About Dragon Ball Future Online:
I used to have very fond memories of this game, until not to long ago I probably would have named it among my favorite RPGs of all time. However I recently realized that I never actually replayed it except for one time about a year after it came out, so when I saw it was on sale I thought it was a great opportunity for a nostalgia trip. Unfortunately rather than making me relive my adolescence it quickly began to break my nostalgia tinted glasses. I mainly remembered the game for it’s engrossing storyline and the great characters, and to it’s credit that did hold true, well for the most part. It’s not quite as good as I remember, as there are quite a few examples of stilted dialogue, unsatisfying quests, questionable voice acting decisions and some characters feel like they are a D&D player reading you the tragic backstory on their character sheet rather than a person of their own, but those are mostly minor issues and overshadowed by the things the story does well. Unfortunately it turned out that there was indeed a reason why I didn’t remember much else about this game. The combat system is an extremely clunky amalgamation of your typical Real-Time with Pause CRPG, MMO and ARPG style combat, and it doesn’t work particularly well as any of those, much less as a combination of all. Trying to accurately control the characters ends up being an exercise in frustration more often than not and most abilities tend to be extremely lackluster and unsatisfying to use. This wouldn’t be too bad, after all I’ve played plenty of RPGs with middling combat because the story was worth it, the issue with Dragon Age: Origins is the sheer volume of the fights. It is rare to turn a corner without stumbling upon a meaningless encounter against some faceless enemies, each of which elicited an audible groan from me.
