What's the best Dragonball Z fighter?

[Nark]

I've been looking at the DBZ fighters for the famicon and it is hard to tell which is are the better games in the series. Just wondering if any of you fellow retroites had any suggestions!

[mugenmidget]

Hm, well I'm not sure about the Famicom Dragonball games (only one I would classify as a "fighter" would be the Datach game), but if you meant Super Famicom then I would probably go with Super Butoden 2 and Hyper Dimension.

I haven't played much of Super Butoden 1, but it seems they improved everything in number 2. The improvements in 3 are nice (less lag when entering/exiting flight, more speed all around compared to default Butoden 2) but there really aren't that many that I can remember. There's some new characters but plenty from 2 are missing, and overall I felt 2 had a far more interesting roster.

Butoden 2 has:

-Gohan
-Cell
-Vegeta
-Cell Jr.
-Future Trunks
-Zangya
-Piccolo
-Bojack
-Goku
-Broly

While Butoden 3 features:

-Goku
-Vegeta
-Trunks
-Future Trunks
-Kid Trunks
-Gohan
-Goten
-Android 18
-Buu
-Dabura
-Kaioshin

I really enjoyed the move sets of Cell and Piccolo, so it was a shame to lose them. But if you see more characters that you like in the SB3 roster, then by all means go for that one instead, the games are similar enough that it mostly comes down to who you'd like to play as the most. Both are fun fighting games in their own right, but for Super Butoden 2 you might need to make use of the "Hyper Mode" cheats to make the games play faster. The default pace is fine, but I've had a lot more fun on the higher speed modes.

Hyper Dimension features the following characters:

-Goku
-Majin Vegeta
-Gotenks
-Gohan
-Vegetto
-Piccolo
-Kid Buu
-Fat Buu
-Freeza
-Perfect Cell

I haven't tried much of Hyper Dimension. I'm not the biggest fan of the graphical style (although the animation is way better than Super Butoden's) and the music doesn't appeal to me nearly as much as the SB games, but the mechanics are interesting and you may enjoy its play style quite a bit. It also has the best roster going for it, a nice mix of the big DBZ villains helps it out.

I believe both Super Butoden 2 and Hyper Dimension have Story Modes as well, if you're interested in trying those (SB3 didn't have one for whatever reason). I wasn't able to read them so I can't comment much on those.


Hyper Dimension seems to fetch more than any of the Super Butoden games, so on that merit alone I think Super Butoden 2 would be my sole recommendation. But if you can get Hyper Dimension at a reasonable price, then I'd go for that one as it seems to be the game that most people enjoy out of the SFC DBZ fighters.

If you are willing to branch out, there's fantastic DBZ fighters available on other systems. For DS there's "Dragon Ball Kai: Ultimate Butoden", which is almost a mix of the Budokai games and Butoden titles, but it has a lot of other awesome things going for it (nice roster, great balance, 3 on 3 KOF style team battles). GBA has "Supersonic Warriors", a game that plays like Psychic Force 2012 and provides excellent free movement fighting. It had a sequel for DS which was alright, but I enjoyed the GBA original far more.

PS2 has the Budokai series (Infinite World is the best version if you're only looking for good multiplayer), Super DBZ (this one had people from the Street Fighter 2 team working on it, great versus fighter), and the excellent Sparking! Meteor/Budokai Tenkaichi 3 (almost like a DBZ "simulator", has an outrageous roster of 161 characters). I would check out any of those if you get the chance.