At first blush, it's a little difficult to get excited about the idea of Dragon Ball Z Kakarot. "Reliving the classic Dragon Ball story" would be more exciting if there weren't a dozen different games that promised and delivered on the exact same thing. Kakarot stands out because it's one of the first Dragon Ball games to focus on the moments between the fighting, the downtime and silly antics that made the original Dragon Ball so popular and helped give personality to the bizarre mishmash of spikey-haired fighters who populate the series. This is at once its biggest strength and biggest weakness, leaving a game that is for Dragon Ball fans but far iffier for everyone else.

Kakarot is an action-RPG at heart, and that mostly works in its favor. Rather than being designed for one-on-one combat, it has a more exaggerated and unbalanced system that lets you feel powerful. The game has a small roster of playable characters, but each has a distinctive set of skills. Many characters who aren't playable can be slotted as support characters who fight alongside your characters and assist in battle.

Combat is a free-flying fighting system where you can perform just about anything with a button press. There are a lot of advanced mechanics that aren't necessary but are a lot of fun. Dodging and guarding can be done in a variety of ways, allowing for everything from stutter-stepping toward your opponent to instantly teleporting behind them. You can push your way through fights by blocking and spamming plentiful healing items, but it both looks and feels cooler when you're fighting more like a Goku than a Yamcha.

Enemies don't follow the same rules as you. Instead, their visual tells provide a hint of what they're doing next. They may glow red and then launch a powerful attack, or they may charge up an energy beam with a path that's shown by a red marker. Strong enemies may have lengthy "bullet hell" attacks where you have to dodge and block at the right moments. It's a good system because it makes it very easy to play the game in a way that mimics the anime, with constant movement, counters, evasions, and seeking weak points. This is the closest a Dragon Ball game has come to feeling like the battles in the show.

The combat system is really fun when it's firing on all cylinders. The first fight with Vegeta feels great. Countering his Gallic Gun with the Kamehameha, dodging attacks, countering and evading — it feels just like the show. The same goes for most of the big one-on-one fights, but when weaker enemies start getting thrown in, it becomes clear that there isn't a ton of variety in the foes. They fight mostly the same and feel like cannon fodder, especially when they get in the way of completing a side-quest or collecting Dragon Balls. It's a lot of fun when the title hits Dragon Ball Z's big moments, but you can only fight so many Saibamen and Skull Robos before you need a break.

There are a lot of ways to power up your characters. Collecting food gives stat boosts once you cook it up. Fighting strong enemies gets you experience points and Z-Energy, which can be used to learn new special moves. Certain events might unlock new skills or attributes, and even the most basic side-quest usually provides a load of rewards.

The most interesting feature is probably the Community system. The Community System is almost reminiscent of something like Persona. As you play the game and complete side-quests, you'll unlock Soul Crystals for every important character. The characters can be slotted into one of seven boards: Adult, Adventure, Cooking, Gods, Mechanics, Training and Z-Fighters. Each character has their own rankings in each of these skills (Goku is fantastic at Training and Z-Fighting but not so hot at Mechanics, where Bulma reigns supreme).

By slotting characters into these boards, you increase their level, which gives you additional bonuses to the related stats or gameplay. You can also raise a character's levels by giving them gifts, but different characters have different stat maximums. Most interestingly, if you place certain characters near one another, they'll unlock a special skit and have an increased bonus. Some are obvious (Goku and Gohan have Father and Son), while others are bizarre and amusing (Burta from the Ginyu Force and Mr. Popo have a speed contest). Maximizing your stats involves juggling various characters, which makes getting more crystals a fun bonus.

One of the biggest roadblocks is that it takes forever to get going. Kakarot slowly doles out new characters, features and mechanics, but it does it at a remarkably slow pace where you have relatively little freedom. I'd argue it isn't until the Android or Cell sagas that you feel like you have access to most of the basic features, which can drag along, especially because for any longtime Dragon Ball Z fan, this is probably the 100^th time of playing through the Saiyan and Frieza stories. If you spend time exploring and doing side missions before advancing the plot, you may be almost 10 hours in before you reach the meat of the game.

The highlight of Kakarot isn't the main stories but the side content. The title leans heavily on the "day to day" elements of Dragon Ball Z that most games gloss over. You get to do things, like visit the long-forgotten character Launch or see Goku's "welcome home" party after he returns from Namek. The side-quests are lighthearted stuff, such as Gohan trying to get an answer about why his tail doesn't grow back, or Puar trying to keep Yamcha's (many) girlfriends from finding out that he's dead.

This sort of thing is what sets apart Kakarot from the other Dragon Ball games. It's a long love letter that spans from the early days of Dragon Ball to the ends of Dragon Ball Z, and for fans, that is probably going to be the biggest appeal. There's no shortage of games where you can have Goku fight Vegeta, but Kakarot is the only one where Gohan can revive the Ginyu Force with the Dragon Balls so they'll teach him to pose. Those sorts of things are where the game shines, even if they are the "side" content. We've all seen the Dragon Ball plot too many times to get excited by it, but the interactions between characters who rarely get screen time are a ton of fun.

As far as the main story goes, I would say it runs into the issue of having an "important" and "unimportant" series of events. The important events, which are largely significant or important battles, feel great. There are a lot of little touches and visual flair that make them feel great. The cut scene graphics end up feeling very stiff, the battles have less interesting quirks or events, and they generally feel kind of blah. It isn't even necessarily that the content is bad so much as there is such a clear divide between lovingly re-created scenes and half-baked attempts to re-create scenes.

There's a lot to do in Kakarot, but a lot of it is wide but shallow. Once you start the game, you're thrown into tutorials for cooking, fishing, hunting, creating boards full of connections, finding hidden items, and so on. When the game isn't forcing you to a certain area, you can do anything from minigames to exploring sunken ships and hunting down Dragon Balls for wishes. The game constantly throws new features at you, but the majority of them are optional.

How much you're going to enjoy this title depends on how much you tend to enjoy similar sorts of things in other open-world games. Nothing is particularly complex. Cooking is about finding ingredients and taking them to Chi-Chi, fishing is a simple button-press minigame, and so on.

As I mentioned before, Kakarot is a visual mixed bag. The environments look great, the battles usually look amazing, but the cut scenes veer from faithful to the show to dull and lifeless. It's still one of the better-looking Dragon Ball Z games on the market by far, eclipsed mostly by the jaw-dropping Dragon Ball Fighters, but the inconsistency can sometimes be frustrating.

The audio is more troubled. The characters from the dub reprise their roles, and they mostly do an excellent job, but the game has an iffy translation in some spots, such as characters reading each other's lines. It's great when it's going well, but there are times when I got frustrated because they messed up basic things. By and large, it's about the usual standard for Dragon Ball dubs, but it's sad that the actors are forced to struggle around some iffy translation choices. Thankfully, the music is excellent, with a lot of really good reprises of classic Dragon Ball songs.

Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot is a solid Dragon Ball Z game that is dragged down largely by a lack of polish in some areas. The combat system is probably too repetitive, and the content is too shallow to be of much interest to non-fans, but it's the Dragon Ball Z game that fans have dreamed of as kids. It doesn't matter if it's punching Frieza or playing baseball; the game captures the spirit of Dragon Ball extremely well, even if the gameplay doesn't always keep up.

Score: 8.0/10