Hyper Dragon Ball Z is rocking my inner Shenron

I’m a huge fan of Dragon Ball Z, ever since those days that I caught marathon repeats of it on SABC, who mercifully broadcasted the superior English dub of the anime series. Naturally, it’s had a ton of games released in the past, and has become the Call Of Duty of screaming alien planet destruction fighting games. Most of those games have been crap lately though. This fan-made one though? It looks perfect.

Made by fans, Hyper Dragon Ball Z looks like a frantic mix of Darkstalkers and Street Fighter, and looks gorgeous in action. Here, see the trailer for yourself WHICH GOES EVEN FURTHER BEYOND!

“Our motivation was born from seeing the many official and unofficial games that DBZ has spawned over the last years,” developers Team Z2 said on the YouTube description.

Usually packed with tons of characters, those games have always left us with a bad taste in our mouths.

This demo is based on games in the vein of Capcom’s Street Fighter and Darkstalkers, adapted and fine-tuned to represent Dragonball’s highly cinematic action in a way that actual combat means more than repeating the same combination of buttons over and over again.

This is how we envision a perfect Dragonball game. Gone is the sensation of every character being interchangeable and having the same style of fighting.

Instead, we have characters with beautiful animations, cinematic moves, skillful combos, interesting movesets, unique traits and the kind of fanservice that’d make any Dragonball fan smirk. We drew from all sources and we committed to our vision, which we share with you.

Honestly, it looks fantastic. Recent Dragon Ball Z games have embraced the 3D aspect of gaming hardware a tad too vigorously,creating sequel after sequel that is bogged down with ridiculous control schemes that emphasise visuals over core gameplay, something that any fighting game fan will tell you is a sin. In fact, the last decent game in the franchise was Budokai Tenkaichi 3, which got a recent HD upgrade.

But Hyper Dimension Dragon Ball Z looks like the perfect blend between combat and ridiculous planet-busting attacks. Those combos man, those beautiful combos. I’m looking forward to the final build of this game, so go on and give the lads behind it some love.

Last Updated: April 8, 2014