Personal opinions and criticisms with the DBZ: Kakarot

[Skye]

The idea of cooking food and feasts for permanent & temporary stat boosts is a novel idea that I found very fitting since they say saiyans have an incredible appetite and the manga has shown a few times how they can just eat an insane amount of food. The issue is that the stats you GAIN permanently from eating food is one-time only per food item, while also being very inconsequential. An example might even at level thirty or so you're dealing with stats in the tens of thousands. Gaining 20 more attack is negligible.

The combat is designed to be accepting of people at all ages, so that way kids and long time series fans can enjoy the story. However, the combat seems to suffer from inconsistent difficulty at various points, jumping from fights that are difficult to fights that are trivial.

Furthering on the combat, oftentimes the enemy AI can be rough when it spams super moves. Particularly at higher difficulties, an example I'll use is the fight with Beerus in DLC 1. That fight I feel highlights a lot of flaws in the combat system, where most melee supers will whiff as the enemy AI will either dodge back, or typically launch a super-armor laden super move.

The combat and game does do a great job of making enemies and bosses look cool and imposing, and the surge mechanic really makes your attacks feel heavy and powerful -- until the enemy gets to half health or some arbitrary health gate in which they will enter a pseudo enrage state where they spam supers and you waste a chunk of your surge because you simply can't attack them. Ideally you'll enter surge and break their stun meter and unleash a ton of damage, but for harder fights the AI will almost never give you that option.

Fishing feels ridiculously simplistic and, I don't understand why they created a fishing mechanic exactly? Don't get me wrong, I think it's a neat thing like 'oooh fishing in an rpg that's nice.', but it feels like there's very little practical use for fishing beyond: Meals and some zenni.

The amount of loading screens also feel very bizarre, especially when load times (for me) appear very fast; it feels like they could've connected or made the maps bigger or engaged in some way to avoid some of the various loading screens they use excessively.

Side quest experience gain is.. very awful. It makes me wonder why they offer experience at all, a story fight might offer over a million experience while a side quest might offer a few thousand.

Furthermore regarding sidequests, the voice acting is very limited to nonexistent beyond grunts and the occasional use of words

The cutscenes are very nice I have to admit, and at times the cutscenes are even more impressive than the anime and are just very visually nice to observe. It's weird thoough, because there are also very iconic moments from the anime that seem too not be included in the cutscenes (it's over 9000, vegeta breaking his arm, cell losing an entire chunk of his body and pleading to be left alive, piccolo wiping the floor with form 1 cell (even though in the game they portray it as an even matchup), bulma thinking zarbon was a good guy).

Regarding the skill tree as well it feels surprisingly limited and basic. A lot of the skill tree 'skills' are just upgrading a skill too cost more and do more damage, or perhaps it goes from 'skill name' too 'super skill name' or 'ultimate skill name', similarly just costing more and doing more damage.

I feel like they could have taken inspiration from xenoverse, another Dragon ball RPG, regarding character progression and development, perhaps allowing Goku or a character to learn skills they wouldn't ordinarily learn or train with characters they don't normally interact with, something to make the gameplay experience feel more unique and make the player feel like they have more agency in shaping the character how they like.

The amount of open world enemies would make you think Earth is being overrun by some maniacal roboticist that ISN'T Dr. Gero. The voice lines as well get very repetitive very quickly as you hear at best, three different options for seeing an open world enemy.

The combat similarly ends up feeling pretty repetitive, leading to a strategy of either super spam or auto combo spam with the occasional 'i-frame left trigger + ki blast' to avoid danger. There are different combo enders with ki blast, a normal attack, and a charge to get some ki back but they damage is all very similar and the regular finisher or the charge finisher are the only ones that I think are useful.

I think the rpg elements and the open world are amazing ideas, I think they have something incredible, and that with a bit more time in the oven, or with sme more love and care it could be a truly amazing RPG, but right now in my personal opinion it feels underbaked and like there are a lot of flaws that turn an incredible idea and game into a game that I'd say is just slightly above average