YMMV / Dragon Ball: Raging Blast

• Awesome Music: There's no denying that Raging Blast 2's intro music, "Battle of Omega", is one hell of a track to pump you up, sung by the ever iconic Hironobu Kageyama. So much so that when reprints and re-releases of the game changed the music, including this one, people sorely missed it.
• Better as a Let's Play: Ultimate Tenkaichi has awesome visual effects and attack animations while going full throttle with the manga-inspired graphics (whenever it doesn't fall under Special Effect Failure during story cutscenes). That said, it still doesn't remove the main issue of the gameplay being so dumbed down and braindead that people find better enjoyment watching attack compilation videos rather than play the game itself.
• Character Rerailment: After numerous games of being portrayed as a simple-minded berserker who only screams "Kakarot!" Broly regains a lot of his sadistic traits that fell to the wayside in Raging Blast, being closer to how he was portrayed in his debut.
• Contested Sequel:
  • Coming right off the heels of the popular Budokai Tenkaichi trilogy, this was to be expected. Proponents will point to the addition of customization for the actual movelists and use of What If? characters, while opponents criticize them for having smaller rosters and more simplistic gameplay.
  • Raging Blast 2 is sometimes seen as the series' Sophomore Slump, as while 2 had a larger roster, a more action soundtrack (prior to the recall), and much better effects and camera, it was lambasted by some for somehow being slower than the first Raging Blast, which many saw as a big deal breaker given Dragon Ball games have a reputation for being fanatically paced to absurd degrees. The replacement of a traditional story mode with Galaxy Mode was also met with contention, given that it relies almost too heavily on Guide Dang It! moments and Scrappy Mechanics.
  • Ultimate Tenkaichi. Some people consider it better than the previous Raging Blast games that filled the gap following Budokai Tenkaichi 3, others consider it to be one of the worst DBZ games ever made with its Rock-Paper-Scissors mechanic instead of combos and strategies. It doesn't help that the plot for Hero Mode, the main attraction of this game, feels like a bad DBZ fanfic.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Those who were disappointed or betrayed by Ultimate Tenkacihi have refused to entertain the idea of that game being part of the previous Budokai Tenkaichi series due to playing nothing like those games and instead being a glorified Rock-Paper-Scissors simulator. It doesn't help that Bandai Namco never considered the game to be part of the Sparking!/Budokai Tenkaichi brand to begin with, as it was called Ultimate Blast in its native country and was internally known as Raging Blast 3 during development, and thus, part of the Raging Blast series... which just raises further issues on how the gameplay mechanics became so radically altered from Raging Blast 2.
• Funny Moments:
  • One of the what-if stories in Raging Blast involves a fight between Trunks and Goten over who ate who's candy. Goku and Vegeta end up getting involved, and Vegeta wins. Once the problem has been resolved, the narrator happily announces that "The future of group picnics with Goku and Vegeta's families [is] once again secure."
  • In Ultimate Tenkaichi, picking the "Crazy" voice option for your character in Hero Mode results in some pretty hilarious lines and sound bytes from the Hero. And even when he DOES say something relatively serious, his thick New York accent makes it very difficult to take him seriously.
  • In fact, depending on which voice you pick, almost any scene can come across as comedic.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: One of the What If? scenarios in the first Raging Blast involves Future Trunks traveling to the past to train with his present self, recognizing their differences thanks to Kid Trunks growing up in a more peaceful world as opposed to the Bad Future he was forced to fight through. Dragon Ball Super would revisit this idea for the Future Trunks Saga, but with present Trunks instigating the pep-talk to his Future self instead.
• Just Here for Godzilla:
  • The only reason why some bought these games was to see Vegeta and Broly's Super Saiyan 3 forms, transformations neither character achieved in canon.
  • Possibly enforced when Ultimate Tenkaichi was brought over stateside (it was originally called Ultimate Blast in Japan), as some played it thinking it will be like the previous Budokai Tenkaichi series. What fans got instead was a Tenkaichi game In Name Only.
  • The main reason why anyone bought Dragon Ball Z: For Kinect was for the Episode of Bardock special included in the game's extras menu (even if it was sub-only).
• Narm: Throughout the story of Raging Blast, there will be times the camera will zoom-in on the character with the fitting sound and effects. The problem? Instead of occurring as they speak, they appear right after the character has finished speaking, with some of the lip flaps still moving. This is made even more awkward that it doesn’t even happen immediately after they’re done speaking either, requiring the player to press a button to continue the scene.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: Though not as memorable as the Tenkaichi trilogy, the Raging Blast duology were seen as great games in their own right, citing the expanded customization system and the much more fluid animations and graphics thanks to the more powerful hardware.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Some of the missions in Galaxy Mode have you start at near death, leaving you a One-Hit-Point Wonder. The worst part about this start at near death handicap? Your opponent doesn't have it. So you'll definitely be stuck in that fight for Kami knows how long. Here's a one or two videos to give you an idea on how bad it can get.
  • In Ultimate Tenkaichi, clashes are decided by what amounts to a rock-paper-scissors mechanic where both sides press a button and guess what the opponent is going to do, after which a cutscene attack plays out and you can press some more buttons to keep the attack going. These kinds of mechanics were present in older games, most notably Budokai, but they happen far more often here, to the point of effectively being the core gameplay loop and means of damaging your opponent. Because of this, fights regularly boil down to complete luck, and even when you're doing everything right and/or using your Super Mode to auto-win clashes, the cutscene attacks themselves can get old very quickly, owing to how long they can go on and most characters using basically-identical animations.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: An inevitability as Kenji Yamamoto was the lead composer to Raging Blast 2, with him pulling melodies from not only Stratovarius, but also the likes of Nickelback and Masahiro Andoh. It should be noted that this and his work on Kai were the final nails in Yamamoto's career, and the game had to be recalled to have its soundtrack replaced following his termination.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: The infamous Dragon Ball Z: For Kinect. Effectively a butchered version of Ultimate Tenkaichi, using all of the same assets wholesale, it tried to sell the idea of fighting like the Z-Fighters with the Kinect's motion controls; instead you had a game that barely functioned and was just a literal exercise in frustration, on top of further mucking up a Contested Sequel in its mechanics.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Ultimate Tenkaichi's main selling point is its ability to create your own character, being the first non-MMO game to enable this. Unfortunately, the character creation is decidedly undercooked compared to what it would become in the Dragon Ball Xenoverse games. It's perhaps reasonable that you can only play as a Saiyan, but you can't even select gender, only going between three different bodytypes. Additionally, the rather restricted fighting engine of Ultimate Tenkaichi means that you don't have much control over how your character plays. Consequently, the only real customization going on outside of visuals ends up being leveling your character up, which is a slow grind.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Hatchiyack, one of the main antagonists of the Dragon Ball: Plan to Eradicate the Saiyans OVA, makes an appearance as a fully playable character.
  • Tarble, Vegeta's brother from Dragon Ball: Yo! Son Goku and His Friends Return!!, shows up, making not only his fighting game debut, but first appearance in the United States.

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