Since the '80s, we have received roughly a billion Dragon Ball games, and some of them are even pretty good! I kid; I personally enjoy most of the franchise's releases, and titles like Dragon Ball FighterZ and Legacy of Goku 2 are genuinely brilliant. While any fan should be familiar with Budokai, Supersonic Warriors, Xenoverse, or even Burst Limit, a couple of great DBZ games flew under the radar, being underplayed at release and mostly forgotten nowadays.
Even though I can easily drop 20 hours into Infinite World or Battle of Z, I'm not going to pretend either of those are masterpieces that everyone needs to play right now. However, Dragon Ball has dropped a couple of gems that really deserve more attention and, in some cases, have aged pretty darn well.
"Nobody played" refers mainly to when each game was released in North America; still, most of these titles are underplayed today.
History remembers Dragon Ball FighterZ as the moment that Goku finally entered the competitive scene, but that's not really accurate.
In the mid-2000s, the franchise crossed over for a brief spell thanks to Super Dragon Ball Z, a game that was almost immediately forgotten as it dropped just a few months before Budokai Tenkaichi 2. In an era defined by bloated rosters, auto-combos, and cinematic cutscenes, this release was the antithesis of everything Dragon Ball video games represented at the time. It was a breath of fresh air.
Developed by Arika, a studio founded by former Capcom developers who worked on Street Fighter, Super Dragon Ball Z merged 3D arenas with 2D fighting philosophy, finding a solid middle ground with only a few shaky moments. Even though you can side-step into the foreground and background, Super DBZ uses a locked side-scrolling perspective, like Tekken or Virtua Fighter. More importantly, the mechanics aren't afraid to sacrifice immediate accessibility for a learning curve.
With fewer than 20 playable characters, Arika could prioritize a balanced roster where every fighter feels unique, and the developers more than delivered. Each fighter has proper light, medium, and heavy attacks mapped to specific normals, requiring quarter-circle and half-circle motions for special moves rather than just holding a direction and pressing a button. You even earned Zeni to unlock Skill Cards that could be used to alter a character's moveset.
Super Dragon Ball Z holds up absurdly well. Obviously, you cannot compare it to something like Street Fighter 6, but the combat is still snappy, satisfying, and challenging. Unfortunately, the PS2 version has very little content, offering only an arcade ladder and a survival mode.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://gamerant.com/dragon-ball-games-perfect-masterpieces-nobody-played/
