one, they're like, kids love karate. I mean, we got Karate Champ, we have Karate Kid.
So, honestly, this game should have been called Dragon Karate. Right. Or just karate. And you're probably wondering, how in the world do you play a game like Dragon Ball when 2D fighting games don't really exist yet? You know, there's no Street Fighter 2 on the market, and that's how we know Dragon Ball games today. And so, just to give you, like, a brief overview, you control Goku through these, like, top-down, I want to explain them almost like Zelda-like stages. But they're in a linear fashion instead of open exploration. So, you go through these 14 top-down stages, exploring all different kinds of regions, but you're apparently still on Earth, even though it's not our Earth. They do call it Earth.
And you try to track down the Dragon Balls, or as they're referred to in the game. The Crystal Balls. Yeah. Which I guess does make more sense if you have no idea what the Dragon Balls are. Yeah. Right. As I mentioned, gameplay is equivalent to a linear style of Legend of Zelda, and it consists of an overworld and caves, or sometimes just walking into people's houses, which winds up being a thing in the Legend of Zelda, too. So, who knows? Maybe the Zelda team was watching the Dragon Ball stuff and being like, yeah, that's good. Break into people's houses.
And occasionally, for the boss fights, you will enter a traditional 2D fighter view to face off against your opponent. However, this isn't really that refined compared to later combat games, so we'll definitely get there. Any other things that you guys think I missed on just an overview of the game? I think you got it for the broad strokes, right? There's a couple weird puzzle screens, too, that are also in that two-dimensional style, but whenever it goes two-dimensional, it's really just taking away the fact that you can walk up or down. Right. Everything else is the same. Yeah, there's a few levels that almost look like Mario Bros. levels. I was actually just about to say Mario Bros. I think that's the perfect way to describe it.
I only have a very quick Tales from the manual, because the whole... We can do a whole episode on the manual. Right, we can do a whole episode on that, and guys, feel free to chime in what you guys think. But I just thought it was really strange how we're not talking about plot points from the anime or anything like that. We're not using their names, but it leaves in an important plot detail that you would only have ever known from the anime if you watched the first ten episodes. And so it says in the tip section that Goku has to find Pudgy, who is Oolong, if you're familiar with Dragon Ball. And it says, but Goku can't tell who is a guy or who is a girl. That was the weirdest thing.
And it's like, that's very strange, right? But in the anime, it's established that he actually doesn't know. Like, he was never taught that thing, and so he always checks. He just, like, touches people's privates in Dragon Ball. This is in the anime that this happens? This is in the anime. He touches them to find out if there's a bump.
Was this in the Funimation version? You know, that's a great question. I was watching the original Japanese when I was looking at it. I'm a dubbed guy. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know what's funny is you can actually mix, you know? Like, you can have now, like, the Japanese, the original uncut, but with that stuff. So I will say that I think it's still in there regardless because it becomes like a, you'd have to cut out, like, a lot of important story beats. Yeah. But, of course, that information is the only reason you would need to understand why you have to find Pudgy in this game because there's people with question marks and you need to figure out which one of them is Pudgy. But I don't think we need that detail. No, it's really strange.
I like that this whole section is, it takes the gameplay of the regular game, but then adding this weird, like, amnesiac element to it. Like, you don't know what anything you're looking at is anymore. I don't know. We can get to that part when we get there. I think we'll have to make a, like, a sidestep for terrible translations, you know? But I just thought that that was funny. The whole manual does treat you like you know what you're doing even though there's... Like you've watched the show. Yeah, there's no established franchise here in America, so it is strange.
Joe, any tales from the manual? I think my overall, I mean, the whole manual is just... We've gotten a lot of, like, poor translations and stuff. This one is just... Some of it... I mean, you can sometimes figure out what it's trying to say. A lot of the times figure out what it's trying to say, but it just feels...
The sentence structures are all... I mean, just read it. I don't even... I can't even pick out one sentence to, like, read to you. Yeah, it's sort of a low light for translation recently. It makes me wonder if they'd use, like, some kind of, like, early Google Translate feature. That's what it sounds like.
It's funny. That's a good way of describing it. And I don't know if you wanted to get into this first or into some other portion, but... Bring us wherever you're taking us. So, this game is much more story-focused than many that we've played before. Yeah, I think let's start there. Let's just jump right into the narrative because each chapter, or as they're referred to, but there's stages, each stage has, like, an entire episode's worth of, like, you know, plot moments to cover and, like, things to do. It has cutscenes. This is a game that has cutscenes, and it's... But don't get your hopes up on the cutscene part. No, no, no. Please get your hopes up.
It's sort of a comic book... Even that is saying too... Is giving it too much credit. Well, you're saying... That's what it calls it in the manual. Because the manual says it. But, yeah, it'll show two characters on either side of the screen while very, like, low-key music plays. We'll get into that later. Yeah. And they talk to each other in the same broken English that is in the manual.
And we'll get into this again later, but my favorite line is, If we touch him, we will become carrots. Yeah, which is just, like, everything in this that they've translated to English without telling you, like, you should have seen these episodes. Everything that they've done has just assumed that this is known knowledge. Think about the very first lines of dialogue where you have Nora, who's actually Bulma, say, okay, okay, let's go on a trip. And then Goku responds, how do we search? You only know... You only know that you're going on a trip. What do you mean, how do we search? And it says, use this dragon radar. Let's go. And I'm just like, what?
This is complete non-sequiturs. How do I use it? If you had no background knowledge on Dragon Ball or even Dragon Ball Z, you would think that this was created by an artificial intelligence. Use this dragon radar, though, does sound like I'm about to get a tutorial on, like, how to use the dragon radar to find the boss. That was what I spent my first five minutes trying to figure out. I'm like, how do I use the dragon radar? She said use the dragon radar. I was like, where's the dragon radar? I was pressing all the buttons. Well, did you think that you... This is a legitimate thing to wonder. On the very first stage, did you think that that was an open world that you'd be exploring and looking for the Dragon Balls?
I mean, sort of. I did have a knowledge of, like, what your goal was in the game. I knew you were looking for the Dragon Balls. But I didn't really know what you were trying to do. Well, the crystal balls. I'm sorry, the crystal balls. I didn't know what a Dragon Ball was. I did not think it was going to be open world. And the only reason I say that is because they sort of tipped their shitty hand in the manual in that they had to explain a level. Like, it's always... I've never seen this before where in a manual they're like, okay, just to clarify something,
then this part you have to do this. Like, make sure you do it the right way. Otherwise you're going to have a bad time. Well, you know what else they sort of did it actually is in Mega Man where they put in the... You're right, yeah. ...the magnet gun. And they're like, don't pick this up because you're going to lose. And I also thought that was a fault in the design too. Yeah, yeah. So I don't know what you think about that. Yeah, well, here's a thought, right? When you hear that your objective is basically to find the crystal balls, right? In a traditional NES game, what we would get is at the end of each level, you find another crystal ball. Like, you beat a boss, get a crystal ball, beat a boss.
This game continues to, like, change the narrative on its head on the fly whenever it wishes. Yeah. And so you wind up, like, acquiring a few, then you lose them all. You've got to collect them all again in that level of... Well, you start with four. Yeah, you already have four, which is like... Like, you know there's seven.
So it's like, this game's going to be over fast. I mean, I guess it's an interesting use of the UI to tell parts of the story, but it sounds more like a slapdash effort to me. And Sean, I have to correct you there, because you actually start with three. It's the same numbers. The reason is, no, it's important because you have to understand that the way to get the fourth crystal ball means everything in this world, because it comes back to our terrible translations part. Oh, I think this is more censorship than translation.
So Hermit, who is Master Roshi, if you're familiar, he says, in negotiations for the crystal ball, he says, okay, give me your sandwich. And then Turtle, who is an actual turtle, so there's no reason to be confused there. He says, why do you and Hermit want it? Hermit says, quiet. And then Nora says, okay, here. And then shows a sandwich. It's more like a triangle. Yeah. A sandwich, yeah. Slice of a sandwich, you know, when you cut the edges.
So then she says, okay, here, will you give me your crystal ball? Hermit replies, okay. And then Nora says, we did it, this makes four. And that's how we know they have four crystal balls on them. What Sean is saying about the censorship part, would you like to tell us what that actually was? So this, I guess, was a scene in the anime where he just wants her panties.
Yes, he wants to see her panties and in exchange, and give my Bulma's 15. I think I had a misunderstanding about what the anime was up until this point. Okay, Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z are completely. Like, lewd. Oh, okay. And Dragon Ball Z is the one you're thinking of when it comes to just like 23 minutes of fighting and screaming the word ah over and over again. Dragon Ball is actually more comical. It's a slice of life thing.
Yeah, adventure is the best way to describe it. Still perverted, but it's an adventure. Yeah. Have you ever watched One Piece? No. Good. So the next point I wanted to bring up is that, yes, it is the panties, but there's also like, with the sandwich thing, I'm actually okay with that swap. Yeah, it's funny. Without knowing what it was originally supposed to be, the sandwich thing alone felt very anime. It just felt very like... The only thing that doesn't work is she sounds so indignant about the sandwich. She doesn't want to give it up. It's her lunch. She's on a tree. She's going to starve. I'll grant you that.
So did you find it weird, though, that like, as you're going through the traditional, like, linear stages, just trying to get from point A to point B, that all of a sudden these, like, other objectives just, like, become announced. But there's no, like, UI for them. It's like, now the Dragon Balls are missing, so now you just have to go and find them. I lost count of how many I was supposed to be getting. I just kept going through doors until I found enough. But there's nothing there for that. But there's also, like, exploring the caves. It's like this whole new layout, but, like, there's no real differences or anything like that.
There's the finding all the carrots when people get turned into carrots. It's like these objective mission-based things happen every now and again, but there's no, like, indication of how much... There's no UI changes. Yeah, I mean, you're right, but this is probably the most modern part of this game is, like, an adventure, a linear adventure with these little self-contained adventures within it. The only difference is that games nowadays have a little thing in the top left corner saying, collect this many.
Yeah. The little mini adventures felt kind of like a filler episode in an anime to me. It was like, we've got the overall story, but then there's, like, this little episode where they just go collect carrots to get Nora back. Or where all the stuff they've gathered so far gets stolen, they've got to collect it. It's like the season finale. And if you touch him, you will become carrot. Yes. Yeah. And I think, like, outside of it just not being communicated well that these changes are happening in your objective,
I think, like, the way Rygar handled an adventure, like a big scope adventure where you go to different things and, you know, handle different stages, that seems like it was working better, and maybe that's because of the limitations of the NES. That just seemed like it was flowing better for me than how this is flowing. But that is, I think in Rygar it was still, when you sort of changed modes, you were still, you still knew the gist of what you had to do, and that just moved to the, like, move in the correct direction.
Whereas I think in this game you have to look around more. I don't know. Right, right. I think that makes sense. Yeah, Rygar is much more of a explore the overworld to find the stages. This one just drops you off in the individual stages, but the goal kind of changes depending on where you're at. Yeah, and there are some times where you get very familiar with the stage that you're on, but you're just like, there's so many little doors, and you get kind of lost, and you're like, where do I find this one?
I got to go back here. And you're kind of running on borrowed time, which I'm sure we'll get into later, but it just makes the whole exploration aspect, like, subpar. Yeah. And there's, in the anime, there's this whole, like, Emperor Pilaf is doing this thing that, you know, he's trying to get the seven Dragon Balls as well, and that checks out in the anime because it's, like, foreshadowing that, like, Goku and Pilaf will meet, and they're gonna, he's the big bad at the end of the arc.
In this game, there's no, like, cut scenes, comic book cut scenes that cut to Emperor Pilaf saying his plan, so it feels kind of random when you get to, like, stage seven, and all of a sudden you want to fight him. But that's another part of this, like, the story that makes me think that this game is designed for fans of the show, and they're just there as bookmarks of, like, hey, remember this? Now you're gonna play that part. But now there's no context. There's no material to pull from. So, of course, it's not gonna make sense.
Is the rabbit part of the show? Yes. Okay. I thought, when I saw that, I thought, this must have been something else, and they re-skinned it for the American audience because we're not gonna know what they're talking about. In the Dragon Ball anime, the rabbit is in the show. If you touch him, you turn into a carrot, which Bulma does. Nora, in our game, gets turned into a carrot, and then they have to figure out a way to turn her back, and then they eventually deal with the rabbit by putting him on the moon. Right. Both in the anime and in this game.
Again, that's just written by artificial intelligence. It's very Final Fantasy VIII. Yeah. And the bigger thing, though, is that after stage seven, after you defeat Pilaf, stages eight through fourteen are completely original content that have never been on the show. And I think that that was an interesting direction. I had no idea. Well, you don't have to.
But I think that's an interesting direction for a franchise to go is to be like, well, there is existing content, but what if we just made up our own story? Isn't that what they sort of started doing with Dragon Ball Z? Didn't Dragon Ball Z end up having to do that at one point? Well, yeah, with the games and the anime. The anime is different than the manga a little bit. Yeah. And then GT happened, and that's not canon at all.
So it's not the first or the last time that they've done this. That's absolutely true. And there's a checkpoint at stage seven because you have finished an arc so that if you ever die in stages eight through fourteen at any point, you'll just go back to stage eight, which I think seems appropriate. So what happens at the end of seven? So I'm glad you asked because as people who are fans of Dragon Ball would know, at the end of seven, you do gather all seven Dragon Balls, and Shenron comes out, hence why the game is called Shenron. So level seven is also in the show? Yes. Yeah. Stage seven is in the show.
Okay. Go ahead. I'm sorry. Levels one through seven are completely canon. No, I meant... Okay. Continue. Yeah. And Shenron shows up and actually says, well, I'll grant you one request. And you're like, what? Really? For real? Like, I'm going to get... I'm going to actually get to, like, make a wish? And you actually get four choices. I think this is the coolest part of the game so far. Yeah, it is interesting. But the choices are very strange. So when you're given your choice, you're given four choices after the stage seven, and then four relatively of the same choices when you get to stage four.
The stage seven choices is to move the dragon in the title, which will just... Now that Shenron, or the dragon as it's referred to in our game, will just appear on the title screen. It'll just, like, kind of, like, slinky his way through the title screen. Does that save? No. It's only if you ran out of lives and had to, like, get back to the menu screen. You'll see Shenron now instead of the... Oh, you got these drag. What a treat. Yeah. So it's just the dragon power logo. Then the second choice, see the future.
What do you guys think that does? I don't know. I was waiting for you to tell us. Well, it lets you get a look at the upcoming levels, stages eight through fourteen. Just a look. Just a look at them. You can't play them. You don't get any, like, real, like... You just, like, see the overworld of them? You just... No, it's more like, um... Screenshots. Yeah, like, screenshots and description of, like, what will happen. You know, like Shenron telling you what will happen in the future. Like, you're gonna go up against this army of, like, a militia of sorts, and you're gonna have to deal with them, and you're gonna have to go into this kung fu tournament. So there's that.
Then there's power-up. The only useful option to wish for. This upgrades your power to 250, which we will definitely get into when we talk about gameplay. And, of course, the final option. I want the sandwich.
Which, if you cut... If you pick that, it cuts to Hermit in the center of the screen with eight sandwiches floating around in a circle around him. Which would only make sense if he said, I want the panties, and have the panties floating around. Because the screen is, like, glowing red, he's clearly, like, blushing. So why would he be blushing about sandwiches? This is our most NSFW episode yet. Right. Yeah. Well, what's weird is, is, like, there's almost a temptation to say, I want the sandwich. Because here's the thing. You get those four choices. Move dragon in the title. See the future. Power up. I want the sandwich. Right? They don't tell you what they do.
At least with the fourth one. The manual didn't even really say it. Yeah. At least in the fourth one, you understand. You know you're getting a sandwich. And in the game, if you collect a sandwich, that increases your speed for a little bit. So maybe you think, like, oh, now I'll always be fast. Yeah. But if I saw see the future, I'd probably click on that and be disappointed that I didn't get to see my future.
It's got an interesting, like, world-building element to it where, like, you feel immersed in it with your imagination. Oh, I actually get to make the wish. Yeah. But it doesn't really amount to much. I always wanted a fairly odd parents game where the basic mechanic is that it's like a boy and his blob where, like, everything is contextual, but you can only achieve things by Cosmo and Wanda making the wishes.
Like a scribble nut sort of thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. And then, you know, I think, like, Dragon Power coming very close on the MDS with four wishes. Pretty close to scribble nuts. Exactly. stage and get the wishes there you have to go through 8 through 14 which are a series of like kung fu tournaments and then an original arc against like it's like a year later yeah essentially actually it and that makes sense because in you know that's the war right in the anime he goes
at the end of the pilaf saga he goes to master roshi's to train and meets krillin there and then him and krillin uh fight in a kung fu tournament but it's a it's a lot different it takes a while to get to that point uh and then instead of the red ribbon army which is in the anime we fight some other army that i didn't care to write down the name of because they're not canon so you defeat them and then you defeat uh a mech version of pilaf as the final boss that comes out of nowhere
and finally you're like okay cool i got the seven dragon balls again what could the wishes possibly be this time well i'll grant you one request i keep saying that because i think that's such a weird thing for a like a dragon to say to you i think anything's a weird thing for a dragon to say you know but if it's like a genie you know it's like it shouldn't have like some kind of like like limerick or something that's very like tolkien dragons you know i just i thought maybe that would happen just wish for a paper clip here are your here are your options uh move dragon in the title
uh so i guess if you selected that already definitely don't select that because it does not add a second dragon to the title uh continue game which will just start the game over from stage one with your score keeps growing i want her sandwich which shows her sandwich yeah okay which shows hermit floating with sandwiches and then unfortunately i couldn't find out what happens
when you actually select this last option because uh well i couldn't figure out what happens in the japanese version but the final thing is get hamburger now if you're saying i want her sandwich and that means panties what does get hamburger mean get hamburger i only ever saw him with a hamburger because we had the english version i looked up the japanese one nobody ever selects who plays it on
youtube no one ever selects get hamburger oh wow so i have no idea what could happen i don't even want to spend what is hamburger a dog whistle for yeah like oh i couldn't even imagine get hamburger anyway if anybody knows let us know yeah if you ever find out for sure i think it's time that we start talking about some real gameplay stuff though and i just mentioned one thing that i feel like we may gloss over a little bit after you after you get your first wish the levels get a little strange you go to space you go underwater they just get before they all seem to be like progressing and then you're in space you put the rabbit on the moon so now you have to go to space that's true you gotta go get
with them you can't breathe you need you need the oxygen and then you have it but anyway why did they mention that you can't breathe use the oxygen tank all right well the gameplay is starting to get dream logic it doesn't get just to be clear it doesn't get weird in terms of like the gameplay getting any stranger it's just like yeah the regions have right gone bizarre and so if we can talk about the
gameplay uh let's talk about just overworld combat for a minute the big thing in the room that we have to address which joe hinted at is the constantly depleting health system this is this is the weirdest decision i think i i this was for me personally the most frustrating part of this game it's like you you lose your health obviously by getting hit but also constantly like i feel like per second
you're losing one health so you have to constantly be looking for for hp ups or whatever they call them in this game but it's food of of any sort i believe but yeah i don't was did they think that this game was too easy and then they had to add an extra layer of difficulty to it make you just always be poisoned pretty much like it's like almost having instead of numbers it should just had a timer there
being like you have three minutes left in this game and then it goes up as you collect like collect time watches yeah because then you could be low on time and not about to die if you get hit once exactly it's doubly effective because if you get hit then your time goes down like that would that would be even worse right yeah no i i agree and and so yeah it's basically it's your health bar which
does constantly go down it's meant to be a nod to goku always needing food because he's always hungry and it is kind of mentioned in the manual that like he has to eat food and stuff like that but i fail to see why this is necessary in this kind of game because you already have like fairly long stages for what it's worth you have enemies that do dish out a lot of damage specifically the bosses which are
pretty much just brute force fights you're bound to be losing hp no one's gonna make it through this you know who's playing for the first time or the first couple of times no one's gonna make it through without getting hit so there's no there's no shortage of like losing health maybe they should have just gotten rid of the food element altogether because there shouldn't have been a way to like
collect more hp in a stage maybe it was like this is your hp for this stage and since the next stage is the next episode or next storyline you'll have all your health back we presume that you've eaten since then yeah exactly but instead we get this uh system of constantly depleting health that i actually thought was like i was poisoned or something at first because when you're finally down to like your
last seven or eight hp there's nothing you can it's just a matter of time we'll just drop dead if there's no food nearby absolutely and i think that it really discourages exploration and not that there's like a ton to explore but these are moderately open areas that i didn't feel like if i knew where i was going to go i'm going beelining straight there because i don't have time to look at anything else to go fight anything else unfortunately though you will have to explore if you want to find enough
food right you're basically scavenging uh is your only is your only option i i think that this system would have if they had to if they had to incorporate this hungry goku thing into the game it should have been it depletes until you can only take one hit and and then maybe you would be able to navigate yourself and find the food again and i love this is only a half measure but it would have at least cut down on some frustration i at least in my opinion yeah the exploration thing though too is kind of weird because if you look at the manual it doesn't leave anything out so you you know everything to expect in the game so even when you find sometimes like a hidden cave or go into someone's house there's
only a limited amount of things you can ever experience anyway so yes you have to do it because there's food but uh you know there's really no like reward system other than that you must keep exploring to keep finding food to keep increasing your health because without it you'll die there's nothing unique in any of these secret areas and that's why in a lot of games that have like secret
areas i'm always sort of disappointed because it's not like there's anything fun in these areas or anything unique it's just here's some points or here's the food that you need to get through the rest of the game so it may as well be uh mandatory and when you say secret area do you mean mysterious secret scene mysterious secret scenes yes i didn't know what you're talking about
the manual has a beautiful way of describing things uh and then there's uh there's two additional like item power up things that you can get the the magic pole which is something that's iconic in the dragon ball franchise of his his pole that extends as far as you want to do as far as to the moon because that's how he puts that rabbit on the moon in the anime as far as the plot requires right uh and i like the magic pole in this game because you get it appropriately in like a story beat and then from
there you can find it and i think it has enough range that you're not taking as much damage anymore fists are tough range thing where you have to be pretty close to the enemy and even then i still felt like sometimes it just wasn't connecting but with the magic pole i was able to kind of like jab at things from far enough away especially in the boss fights yeah yeah it even with the magic pole though i think the maybe not the hitbox detection but the hitbox
its method of telling me when i've hit something it was was still kind of off there were a lot of times where i'm like am i close enough am i hitting up there's like a little flash yeah a little flash i was okay with that feedback um i still think that this game has a um when you get hit really bad um the way that it handles that is really bad in that you don't get any invincibility i don't think nope because you'll just keep taking damage you just keep taking damage frame by frame by frame and i don't know i forgot what the last game that did that was but it infuriated me then and infuriates
me now yeah and just to backtrack i shouldn't say that it's hard to tell if you hit something because there is a little flash on the screen yeah but it's hard it doesn't feel like you've hit anything there's no that the enemy doesn't react at all and it just feels like if you're going to go hit something you're probably going to also get hit in return at least that's what i felt well the biggest thing and this happens it's it's an overworld combat it's in boss fights it's because there's no
knockback at all they're they move they don't move at all they say completely stationary so even if the flash registers if you throw like three punches pretty fast there's a good chance that you might see like two flashes not all three of them because it doesn't necessarily like say like well we're in the middle of this flash so we got to make sure that we compensate the next like pat back pad them or something like that so the system there is really strange and i just i'm i don't think like a
health bar on enemies would be the way to go but it is kind of weird how like how some of these enemies are punching bags yeah um and i could never tell which because they all are just different colored weird shapes do we know what these enemies are no i i honestly have no idea what the first couple of enemies are i know what the bosses are because they're recognizable but the the enemies themselves i'm like i don't really think goku ever fought anything like that they look like almost like dinosaur meat insects yeah people and maybe each color has a different amount of hits that you
need to take care of them but it seemed like a complete crapshoot to me i definitely think color had to do with it and that's like a that's just a thing in games but but it seemed weird that there was no like oh you have the magic pole this one now only takes one hit like everything took at least three and some things took as many as seven so i thought that i thought that was strange you get the wind wave too when you finally get to the point where you have to put out the fire um because the only way to put out a fire is through the wind wave for those of you that have been following along
via dragon ball knowledge this is the kamehameha wave that's kamehameha yeah it didn't look like kamehameha yeah uh it's kind of crazy but also like you know let's first let's talk about how this is executed but also like i'm curious did you guys even wind up using this that much i didn't no so i think he's at once you have to hold down b and a at the same time and then like depending on your luck i guess like if you release a you might start seeing yourself like form the wind wave and then
when you let go of that then it'll shoot it this is really great in in like a boss fight because in a boss fight that you're on a 2d plane so as long as the character the enemy that you're fighting doesn't jump it's bound to hit the problem in the overworld combat is that this takes a while to trigger everything else on the screen is moving your health is depleting and when you shoot this thing you also have to line it up because it doesn't like connect with whatever's directly in front of you it connects
with whatever's going to be in front of you at that particular time so i've rarely connected a wind wave with any uh enemy in the overworld combat i also uh watched a couple long plays of this game and i think i saw them use it twice it doesn't seem to be a very popular method of fighting either among the fan base and it's definitely a reason for why there are no one-hit enemies in this game because the wind wave solves that but i just don't think it's worth it no to perform
if combat wasn't hard enough in the overworld now we have to deal with the boss fights and the thing that the thing that strikes me off here is that there's a way to do this correctly
but because we all like have the future site of everything else that's going to perfect this we i guess i really can't expect things like you know like nice health bars at the top or uh like a like a strategy to get around your opponent and stuff like that so do you mean that it has that there's a correct way to do this in theory or there's a correct way to do this in this game
specifically in theory okay i see yeah um the this game seems to go by the philosophy of just make it take a lot of hits and make it attack you quickly and that's pretty much their their entire philosophy for boss battles because i think they were all kind of the same in that regard there's no real ai going on here where later enemies are any harder than earlier enemies it's just more hits each time
which is a frustrating mechanic because personally you know the first boss that you fight is only easier than the very last boss because it just takes less hits but in terms of strategy and stuff all of them kind of just require you to you know hit whenever appropriate and otherwise be as far away from the boss as possible it is i i did mostly run up hit hope i'm going to hit because i can never
tell if i'm close enough where it's going to hit but if i miss doesn't matter either jump over or run back because yeah and then i usually ended up i usually get to the boss battles with pretty low health yeah because of the time thing so then i usually die and it's not like this is just a uh a product of its time we've already seen games that have variations between bosses and uh difficulty
fluctuation in bosses like this is a thing that has been proven people can do already you could argue that megaman is more of a 2d fighter than this boss fighter you know like each one of them has a health bar you're going around the arena you know it's 2d space you actually because you've mentioned this a couple times that it's sort of going for this 2d fire fighter thing i didn't even think that it was going for that interesting i thought it was just we're going to take away your up and down axis for these fights it just made me think of like karate champ yeah and games of that
nature to feel like a one-on-one duel and so that's why i say that the 2d fighting thing because it feels like and maybe it's just graphically it feels like it's there but there's no implementation of it yeah you know i'm seeing everything that tells me like you know if i didn't know better this would have an entirely different control scheme where you can actually like grab your enemy and throw them over or like do it yeah block and do like some special combos but instead you don't get to do any of
that stuff so i think i think it's like for me this is the most disappointing because you're just stuck basically brute forcing your way through these battles every single time it's not like and then you know this after a couple boss fights it's not like oh now i'm fighting yamcha good thing that there's this thing that i can do where like he's gonna do his wolf fang fist from the show you know you can counter that right i can counter that doing this you know there's not even like a creative gameplay solve where it's like oh in this one there's platforms and so you jump around
the platforms it's like everything is exactly the same at all times there's nothing to jump over there's nothing to deal with there's no like hidden trick to dealing with the the bosses you just punch them enough times and they'll die everything is the same at all times everything is the same same as it ever was we didn't really talk too much about the the caves and going into houses and stuff like that but you can do that you can do that and it's mostly like smash things or kill all the enemies on screen if you're in houses and that kind of thing or if you're in the caves which are also 2d
just break blocks until you happen to strike the right block which could happen very early or very late it could be the last block that you destroy in the cave and and those will give you keys or dragon balls and you go collect the dragon ball by just walking over it like you would in any game and then uh 11 or 12 seconds later you've collected it i don't know what that was supposed to be
i don't either there isn't there's like a sound cue so maybe it was like playing something but you still control your character until you don't until it disappears and that means you've gotten it but like you have to once you touch it you have to wait like 10 seconds it's very strange uh i don't i don't pretend to know what they're going for here you know this seems like the entire reason that this game ever made it to america was because they looked at the market and said
well it's different than every other game on the nes in in terms of like how it plays but it also has that karate thing going for it so that karate was hot karate sells like gangbusters yeah i mean what what doesn't uh have karate and what what wouldn't have karate in front of it that would be better like the legend of karate would be so much better than the legend of zelda you're right yeah that's why i don't like it right i don't know you're curious now yeah who's zelda who wait
karate hockey balloon karate karate karate junior math karate junior math honestly sounds like a real like dos game you know like something that you would actually have done like it's like typing of the dead but instead of shooting zombies you're you're you're doing high kicks yeah there's like a math equation of like four plus three and then you have to destroy seven wood blocks
anyway we're we're drifting so uh i will say that that's pretty much gameplay for me does anybody have like stray thoughts that they wanted to announce i didn't like the jump um okay worth noting yeah yeah i think the jump felt fine um but it gives you so much air that you would think you could jump over some obstacles and then you would also think that if you could jump that it could be used in attacks but there's no jump attack like am i right about that yeah you're right there should have been like a jump kick and that would help a lot with uh taking as taking that much damage but it you know it's not
there so jumping is really only for collecting things that are that are like floating yeah so i'm not really sure why that often yeah why is why does it exist i don't know well every game has to have a jump have you played super mario brothers have you played legend of zelda i did actually often forget especially on the overworld that i could jump and i was doing a lot of like dodging around things then once in a while when i remembered the jump i was like well i guess that's kind of useful okay so you didn't find it useful i mean only a few times when i was like oh i forgot about it and i was like oh yeah like it kind of gets me to move a little quicker okay oh and and in terms of the translation
is it terrible enough that it's now funny to like play through and see it or is it not even worth that i think it's funny i can see like underneath the bad translations that there's like they throw some jokes in there we don't get a lot of jokes in video games you can see that they're like trying to be anime even with the not that this is what we're talking about even with the expressions on the characters faces and i mean that was that is a bulma mouth like that that yeah but i thought so it's the question is the bad translation funny or is the question is the writing funny behind the bad translation is the bad translation funny yeah i wasn't answering the same question but uh and i
guess like you know because a lot of people will play like games like ghostbusters on the nes because the end screen like the the final card is just terrible text it's like congratulations you know like like it's just who didn't how did they miss that this is a whole game that offers that yeah i guess wondering is like and it feeds it yeah yeah and it's i think it's appealing enough to like since you get that after each story it's almost like that's what you're unlocking is more
ridiculousness yeah well i i felt a few times like it was reminding me of times when i found an old notebook from when i was a kid and i had written some story but like my grasp on like sentence structure wasn't fully there yet like a lot of it and like yeah coherence a lot of it felt like that aside from my thoughts that this was written that this was like one of those jokes of like we fed uh we fed this computer all this batman and made it write a script like we fed it 1 000 chapters of dragon ball manga and this is what i came up with but other than that it also felt like a um like a really bad fanfic
like uh if you've seen um the the half-life 2 like free man uh video it felt like that where there's just all these really bad translate it's fun it's it's fun to poke fun at it yeah yeah the translation choices are also strange too though because it's like you know why why change bulma to nora because nora's a normal person's name but can you leave goku as goku and hermit hermit like why wouldn't hermit be like some kind of like mr miyagi like type thing instead just name herman yeah herman that would have been fantastic you should be writing translations for early nes games
that's very specific but one last thing yeah one last thing okay so another thing that adds to the comedy is that um the music in this game uh fluctuates between two tracks for the most part um which is a couple bars of an up an upbeat action uh sound song oh they've heard it by now in the in the episode and i actually think i should have been cruel and played it a few times because it's every single stage didn't you yeah probably uh it's every single stage and i think what's so funny about it is at first it is pretty catchy because it's like upbeat and it's like
you know like that's it that is the song but that's the entire loop but then like it'll these random moments not random but it feels random the random moments that you go into the uh the story cut scenes it it completely changes gears it's kind of spooky it to just like
actually just just play it now yeah i'm sure i played it and um i think just the change in tone coupled with the terrible text is it's a treat i think you will enjoy it yeah but i i'm actually surprised that we haven't talked about the music until this point because that is the only music that song when you go into when you go into a cave it starts over when you pause it and unpause it
it starts over and when you listen to it for one and a half seconds it starts over if i'm being honest i muted this one i muted this one and i just put on like some nice music that i like uh actually over it i blasted it the whole time if i'm gonna hear it my roommates are gonna hear it that's funny it's my ringtone yeah that actually would be a great ringtone though like that's something i could get used to yep
well i think everybody should uh just you know grab a cold one sit back and relax because anybody who's a fan of dragon ball knows that we have 48 dragon ball games to go through right now do not list them all i will not list them all i considered it actually i said how do you digest a franchise like dragon ball and do you count things like cameo appearances or do you count like his secret unlock and super smash brothers do we do we count like the original movie and the uh vhs in north america that had to disturb track as two different releases i i would i i definitely would in fact i would even count like the dragon box dvd series and the season you know breakdowns as different releases because the dragon box is an
objectively bad box set that sells for a ton of money so i think there was also yeah exactly i also think there was one that had a slipknot song too so that's that's new as well yeah that's great yeah i mean dragon ball was one of the you know like that and final fantasy 7 were pretty much like all the rage in terms of making your own like uh fan-made music videos you know like that's what you would go for uh let's talk about some sequels and spinoffs so uh i mentioned that there was one game that came out before this one and it was not on the nes it was on the uh super cassette vision
uh it was only released in japan uh it's called dragon ball the great unexplored dragon region now these are literal translations because i'm not going to try and destroy the japanese language okay uh but this is pretty well yeah this is the first dragon ball console video game ever released it was developed and released by epoch uh and that happened in 1986 so just a year before this two years before this one uh it came out on the super cassette vision as we talked about and uh it is the only dragon ball game not produced or distributed by bandai or namco bandai all future all 47 games after
this bandai namco is all over that thing they've held on but you're probably wondering what could the first game have been right like what could be different well it was an overhead shmup uh with goku on the nimbus cloud uh shooting down enemies okay so there was no story it was really just like play as goku on a nimbus cloud going through a traditional shmup so yeah then we have dragon ball great demon king's revival this comes after this current one that we just played it comes out in 1988 and it says you know what this whole action adventure format legend of zelda ripoff whatever you want to call it it wasn't working out for us and we need to change things drastically and turn this into
an rpg card game board game okay i'm interested yeah you better believe you're interested because this game is available with fan translations uh you can play the entire game and just so anybody who's curious about any of these games in our show notes section i'm going to link every single one of these games along play is this a famicom game it's a famicom game released in 1988 you play as goku going around a board through the um the piccolo saga of dragon ball and you what you
land on well you know sometimes you'll get new cards you'll get um you know like uh fights into fights and stuff and you have to play the card game afterwards so when you go into a battle and then you select your cards and then it actually shows like cool you know uh eight bit graphic fights use it with the cards you used so it gets stale pretty fast yeah but the idea of like i'm choosing all my fight actions and then it's playing off as the cards like come at each other it'd be like watching a yugioh fight where like they fight in real time after you lay down all your moves
joe piccolo was a green man i remember piccolo wasn't he dragon ball z he was also in dragon ball i remember the green guy there was like a pink guy people into chocolate he's evil in dragon ball am i crazy that's true right there was a chocolate guy uh but he got turned into chocolate oh is that what it was that majin bu turns people into cookies and chocolate okay then uh in 1989 this is just so
you know this is the new norm okay so in 86 we got dragon ball uh the great unexplored dragon region on the super cassette vision then we get dragon ball shenron nonazo in 87 for japan then we get dragon ball great demon kings revival which changes it to the rpg card game board game in 88 that's a game a year well in 89 we are due for a new dragon ball game how about dragon ball 3 goku's story
which is again taking the rpg card game format and it does everything in dragon ball up to the piccolo saga so the first game was like oh you know you could just play the piccolo saga now it's like imagine if you could play everything in dragon ball up to the piccolo saga then in 1990 we get dragon ball z the assault dragon ball z dragon ball z it's done now 1990 dragon ball z the assault it's an rpg card game board game
just the saiyan saga and it ends at the great ape fujita battle so like pretty much the end of the saiyan saga 1991 comes around they're looking at like oh what can we do well we have this rpg card game board game let's uh let's just do that again and we get dragon ball z 2 a fierce god frieza which does everything up to the frieza saga you guessed it 1992 dragon ball z 3 a violent battle of artificial humans uh
it's everything up to the imperfect cell saga okay but things are about to get interesting i'm just like glossed over right now like i'm just like a glossed look nobody can do a pop quiz on this but trust me things are about to get interesting because the card game board game format is working every single year they're making new ones and it's just basically like you know it's like this is the yeah this is the madden of here's the newest arc of dragon ball now you can play it right well they're taking a step further because they released dragon ball z get kito tenkaichi budakai
budakai yep we all know budakai we also know tenkaichi yeah that's another thing yeah no no yeah we know all those yeah everyone knows that stuff in 1992 this game comes out same year as dragon ball z 3 but it comes with the famicom exclusive peripheral the detach joint rom system which allows the user at home to scan dragon ball z trading cards you know like via like remember the e-reader yeah like the upc or something yeah you scan them and then they they're now your cards in the
famicom game no idea that this was possible that's really cool micro transactions right here on your famicom uh and what's weird is there's barely even any story you just scan the cards in and then like it's like a combat simulator oh my yeah so very strange but there were you know seven dragon ball cards to collect i don't know what happens when you scan them all in maybe you make a wish for a hamburger but at least tell me we're we're we have one final one and i'm stopping here because it's the last nes slash famicom game okay it is dragon ball z gaiden plan to eradicate people
of the seya and this comes out the next year in 1993 which means that from 1986 to 1993 we got a dragon ball game every single year and it's the it's the rpg card game thing all over again no scanning however this time it's an original story wow oh yeah it's a gating game yeah it's a gating game but here's the crazy thing the original story that was in this game then gets to become the first ova release a year later they do make an original video animation of that same story oh that go that like you can that you can watch now so you don't have to play the game just watch the story now any of these games do
we play them or are these all famicom all famicom okay thank god yep they we won't see it'll be another three years after dragon ball z gaiden that we'll finally get dragon ball z in the states okay we should probably talk about the fact that dragon ball z games are still being made um there's that dragon ball z kakarat game uh that's like open world well what's the omniverse that's yeah xenoverse xeno versus though there's those two there's fighter z which is exactly that's a big esport now yeah that's exactly what i was looking for in this game i was hoping we could have gotten an
early fighter z in that boss fight and then there's the budokai games which were really fun and silly fighting games where they were like yeah there's like 300 characters in this one no we didn't balance this one but we can't talk about all those because this section would go on forever you guys are okay i didn't even include like interviews with toriyama about like this stuff so let's bring it to the essential games list joe you're only allowed one vote you either vote wait you're gonna vote
essential or not essential so with that in mind dragon power we're not talking about dragon ball dragon power essential or not i think it's pretty obvious that i'm not going to vote this one essential uh it had too many little issues too i hate the uh descending health bar a lot of other little things wrong with it but i do want to say that it it looks clear to me that that they tried it's not no but like i'm not even saying that like in a condescending way there are a lot of games we get
where it's like wow they just wanted to release anything they could any garbage they could release on this console to sell it seems like people were passionate about this they missed the mark on a few things and it makes the game you know not a great experience but i appreciate that they tried to implement a story and have like you know open world and do things a little differently i i'm i just don't want to i just don't want to go without saying that like there's clearly passion involved in this they had a lot of ideas didn't really come together probably the way they expected and people will be begging for this
game after they play six card games in a row you know they'll be like please give me another top down dragon ball z game uh sean please give us your vote also you only get one see i'd like to circle back to that real quick before i give my vote um i actually uh at our next best of um uh conference i will be bringing up the idea that maybe we should have an electoral college sort of vote where uh depending on how many episodes you've been on that's how many votes you get you joke but that sounds great
i i actually found a hidden advantage steal a vote idol yeah that i'm going to play on sean and steal his vote uh it's not not a thing you can do what survivor anyway um in regards to dragon power um i don't know how passionate the people were uh making this game i i mean yeah they they they did their due diligence to an extent um at least the japanese developers did yeah sure i mean maybe the localization team yeah i wouldn't call that passion but i guess in terms of the story like this is a pretty in-depth story for a video game in 1988 so i'll grant them that but the game itself is garbage
and i am going to say it's not essential hey i'm not disputing that the game is not good i'm saying it does it doesn't seem like a game that they just shit out like some other games we've got joe all i'm saying is i think that passion is a little bit of an overstatement yeah i think we agree to disagree okay passion can can create can mislead you terribly it could and as far as because i can't put this in the essential games list uh as far as i feel about this game uh dragon power has one thing going for it it is a better deadly towers okay this game has a lot of things in it that are very similar to deadly
towers but without all of the confusion of like wait what floor am i on what room am i in what's my current objective like this one lays it all out for you i like that it made it linear and said like hey just do what you can today you know like digest it however you want you only want to get to the third chapter there's a story right there you made you got four dragon balls and and you're done you know like the it feels nice that everything kind of wraps up at the end of each thing it feels like there's progress actually being made whereas like when you when you eventually get to that point where you give up on ghosting goblins you don't feel like you've actually succeeded in anything because
the only goal was to get the the you know the princess out of the castle so like you know there was no fulfillment in like well at least i beat three stages you know like in this one it feels good to do that i will say that if you're looking for something like this uh if you play this one and you think like hey that's a pretty cool idea though for a dragon ball game highly recommend the legacy of goku games on game boy advance they're pretty much just like this except for they also have like rpg elements to them and i think they're fantastic so there's two of those definitely play them
and lastly this game is not a total failure because dragon ball z connect exists and uh that was a dragon ball z game that was made specifically for microsoft's connect and everybody always dreamed of just doing a kamehameha into their uh tv but somehow connect managed to fail so it didn't like register no it's just so try yeah there's a point where you realize oh i'm just waving my arms right i can do that anyways you could do that regardless uh in any of these anyway there's 48 dragon ball games i think dragon power has the right idea by starting off with the adventure begins on the back of the box because truly the adventure does begin but does it ever really
get any further than beginning no i feel like even as i continued to play this game i noticed i was playing more of the same i never really felt like i was growing i never felt like i was becoming
stronger as goku where was my power level it was not over 9 000 and so for that this game is not essential that's all the time we have for you prepared that statement didn't you absolutely uh i had to get it in there that's all the time we have for this episode of nostalgia join us next time we'll be playing ice hockey which is very similar to dragon power i've been told we'll get back to video games the next episode yeah yeah well i could have said ice capades you know that would have been weird uh we're not gonna do any of that stuff basically instead we're gonna ask no no we're gonna do we're gonna play we are gonna keep playing video games we're gonna keep playing video games absolutely and you're gonna keep writing into us uh if you write
into us you can do that on our website you can do that on twitter you can do that um snail mail you do that however you like but don't put the envelope on an actual snail like you're not supposed to tuck it between his the part of his body that rises and the hard shell we do congratulate you for uh meeting the quota uh for amount of fan mail that we get to make us keep doing the show yeah uh we're actually raising the quota to 45 letters or emails um by next month and if we don't get that uh then we stop
the most important thing is that you recommend the show to your friends we get so many people telling us they love it but they haven't ever wrote into written to us saying like hey i'm telling all my friends so if you want to send an email just saying i'm telling all my friends and leave the body of the email blank that would be great sell yourself out yes and we'll sell out for you uh i'm michael esposito you can find me at esposito film on twitter and i'll talk to you soon how's my how how Thank you.
