Dragon Ball Z: Taiketsu - In All But Name

23/06/25

One of the more astounding things when you look at franchises with a pretty decent number of titles under its belt, is there is no correlation to the popularity, profitability, nor quality of its parent franchise to the amount of actually good games to come out of it. For example, have we ever gotten a good Superman game? But in today’s case, we’re taking a look at a series I’ve already covered. Not content with just subjecting myself to the poor, yet somewhat rewarding Legacy of Goku, I continue my foray in the sub-universe of Dragon Ball Z games, and begin to ponder just why so many of what is likely the most famous anime of all time produced so many stinkers over the years - especially for the Game Boy Advance. Not satisfied with just being ‘bad’, Dragon Ball Z: Taiketsu takes an already weak genre for the GBA and churns out one of the most soul-sucking, unsatisfying and downright boring games on the system, with pretty much every element that makes up it’s whole ranging from utterly uninteresting to downright horrendous.

I adore Dragon Ball Z - every night in my preteen years I’d sit down, stars in my eyes, flick on Cartoon Network at 7:30 and see the Z Warriors do things I’d never seen in western cartoons. I’m sure plenty of you reading this have had similar histories - in the late 90s and early 2000s, anime was just unlike everything else, but even amongst those, Dragon Ball Z is special. Over the years, I’ve played a lot of the games that have spawned out of the series - some good, like the fantastic Budokai games or the charming Legacy of Goku series - but I’ve rarely touched the series’ more notably abhorred titles - and there are few Z games more abhorred then Dragon Ball Z: Taiketsu. Now, I know games like Legacy of Goku 1 or Ultimate Battle 22 are fairly maligned, but they’re playable. Dragon Ball Z Taiketsu, too, is playable, but I only describe it as that in the most skeletal terms. This is a rough one, folks.

Taiketsu is a traditional, 2D fighting game, a genre that from what I’ve gathered has never really fared particularly well on the Game Boy Advance. The lack of screen real-estate, coupled with fewer buttons than a console or arcade controller, and the console’s rapidly diminished processing and graphical power makes it a poor choice for any kind of fighter, competitive or party-minded. It succeeds as a fighter only in the most basic, foundational ways, something I can only describe as the game not being able to be beaten by, and I quote Game Informer on its review of the infamously bad Kabuki Warriors, “bashing the controller against my ass.”

To describe the combat in Taiketsu as ‘poor’ would be ridiculously overselling the quality of this game. It’s one of those games that, even beyond just how bad it looks, just feels bad to play. The game plays like a run-of-the-mill fighter, with a number of punches and kicks, along with a projectile or two, but whilst the foundation of a good fighter is present, it’s shaky at best and crumbling at worst. Combos, as few as they are, come out slowly and it very quickly becomes a matter of finding one or two moves for each character that come out quickly, and thus, damage consistently. The CPU constantly blocks, so even with the haphazard combo system you really don’t feel like you’re doing any real consistent damage to them as the fights wear on. I know a lot of fighters nowadays adhere to the whole ‘one player does a combo as their “turn”, the other play counters, so and so forth’, but something about how lackluster your moves feel and the amount the CPU blocks just makes it feel bad. I’m not a fighting game guy, so I find it hard to exactly describe how poor the base gameplay feels in Taiketsu. In fact, it feels so bad, using cheesy strategies almost feels like a relief from that bog-slow pace of the game, rather then bad for breaking the game.

Honestly, the best, non-cheesy strategy I could come up with is to run away, charge up my character’s Ki, then use their strongest super attack to devastate 40% of their healthbar, then rinse and repeat. This strategy is doubly effective against you, since if either character activates a super, the opponent is locked in place and forced to take the monstrous hit to their healthbar. You can block normal attacks and generic ki blasts just fine, but you don’t even get a chance to play around supers beyond not letting them charge up. It’s not like I had a lot of options off the bat. Baffingly enough, from what I’ve gathered, there is no information on how to perform the small number of combos and unique moves exclusive to each member of the game’s roster. Smartly, I gave the manual a glance before digging into this scat-tastic mess, but the manual literally states the existence of a combo feature, but outright declares you have to work it out for yourself! It’s an insane decision, and after a minute of hitting random combos of buttons to try and brute force this, opted to just use a GameFAQs guide for novelists and be done with it.

But it’s not like I needed to ever really dive into utilizing combos or specials - Taiketsu’s AI is so braindead that I could spam one of the only mildly interesting moves in the game again and again. Sure, they’re constantly blocking and dragging out the experience, but they’re not easy to deal with. Basically, tapping down twice, then hitting B and up together, will send your character offscreen into the sky. The other fighter has the choice of either just waiting until you come back down after a few seconds, or they can do the same move and then fly into the air. What follows is one of Dragon Ball Z’s iconic high-speed aerial battles, where you need to spam buttons to fill a bar before your opponent, with the loser taking heavy damage. Not only is the mashing battle exceedingly easy to win, you do around a quarter of the foes’s health every time, and 99% of the time they’ll *always* follow you into a Sky Battle. Very quickly I realised if you just initiate Sky Battles again and again and again, and you’ll never lose a fight. Again, Taiketsu is not a remotely difficult game, but when it’s core combat is so annoying, satisfying and frankly, clunky, the fact I don’t want to engage with any of the game’s other mechanics and just put the focus on ending battles as quickly as efficiently as possible speaks volumes.

Whilst a lot of fighting games - specifically lower-scaled ones, like today’s subject - rarely branch out within themselves from just run of the mill fighting. Sure, sometimes Tekkan will have bowling, or another game will have volleyball, or whatever. But there’s nothing akin to fun side modes of any real interest within this rough in the diamonds. Taiketsu’s boggling low amount of game modes essentially amount to ‘tournament’, which is really just a renamed traditional arcade mode where you fight seven of the other fighters in sequence. There’s endurance, which is just endless, again, normal fights. Time attack, which is still really not that different, beyond grinding out the game’s currency. Which, on that note…

Pretty much any battles will reward you with Z Points. Z Points are essentially your currency in the game, with a shop where you can buy character bios, music, and concept art. Wow wee. Because that’s exactly what I want to do in my fighting game - read about biographies of characters I already know well from the anime I adore. There’s not even characters to unlock - Characters are solely earned via completing various character’s Tournament mode, so you’re left with slim picking for varying carrots on sticks to continue playing this woeful experience. The only interesting things you can actually buy with these Z Points are various modifiers for the still perpetually boringly frustrating base combat of the game. I’m talking about unlimited supers, instant death, stuff like that. If for some ungodly reason you want to spend any time more than required in Taiketsu, these mechanics are the mildest of distractions, and are a pretty good way of farming Z Points to unlock everything if you’re crazy enough to undertake such a task, but these are the bitterest, stalest of carrots on an already crumbling stick

It’s also genuinely far and away one of the ugliest games available on the console. Usually when we find a particularly ugly ducking in the Game Boy Advance family, it’s usually from a particularly low-budget title or property - I can’t imagine must thought was put into the visuals of Shrek Speedway or Bratz, but this is Dragon Ball Z, one of the most popular cartoons on the planet, especially in the early 2000s. Ugly doesn’t describe Taiketsu - Dragon Ball Z Taiketsu is horrendously hideous. It has *just* enough visual clarity to actually identify this is, in fact, a Dragon Ball Z game, but no matter what size screen you play this game on, you’ll barely be able to tell. Again, this is both the same developers, and the same engine, as the generally (sans the first game) pretty excellent Legacy of Goku games - I just can’t quite understand why Webfoots’ other Dragon Ball Z games, warts and all, had a certain amount of love applied to them, having *something* to love about them, especially in the graphical department, but the blurry models, indistinct backgrounds and total lack of aesthetic or sauce to the game’s menus or UI is baffling. The character models look like some sort of unholy cross between Donkey Kong Country characters and a disintegrating member of Gumby’s cast. Battle music is totally forgettable at the very best, and the fact that the game boots to a menu with totally no music whatsoever perhaps stands as a sign of the horrors to come more so than anything else.

Dragon Ball Z Taiketsu is perhaps the worst ‘functioning’ game I’ve played yet for the Game Boy Abyss. All the pieces work, and it didn’t put me to sleep or make me go insane with rage like with titles like Bratz or Shrek Speedway, but ‘functioning’ is already and overstatement. Choppy, unintuitive and brainless combat cements this as the floor for fighters on the Game Boy Advance, and the additional lack of interesting combat, poor audio/visual experience and outright refusal to teach you the game’s combos and special moves almost drags it down to the true Abyss itself. I simply cannot believe that the devs who made the generally quite pretty Legacy of Goku games made a game this poor - even the below average initial game in taht series, frequently mocked for it’s shortcomings by fans, is leaps and bounds beyond Taiketsu’s woefulness. Unless you need to play every Dragon Ball Z game that ever existed, I outright beg you to avoid this, it’s simply that bad an experience.

I just want to drop the kayfabe for a second and talk about something. Maybe it doesn’t fit here, but I don’t care. This review was ready to go a few days ago, but it was delayed due to the tragic passing of my fiance’s cat, Slinky, who I had the pleasure for knowing for over a decade, and living with for half of that. He was nineteen, an incredible age, and he was a beautiful, brown burmese baby who I lived with for years. Never before or after have I met a more affectionate, charming, ridiculous or loving cat than Mr. Slink, and his passing has broken my heart as much as any family member or pet. I don’t really know why I put this here, except maybe to share just how incredible this silly little cat was to me and everyone who knew him. I love you Slinky, and I’ll never, ever forget you.

Thank you so much for reading my review of Dragon Ball Z: Taiketsu on the Game Boy Abyss. Thanks for bearing with me, as always. You can find me over on BlueSky or Twitch @GameBoyAbyss, or email me at mgeorge7003@hotmail.com or cckaiju@gmail.com. See you next time, everyone.