You know what, ******** it! I have a review in mind right now and I'm going to do it before I forget it.
Welcome to the return of the Mephisto Review. Today's game is for the Gameboy advanced and is based on the iconic anime/manga Dragonball.
The game takes place from the beginning of the series, all the way up to the fight with Demon King Piccolo. There are 2 different gameplay styles as well as various mini-games.
The main gameplay style of the game as the sidescrolling platformer beat-em-up style.
You run around the level, beat up bad guys in the way, collect items and try to make it all the way to the end without dying. The controls are easy. A is jump and B is attack. Holding up and pressing A will get your character to do a high jump. Some characters have a double jump, Goku uses his power pole, and some characters will fly if you repeatedly press the A button. The L and R buttons also do something, but that will be explained later on.
This type of gameplay can be played in 2 modes, Story Mode and Extra Mode.
Story Mode:Story mode is pretty self explanatory. You play the adventure based purely on the story. You play as Goku, but you can unlock the ability to play as Krillin. With story mode you get the text based cut scenes before and after each level as you make your way across the map of the game:
(I apologize for not being able to get a smaller picture of the map)
Also in story mode it lets you play in the second style of game play as well as some small mini games that resemble various parts of the story, all of which I will go into further detail later on in the review.
Extra Mode:Extra mode is more of the same thing, minus the cut scenes and the second mode of gameplay (unless you play as Goku or Krillin.) What makes Extra mode worth the play though is it allows you to pick any character from the game at all. You can choose to play as Goku or Krillin, as well as any of the bosses from Tien and Demon King Piccolo. If you really want to insult your opponents you can even play as lowly grunts/soldiers. However, to unlock various characters you must collect certain items during story mode.
If you can view in this picture above, you see your character has a health bar, and at the very bottom a Ki bar. To use Ki you press/hold the R button. The longer the R button is held, the stronger the attack, be warned though that you have to build that Ki back up by fighting, so larger attacks may not always be better. L will cause Goku to use his power pole and make Krillin use the Solar Flare attack. Other characters will most likely block with the L button. Among the characters, Goku is the only character in this fighting mode to have multiple specials. If you press both L and R at the same time, he rushes the opponent with a combo involving fists, the power pole and finishes off with a kamehameha attack.
The second style of gameplay is a fighting game mode.
There are two modes for this as well:
One-on-One mode:Very simple, you versus your opponent. You get a character select screen of 8 playable characters:
They are as follows:
Goku
Krillin
Piccolo
Jackie Chun (Roshi)
Grandpa Gohan
Mercenary Tao
Cyborg Tao
You unlock most of these fighters through story mode as well.
Survivor ModeOnce again, very self explanatory. Pick a character and face everyone that you face on the One-On-One mode (characters from story mode also appear, they are Chiaotzu, Giran, and Nam.)
You face them in the following order:
Giran
Nam
Jackie Chun
Mercenary Tao
Chiaotzu
Krillin
Tien
Demon King Piccolo
Goku
Cyborg Tao.
Once again, look at the above picture. Once again you have your Ki and Health bars, but see the green bar under the health? That is the defense bar. When you attack your opponent and he attacks you at the same time, the defense bar goes down based on whoever is winning. Once you get the defense bar down, they are open to your wrath. Unleash combos where you can launch them into the air for either more combos or a ki attack.
In this mode, Goku, Tien, Jackie Chun, and Demon King Piccolo all have super attacks as well as their energy attacks. Goku uses his flying fist attack that he did to kill Demon King Piccolo, Tien uses the tri-beam, Jackie Chun uses a lightning attack and Piccolo uses a beefed up version of his Ki beam.
There are mini-games as well.
Boss Rush, which allows you to face all the bosses over (not the One-On-One mode, but the regular platformer mode.)
A grunt mode which has a horde of grunts coming at you all at once.
You can play the mini game that has you catch Korin.
These are fun, but not the strongest point of the game. I generally stick with either the fighting mode or the platformer mode.
Overall:
Whether you love or hate the anime, Dragonball Advanced Adventure is a fun game that has a tremendous replay value. I recommend it to anyone who loves the genre of fighting and platformers. The controls are some of the smoothest I've used on the GBA and it has a pretty decent soundtrack as well. The visuals are bright, colorful and very pleasant to look at. I give this game a 10/10. It's not the most original idea ever, but it works and is enjoyable.
On a side note: Yes I do realize that most of the pictures are from different language releases of the game, despite that, they all play the same in the end so it doesn't really matter.
Here is a playthrough of Survival Mode that I did. I play as Tien accompanied by the music styling of Vinnie Moore.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=sne3nJndc2U 
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