Dragon Ball Z Super Butouden 1 & 2 (Bandai, 1993, SNES)

This week we are continuing with Dragon Ball Z games on the SNES, and we are finally getting to the much anticipated fighting game genre. This time I did not bother translating the games, as I figured everyone who has seen the anime, knows what's going on. My thoughts: Finally getting to the early fighting games in the DBZ universe… if only they weren't so janky. You probably can't see it in the recording, but the controls are just plain awful. I mean, first of all the flying button is triangle (er, I mean, X? On the SNES controller), which feels like such a waste since it could instead be used for special attacks… which I do not know how to do. I even looked up guides online but still didn't manage to pull one off even a single time. Which also makes the AI quite frustrating. On the easy difficulty, they pretty just camp in a corner shooting ki blasts; while on the normal difficulty they start using special attacks, which I can't dodge and I don't know how to use them in return, so it just feels unfair. Not aided by the fact that I suck at fighting games. But the games look quite nice, I'll give them that. I bet there are a bunch of people who probably hold these games close to heart, but I personally can't really bring myself to enjoy them. They are janky, the special attacks are impossible to pull off (at least for me), and they leave much to be desired (especially knowing what's to come). If you like old fighting games and Dragon Ball Z games, you might find enjoyment in the Super Butouden series, but if you don't really care about DBZ, you are much better off sticking with Street Fighter games. PS. Once more I also tried my hand in games I did not record, namely Super Butouden 3 (SNES) and Ultimate Battle 22 (PS1). Both of them are also fighting games, and neither of them unfortunately have a story mode, so I had nothing much to record (to avoid further embarrassing my limited fighting game skills). Super Butouden 3 continues on like its predecessors, and isn't much better unfortunately. Ultimate Battle 22, on the other hand, is marginally better, and in that I even managed to find the special attack combos, but they are a bit lack-luster in my opinion. I guess there really is no choice but to wait until the PS2 era before we get good DBZ fighting games.