I checked out DBGT: Final Bout and tried to sort through all the dumb Dragon Ball narrative and characters. Half this game's characters are Goku, so that makes stuff easier and even dumber! This game was heavily sought after by collectors in PS1 and early PS2 era. US copies were going for $300. There was even an entire bootleg scene making prints of these on Ebay back in the day! It got nuts.

A lot of folks bought Japanese versions of this game and got weird accessories to make it work on an American PS1. Needless to say, there was a lot of effort put in to play this by a lot of folks. So you'd think it be great, right!?

@stevenbeynon

Oh man, Final Bout is a TERRIBLE GAME! I wonder which is worse, Final Bout or Ultimate Battle 22...

This game was the reason I started disc-swapping on my original PSX. Then I finally got a burned copy of it, and BLECH.

final bout. ultimate battle 22 was unimpressive as it was just a barley updated version of the famicom games which were OK. final bout is a new series and is much worse to play.

This was such a terrible game but I loved it cause it was the only DBGT game on psx back in the day. Thanks for doing this look at the game, been thinking of jumping into some of the newer games that came out on ps2 and the last gen consoles.

Man this game was so terrible. Even as a kid that loved everything about Dragon Ball I knew this was a piece of poop. Kid Goku was annoying as hell to fight against since almost every single attack missed him completely. I actually played this again with a friend a couple of years ago and we had about 30 minutes of fun with it. (Mostly consisting of laughing at how awful it was, and me punching his shins with Kid Goku)

I just dropped by to say that this game was complete and total ASS. SSJ4 Goku could kill people with 3 punches, yo.

Whatever, I loved that game as a kid. I played it when not many other Dragonball games were available.

Oh wow, I had this game.

The intro was the best part.

I was totally one of those kids who imported this game. It was pretty awesome. I had you get this special boot disk with this spring that allowed you to play the PS1 with the lid open. Hot swapping the disks was great.

As for playing the game yeah it is not good but I played a lot of it. The game did have one good part which was the build up mode. It was this pseudo rpg mode that allowed you to level up various statistics of your character. You could even battle build up characters in multiplayer. It was a great mode. Budokai 3 did mode simular to it.

Oh my! How much did you spend?

It wasn't insane since I imported the Japanese version. The US version was going for like $150 at the time. So the game and that region kit were definitely less that that. It was probably like $80-$90 total. Not my best purchasing decision ever. The novelty of being able to play PS1 with the lid open was worth something at least.

My exposure to Dragonball GT is incredibly limited, but I'm guessing a roster consisting almost entirely of Goku and Dragonball Z villains doesn't do the source material "justice". Of course, everything I know about Dragonball GT suggests that it's really dumb.

Also this game looks terrible, but I think that goes without saying. Good job Steve.

@epicsteve: God this game was GARBAGE. Good on you for playing it Steve.

There's a couple of villains they could've used. The entire series is about 60 episodes which is like one fight in DBZ.

It's not an Encyclopedia Bombastica unless I get to voyeuristically see what state your room is in.

That's why it's amateur! Well, check back later. I got something else going up with a bigger budget.

I paid $100 for this game back when it had kind of first come out. There was huge buzz around it, then I got it in and...

What a waste of money.

I was one of those guys who got the japanese version of this. Sometimes I still load the opening and the ost because that, at least, was pretty good. As for playing as Baby Vegeta, it would have been cool if you could here, but you can in Budokai Tenkaichi 3 so I'll go and play that instead.

Also, Tenkaichi 3 is the best DBZ game, not Budokai 3

@49th: Me too!!

I loved UB22/27 and played it non-stop, leveling up my SSJ2 Trunks and kick everybody to bits in seconds.

There's also DBZ Legends which was pretty terrible too and Hyper Demension for SNES which was pretty cool.

Yup Budokai 3 is indeed the only good DBZ game.

i played and completed Final bout. It was in a Ultimate battle 22 case and cd sticker....cos it was bootleg in early 2000's. so i sounded like I got the better of the two.

I was too young to know anybetter.

All the Budokai and Tenkaichi games are good and Raging blast 2. Raging blast 1 was horrible. Ive played them all and I still need to see about Battle of Zi its interests me...but the fights are weird in the demo.

Great work, Steve.

I had totally forgotten that Nick from Rev3 is the same as Get the Fuck Off My Set Nick from Happy Hour until I went back and watched a bunch from summer 2011 just recently. Congrats!

Dragon ball gt was such garbage and extremely dumb even by the relatively modest standards of the franchise.

@glentennis said:

Great work, Steve.

I'm glad I'm the Space Australian.

I remember wanting this game so bad when I was a kid...then I saw a youtube vid on it. I'm so glad I didn't have the means to acquire this game.

It was released in 1997 not 1994 man, and as bad as this game was I probably spent hundreds and hundreds of hours playing it back in the day. Didn't know it was that rare though, i got it when it came out cause i was a huge dragon ball z fan as a kid. I used to spend hours leveling up my character and fighting the same guys for hours because they had 2 million health bars lol.

still have it somewhere at my folks house.

Yeah, I misspoke. I really don't know how I got the date wrong at the time of recording.

Tenkaichi 3 is indeed the best DBZ game ever. This one...haha not so much. Although I would probably play this over uh...what was that side scrolling brawler? A friend and I beat that co-op. It was just a bunch of yelling:

SPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECIAL BEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAM...

FINAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL FLAAAAAAAAAAAAAASH....

Because the game would slow down and they would say their ultimate really slowly and spam it mercilessly.

I love DBZ but some of games are straight up junk. Also thanks to SSJ God mode or whatever, it basically means they decannonized GT. (Yes I know it was made by the people who made the movies but it was accepted by Akira Toriyama as cannon at one point.)

A friend of mine sold me this game (US version) for $30. I knew the game was terrible, but I loved the build up mode with SSJ4 Goku; I still have a save with him at level 147. Trunks' stage music and the opening movie were the best things about the game. Unfortunately, all of my PS1 games were stolen 10 years ago, so I'll never be able to enjoy this awfulness again without emulators.

I believe Budokai 3 perfected the 2D DBZ fighting game formula, and I like to throw that in for a spin every now and again, but Final Bout will always hold a special place in my PS1 memories.

The memories the only way I could play this was at a video store for a dollar an hour. Didn't have a PS1 at the time but huge dbz fan. Also thought all those GT characters were only for the game :P.

Best DBZ game: Tenkaichi 3

Best game: Budokai 3

I remember I had this game when I was younger, this was before the internet so everything I knew about it was from a friend. Ended up going to a game store not to far from me to buy the special adapter for my ps1 in order to play it and as a kid in like 4th or 5th grade I thought it was awesome. Watching this now it's funny how much nostalgia can affect your memory of something you thought you remembered.

I had this game when it came out and was really confused, dragonball z hadn't even finished when the game was released here in the UK.

Wow, this takes me back to a time when my friends and I were still watching DBZ on bootleg subbed videotapes. This game was such a steaming pile of disappointment.

I can't say when GT ended in Japan, but I'm pretty sure that series ended way before DBZ even started in the US. Probably why there was only 10k copies of these originally. And that excuses the lack of the actual US actors.

@epicsteve: It apparently finished near the end of 1997 in Japan. They showed the first episode of Dragon Ball in the US in late 1995, and the first episode of Z in 1996.

@sphinx: WHAT!? TENKAICHI 3!? NO

seriously NO.

Budokai 3

frieza said 'how trivial'

also GUWAH GUWAH GUWAH

I remember when I first played this. Ugh.

Budokai 3 and Tenkaichi 3 are pretty dang solid.