The Dragon Ball franchise has been around for so long that it’s tried just about every type of game, and it’s been hit-or-miss. Some of them, like Legacy of Goku, are pretty rough. A startling amount of them are card games. Do you count Xenoverse 1 and 2 as RPGs? I hope so, because Kakarot is pretty similar. Was Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot worth it? Let’s power up and find out!
Table of Contents
This game covers the entirety of Z. You might think this would be the bare minimum for a game in this franchise, but you’d be surprised. It’s an action RPG that half-assedly tries to do a lot of the typical RPG conventions.
There’s a lot of fanservice and I enjoyed some of the character interactions. Some of the more tense moments in the story, like the Android saga, genuinely brought me into the game. There are a lot of familiar faces that show up that will delight fans of both Dragon Ball and Z.
Fans of FighterZ and Xenoverse will also be happy to see cameos from Android 21, Mira, and Towa.
For what it’s worth, there is a fishing minigame (I know it’s important to some people).
This game would have benefited greatly from another year of polish before release.
Ultimately, it ends up devolving into one of two strategies: kite enemies with energy attacks, or mash your attack string to end encounters as quickly as possible. It’s boring.
DBZ is fundamentally a boss rush mode as an anime. RPGs are all about strengthening your characters, so forming a party to take on these threats is a given, right? Wrong. Most of the fights in this game are a solo affair, and you aren’t going to necessarily be on an equal level footing even if you do every sidequest.
I can’t stress enough how much better it feels to have additional party members. Many of the enemies are downright annoying, and it’s nice to have another ally to help divide aggro. Additionally, party members will help you follow up on attacks or gang up on an enemy with you. It’s very rewarding when a party member teleports behind an enemy that you’ve just sent flying and knocks them back into you so you can continue your combo. I wish it was a feature that you could take advantage of during some of the more aggravating fights.
There aren’t very many, and you also don’t have a choice in battles. In postgame, you can revisit story chapters, however, you’re still locked in to whichever “canon” character is used for that battle.
You “recruit” characters to train with, but that’s misleading. That just means you get their soul emblem, so don’t get hopeful like I did. Even characters who clearly have full movesets aren’t actually playable, like Goten. Gohan has three stages – child, teen, adult, but you are limited to whichever one the story calls for, and you can’t swap between them.
Once Trunks leaves, you also won’t see him again until postgame.
During the storyline, I only experienced one or two crashes. However, it was much more prevalent in postgame. I can only guess that crashes are somehow linked to changing your party. Unfortunately, you have to change your party for sidequests a lot.
The game autosaves frequently, so I never lost any significant progress, but it’s still annoying. At one point I gathered the last dragon ball and then proceeded to try to use them. The game crashed, so I loaded and tried again…and it crashed again.
There are a lot of them, and they’re long. By the time you get to the Buu Saga, you’ll probably be sick of cutscenes. For me, the back half of the game was skipping or fast forwarding cutscenes and sitting at loading screens. Many of the sidequests will also be fetch quests that involve multiple loading screens. I don’t know how quickly the game loads on the PS4, but it takes a while on the Switch.
For an open world game that encourages you to start flying around in the first few minutes, it certainly likes to keep you on a tight leash a lot.
Get used to fighting Red Ribbon Army robots, Saibamen and their recolors, and Frieza Force troops. Eventually you’ll see Babidi’s henchmen, but that’s it for non-boss encounters.
I loved being able to fill out the community board and swap soul emblems around. However, the effects of the community boards are useless for the most part. For example, you can ignore the Adventure board entirely since eventually the game gives you senzu beans for free, which fully heal your character.
The boards are flexible enough to where you have a little freedom with slotting in characters. However, you won’t be able to complete some of them until long after you’ve finished the story.
These features are all half-baked.
The stats you get from cooking absolutely pale in comparison to simply leveling up. The menus are janky as hell. I never used it.
I never raced unless I had to for quests, and literally never had a reason to build anything with Bulma, which begs the question of why the Development community board even exists. I think this feature was exclusively so they could have the “Goku gets a Driver’s License” scene.
This is the only way to get useful skills. Many of the better skills are gated behind rare items and money, but you won’t need them to finish the game. You also have to complete each training with each character, which is tedious.
I enjoyed this title for the most part but I tend to be kind to janky games. This title needed a lot of TLC before hitting store shelves, and it never really got it. It originally released pre-pandemic, so it doesn’t have that excuse to fall back on.
Towards the end of the game, the crashes and lack of actual content was wearing on me. I got to the point where I was just trying to be done with as much as possible so I could be thorough for this review.
If you’re playing the Switch version, it comes bundled with the first two DLCs. There’s a third DLC which covers Future Trunks and adult Gohan against the Androids in their timeline that isn’t included. I considered it, but ended up passing. I got this game for $29.99 and I’m not paying another $20 for a couple extra hours of playtime.
You can also watch the entire Trunks DLC on YouTube, and the entire video is about 2.5 hours. From what I saw, it’s several fights against 17 and 18, and then a speedrun through the early Buu Saga.
She shows up as an opponent in the training room, though it’s just a simulation. She doesn’t actually have any bearing on the plot.
There are some caveats here. RPGs are generally known for their story content. However, DBZ fans will already know all the story beats, and the cutscenes, while serviceable, aren’t really worth sitting through.
Weighed as an RPG, it falls a bit short, and it’s also very shallow as an action game. It’s an ok game for Dragon Ball fans, but there’s really no shortage of Dragon Ball titles that are better than this.
Overall, I really can’t recommend this game. It’s competent but you can do better. I got it for 29.99 on Black Friday and would have had some definite buyers remorse if I had paid more. I feel bad for PS4 and PC players who may have paid full price for the game and DLC at launch. Buy it used, on sale or heavily discounted.
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