Game 456: Dragon Ball: Daimaō Fukkatsu (1988)

     

Dragon Ball: Daimaō Fukkatsu

"Dragon Ball: Revival of the Dark Lord"

Japan

d&d Corp. and Tose Co. (developers); Bandai Co. (publisher)

Released 1988 for NES in Japan

English translation courtesy of Stardust Crusaders, 2011

Date Started: 2 April 2022

Date Ended: 11 April 2022

Total Hours: 6

Difficulty: Easy (2.0/5)

Final Rating: 17

Ranking at Time of Posting: 104/460 (23%)

      

When Dragon Ball came up in a random sort of games, I groaned. It feels like I have been remaining willfully ignorant of the franchise my entire life. I've usually seen it with a Z on the end, and until this week, I thought the Ball and Z were all one word, pronounced "balls." Beyond silly things like that, however, there is a host of foundational stuff that I don't understand, including various tropes found in anime and manga. I wasn't much interested in researching it, but I sighed and did my best.

     

I now know that the sprawling franchise started in 1984, with a set of serialized stories by Akira Toriyama. They spawned several additional manga series, anime television series, a live-action film, and close to 100 video games for various platforms. My understanding is that the franchise is set in a weird alternate Earth, where flying cars and characters with guns exist alongside dragons and dinosaurs and animals that can talk. The stories concern (at least in part) quests to find legendary Dragon Balls, which can summon ancient wish-granting dragons. One of the Dragon Ball seekers, Goku, becomes the ultimate defender of the Earth from various criminals, megalomaniacs, and demons. One of the latter is named Piccolo, the "Daimaō" of this game's title.

   

With uniforms, too, with a shiny gold braid on the coat.

     

If I have readers who enjoy the franchise, I'll be curious to hear what you think its strengths are. I watched some summary videos, and even putting aside my normal dislike of anime (and the animation style used in Dragon Ball is somehow worse than just regular anime) and child protagonists, it just felt to me that the setting and characters were a bit chaotic. I'm a firm believer in Brandon Sanderson's Laws of Magic in which limitations are more important than powers. In addition to magic systems, these limitations, in most stories, extend to things like technology and, well, gravity. Dragon Ball seems to be immune to these considerations, which makes me wonder how you possibly create tension in the storytelling.

  

In 1988, the original Dragon Ball show was in its eighth season despite only having premiered two years earlier. The premiere on 24 February 1988 had launched the "King Piccolo Saga." Goku's friend Krillin (a bald kid who looks like a Buddhist monk) is murdered by the demon King Piccolo, who was recently released from eternal imprisonment by the evil Emperor Pilaf. Piccolo hopes to find the Dragon Balls to restore his own youth and conquer the world, or maybe the universe. Goku now wants to collect the Dragon Balls to wish for Krillin's resurrection. The game picks up from here and apparently tells a story different from what the show depicted during the same period.

       

Goku's reaction to finding his friend's dead body.

    

This game is the third video game based on the franchise. The first was released in early 1986 for the Super Cassette Vision. It's a top-down shooter called Dragon Ball: Dragon Daihikyō ("Dragon's Great Exploration"). The second, released in late 1986 for the NES, was called Dragon Ball: Shenron no Nazo ("Mystery of Shenron") in Japan and Dragon Power in the U.S. It's a pure action-platformer. With this title (sometimes called Dragon Ball 2, as it was the second in the Bandai NES series), the developers introduced a new set of mechanics that have come to characterize the video games, all the way through the modern era. 

    

A few things differentiate Dragon Ball from other NES RPGs of the time. The most obvious is the combat system, in which victory is resolved through a War-like card game. The player has a constant hand of five cards on which three variables appear: the level of the card (represented by the number of dots at the top), the speed of the card (represented by the number at the bottom), and a symbol in the middle indicating the type of attack, and thus the resulting damage. (The middle symbols were Japanese characters in the original and were updated to more visual clues for the English translation.) Each played card is immediately replaced by another. Levels go up to 6 and speeds to 9.

     

 I execute a combo attack using a card with a strength of 4 and a speed of 7. If this doesn't kill the enemy, my next card has a strength of 5 and does a random attack.

     

In combat, you and the enemy play a multi-round game of War, each turning over one card at a time and comparing the results. The character with the higher power gets to perform the action on the middle (with the one exception that a one-star card played by Goku beats a 7-star card played by the enemy). The other character may dodge the attack, with the chances based on his card's speed value.

       

At the beginning of combat, the game asks how many cards (rounds) you want to do. I have no idea why it matters, since if you choose too few, combat continues anyway, and if it ends before whatever number you choose, the extra cards are just returned to your hand.

    

There are seven types of card: punch, kick, combination, bo staff, special attack, flee, and random. Except for the last two, their power is in roughly that order. If you use a special attack, the game has you pick from among five cards to determine the nature of the attack. (The "five cards" thing is just an illusion; I verified with save states that the game chooses a result at random before you even pick, and you get it no matter what card you choose). The results include some kind of punch combo called janken, a double-fisted punch called hasshuken, and a ray of power called kamehameha. They are all significantly more powerful than regular physical attacks. Am I correct that the notion of special attacks with multi-syllabic Japanese-sound names goes back to Street Fighter (1987), or is there an earlier source?

     

Fighting some kind of double-headed robot. We both pulled a "special attack" card with the same speed, but mine (bottom) has a higher level.

     

You may wonder how such a combat system qualifies the game as an RPG. Experience and leveling, it turns out, play a subtle role in the types of cards you draw to replenish your deck. Higher levels increase both the strength and speed of the average card, the likelihood of a special attack, and the power of special attacks when played. Levels also increase Goku's maximum hit points.

   

I imagine that the system was meant to be an in-game representation of the Carddass collectible card game issued by Bandai the same year. As I say, it's not that much more complex than the old card game War. It actually made me remember an episode from third-grade in which our teacher caught me and another student playing War during what was supposed to be an educational period. Card games were fine in general, but they had to teach us something. The teacher balked that there was nothing educational about War, to which I replied, "It teaches us to tell what number is higher." She rolled her eyes and said, "Chet, I'm going to pretend you didn't say that." The next day, the other student and I returned with the rules to a new game that we called War Plus. It had a bunch of different conditions, probabilities, and wagers that required multiple draws and a bunch of math. We successfully lobbied for its acceptability as an educational game. I don't remember what the rules we invented were, but I'm sure it was more complex than the system used by Dragon Ball. The system had enormous staying power, appearing in Dragon Ball RPGs well into the 2000s, so I can only assume that it similarly gets more complex.

    

I'm not entirely sure what kind of attack this actually is.

         

Dragon Ball's combats occur during and in between adventure game-style episodes in which Goku explores various cities and fortresses, trying to find the seven Dragon Balls or otherwise find the next step in his quest. Each area has multiple screens, and each offers some menu combination of moving, searching, using items, or talking to NPCs, those both attached to the location and in Goku's party. The game starts in adventure mode in a place called "Turtle House," where Goku was relaxing with friends after a recent martial arts tournament. They come home from a shopping trip to find Krillin dead upstairs and a scrap of paper with Piccolo's symbol in a kitchen drawer.

 

Goku sets off in pursuit of Piccolo and ends up fighting a henchman, a winged demon called Tambourine. I reloaded multiple times trying to win this combat before I figured that Goku's loss is scripted (fortunately, this is the only place in the game where that's true). Tambourine breaks Goku's "dragon radar" and steals his bo staff, sending Goku back to Turtle House. His loss is attributed to exhaustion following the recent tournament (and represented by half-health). Goku rests and heals, and then the game begins properly.

      

Moving between areas. I have no idea who the guy in the upper-left is.

    

It is extremely linear, going from episode to episode in a fixed order. To get from one place to another, the player has to maneuver Goku along paths on a world map. Each path has a number of nodes along the way. To move, the player chooses a card and then travels a number of stops equal to the power of the card. Upon reaching the final stop, Goku gets a new card and then has to play a little minigame in which he chooses from among five cards presented by his master, Kamesennin. As with the special attack cards, the "choice" is irrelevant because the game rolls the outcome before the player has even made it. Results include:

   

• Piccolo's Card: Goku must fight an immediate battle with one of Piccolo's minions, almost always a giant bird called Ukelele, but in the late game also Tambourine and a couple of others.

• Sheng Long Card: The dragon god's card will either give you some kind of hint and restore health or allow you to trade one card for another. (Healing is otherwise accomplished by occasionally finding food on slain enemies.)

      

A tip from Sheng Leng.

     

• Lady's Card: Has three potential outcomes: 1) all your cards are swapped for new ones; 2) Kamesennin walks you through "training" which is basically just combat with Kamesennin; and 3) You pick another card.

• "Bust" Card: Nothing happens. This is accompanied by what I first interpreted as a "golliwog" image, but I guess it's just a character from the show named "Mr. Popo."

          

Both this image and "Mr. Popo" have different connotations across the Pacific.

      

The game requires a fair amount of backtracking, and moving along the pathways is maddeningly slow. If you're in a hurry to get from one place to another, you naturally want to play the card with the highest level, but most of the time, you want to save such cards for combat. Thus, the better strategy is to play cards with the lowest level, even though you mince along and have to screw around with Kamesennin's games so many times you want to scream. This method also ensures that you fight plenty of random battles and thus level up between fixed combats.

        

This was a cool graphic from some point in the game.

     

I'll try to recount the story, but it's so nonsensical to me that I don't know how to string it into a comprehensive narrative. Either a lot is lost in translation or the game requires knowledge of the series or both. In broad strokes, Goku and his friend Lunch first set out for the Western Capital to find his friend Bulma, who can fix his dragon radar, which helps to find Dragon Balls. He rescues her from Ukelele and she fixes the device. The party then goes to the Henshin School looking for two additional friends, Oolong and Puar. They have been taken prisoner by Ukelele who is impersonating Oolong, but you fight him and free them.

   

Goku then heads for a place called Jingle Village for reasons I can't remember, where he frees yet another friend named Hatchan who has been taken over by some kind of machine. Here, Emperor Pilaf makes his first appearance in a suit of armor called the Pilaf Machine. At the end of the episode, the village elder teaches Goku how to summon something called a Nimbus Cloud, which I guess is how Goku gets around for most of the anime series.

 

Looks like that snowman is struggling, too.

      

Goku then goes to Pilaf's castle, where he has to fight and defeat Ukelele twice more before he can encounter and fight Tambourine and find the second Dragon Ball. (Yeah, he got the first one somewhere in there.) Lacking any intelligence on the rest of them, he goes to a fortune teller named Baba, who wants him to bring her a treasure. Goku decides to steal the treasure from pirates in an under-sea cavern. While searching for it, he fights a henchman named Banjo and gets the third Dragon Ball. Back at Baba's, she reveals that the fourth Dragon Ball is back in Pilaf's castle, hidden in a way that somehow requires Goku to blow a saxophone in the right room. He finds it on a second visit.

  

Dragon Ball five is found in a tower called Karin and the last two are in Penguin Village. For some reason, finding all seven Dragon Balls isn't enough, though. Goku then has to retrieve an enchanted hammer, ring, and glasses from the realm of an elephant god named Konpei, who fights Goku repeatedly. 

     

I get the last Dragon Ball.

      

Goku finally goes to Piccolo's mansion, the headquarters of the Evil Clan, where he uses the enchanted hammer to smash the Root of Evil and free the souls of the people killed by the clan, including Krillin. He then heads to the Dark Castle, where a long maze brings him to the final showdown with Piccolo.

      

Nonsense. This game has no economy.

    

If all of that seemed somewhat nonsensical, it's nothing compared to trying to solve the "puzzles" in adventure mode. You basically just have to try every option in every location, stringing together a series of illogical actions and outcomes until you finally complete the quest and can move on to the next place. There are a lot of ways to meet instant death during this process.

     

But he can breathe in space.

   

Sometimes, you have to do the same action multiple times before you get a result, and it was these times that I was most likely to have to turn to a walkthrough. For instance, there's an early screen where you have to talk to Lunch four times in a row to get her to sneeze, which causes her to switch to an alternate personality who notices something that Goku doesn't.

      

"This must be the solution to a puzzle!" -- an adventure gamer.

     

Even with help, there were a lot of things I didn't understand, such as whether the NPCs accompanying me really did anything (except the couple of times they were necessary to a puzzle), how something called a "hoi-poloi capsule" seemed capable of creating whatever the character needed at the time (including an airplane and a submarine), why Goku has a monkey's tail, and why Bulma insists on calling Goku "son." 

  

Don't question it.

    

The combats in the game aren't very hard. I wasted a lot of time in the beginning thinking about strategy, trying to save the best cards for more difficult combats, but eventually I got bored and just started using the cards in the order that they appeared in my deck, and I found I was rarely in danger of low health. Only for the final combat with Piccolo did I need to make sure I had a decent deck (by burning low cards in earlier combats), and even then I won the first try with a couple of hadoukens or whatever.

   

And I had two more after that.

    

The final animation shows Goku bursting through Piccolo's chest. Piccolo then has a villain's speech worthy of Malcolm Trandle: "How!? How could this be!? Me? The Dark Lord Piccolo? Defeated? I am in awe . . . but I must warn you . . . Don't think you've seen the last of the Evil Clan!"

       

Gruesome.

     

I give the game an 18 on the GIMLET. It does best in "game world" for at least having a detailed backstory, even if I think it's silly. It gets 0s in "equipment" and "economy," as the only inventory is of the puzzle-solving variety, and finding it is scripted. Everything else gets 2s. I wish I could give more for the combat system, which is at least original, but there just aren't enough tactics. It got boring and repetitive fast, particularly where you have to fight the same enemies repeatedly. (Honestly, how many times do I have to thrash Ukelele before he gets the hint?) It's also far too linear, and the puzzles are so nonsensical that I can't give much credit for encounter design.

       

I played the game, didn't I? Do you have to twist the knife?

     

If I continue dipping occasionally into console games, I guess it's inevitable that we'll encounter Dragon Ball again. I guess the Z series, depicting Goku as an adult, is more popular than the original. I watched videos of some of the later games but couldn't get much of a sense of the evolution of the card approach; I wouldn't mind hearing from readers who have played later games if it gets more advanced or interesting.