Dragon Ball is a mess. A beautiful, screaming, golden-haired mess that spans over forty years of gaming history. If you actually look at every Dragon Ball game ever made, you’re not looking at a linear path of "getting better." You’re looking at a wild, experimental, and sometimes deeply frustrating scatter-plot of genres. Most people just think of Budokai or FighterZ. But honestly? The series started as a clunky side-scroller on the Super Cassette Vision in 1986. It’s been a card-based RPG, a motion-controlled nightmare, and even a survival horror-adjacent hide-and-seek game recently.
It’s easy to get lost in the sea of titles.
There are over 100 distinct releases if you count the obscure Japanese-only handhelds and arcade units. Tracking down the lineage of these games is like trying to follow the power scaling in the Super anime—it eventually stops making logical sense. But there’s a reason we keep coming back. Even when the games are objectively "bad," they capture a specific kind of power fantasy that almost no other franchise can touch.
The Early Days and the Card Battle Obsession
Before Goku was throwing punches in real-time, he was waiting for you to pick a card. Seriously. The Famicom (NES) era was dominated by the Gokuden and Kyoutai series. These weren't fighting games. They were RPGs where your movement and attacks were determined by the number of stars on a digital card.
It’s a weirdly slow way to experience an action series. You’d spend ten minutes just walking across a map of Earth, praying you didn't trigger a random encounter with a Saibaman. Dragon Ball Z: Kyoutai ZIII: Ressen Jinzouningen (1992) is probably the peak of this specific weirdness. It covered the Android saga, but if you didn't understand Japanese, you were basically just clicking pretty pictures and hoping a beam came out. This era proved that Bandai (before the Namco merger) knew the IP was strong enough to sell anything, even a menu-heavy strategy game to kids who just wanted to see a Spirit Bomb.
Then the 16-bit era hit. The Super Butoden series on the SNES changed everything. It introduced the "split-screen" mechanic. If you flew too far away from your opponent, the screen literally ripped in half so you could keep track of your character. It was revolutionary for 1993. It felt huge.
The Budokai Pivot and the Golden Age
If you grew up in the early 2000s, you know the PlayStation 2 was the king of DBZ. This is where the "modern" feel started. Dragon Ball Z: Budokai came out in 2002, developed by Dimps. It used 3D models on a 2D plane. It was fine, but Budokai 3? That’s the one people still argue is the best. It had the "Dragon Rush" mechanic which was basically a high-stakes game of Rock-Paper-Scissors mid-flight.
🔗 Read more: Among Us Spider-Man: Why Everyone Is Still Obsessed With These Mods
But then Spike entered the room with Budokai Tenkaichi.
The naming convention was a nightmare for parents. Budokai and Budokai Tenkaichi are completely different series. Spike moved the camera behind the shoulder. They gave us "Free Roam" in a 3D arena. Suddenly, you weren't just playing a fighting game; you were playing a simulator. Budokai Tenkaichi 3 famously had 161 characters. 161! They had Frieza's soldier #2. They had Babidi. It was bloated, unbalanced, and absolutely glorious.
The move to the PS3 and Xbox 360 era was... rough. Let's be real. Burst Limit looked amazing but had no content. Raging Blast felt like a downgraded Tenkaichi. And then there was Ultimate Tenkaichi, which was essentially an automated movie where you just pressed a button every five seconds. It felt like the soul was being sucked out of the franchise in favor of better lighting effects.
Xenoverse, FighterZ, and the Identity Crisis
Around 2015, everything shifted. Bandai Namco realized people were tired of just playing the "Raditz to Buu" story for the 50th time. They gave us Xenoverse.
Xenoverse wasn't just a game; it was an MMO-lite. You made your own "Original Character" (OC). You walked around Toki Toki City. You grinded for clothes. It was the first time every Dragon Ball game conversation started including the word "Builds." Do you put your points into Ki Blasts or Strike Supers? It turned the fanbase into theory-crafters.
Then Arc System Works showed up.
💡 You might also like: Why the Among the Sleep Mom is Still Gaming's Most Uncomfortable Horror Twist
Dragon Ball FighterZ is arguably the only "legitimate" competitive fighting game in the entire catalog. No gimmicks. No flying behind the back. Just pure, 3v3 tag-team carnage that looked exactly like the anime. It was a love letter. It also highlighted a divide in the community:
- The "Simulator" fans who want Sparking! ZERO and 3D chaos.
- The "Fighter" fans who want frame data and balance.
The fact that both can exist now shows how much the brand has matured. We also got Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, which is basically a playable museum. It’s a single-player Action-RPG that lets you go fishing as Goku. It’s slow, it’s sentimental, and it focuses on the "Z" in DBZ more than the "Fight."
The Games Nobody Talks About (For Good Reason)
We have to talk about the failures. Dragon Ball Z: For Kinect is one of the most broken pieces of software ever sold at retail. You had to physically throw punches in your living room. The sensor almost never worked. You’d end up looking like you were having a seizure while a low-res Cell laughed at you.
Then there’s Dragon Ball Online. It never officially came to the West. It featured a story written by Akira Toriyama himself, set hundreds of years in the future where everyone is a martial artist. It was fascinating world-building trapped inside a clunky, grindy Korean MMO framework. Most of its lore—like the Time Breakers and Mira—was eventually recycled into Xenoverse and Dragon Ball Heroes.
Speaking of Heroes, that’s a rabbit hole. It’s a card-based arcade game in Japan that has been running for over a decade. It’s where "Super Saiyan 4 Vegito" and "Ultra Instinct Raditz" come from. It’s pure fan-service insanity. It doesn't care about canon. It only cares about what looks cool on a holographic card.
The Technical Reality of Emulation and Preservation
If you want to play every Dragon Ball game today, you're going to hit a wall. Licensing is a nightmare. Games like Dragon Ball Z: Budokai HD Collection actually removed the original Yamamoto soundtrack because of plagiarism scandals. Music that defined our childhoods was scrubbed and replaced with generic rock tracks.
📖 Related: Appropriate for All Gamers NYT: The Real Story Behind the Most Famous Crossword Clue
Old titles on the Game Boy Advance, like The Legacy of Goku series, are also stuck in limbo. Legacy of Goku II and Buu’s Fury are actually incredible Action-RPGs developed by an American studio, Webfoot Technologies. They feel different from the Japanese-developed games. They have a distinct Western RPG flavor. But because of licensing shifts between Atari, Funimation, and Bandai, a modern port is unlikely. You’re left with original hardware or the "gray area" of the internet.
What Actually Matters Moving Forward
The future is looking back. Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO is the return to the Tenkaichi formula everyone begged for. It proves that despite the technical brilliance of FighterZ, the core audience wants to destroy mountains and fly in 360 degrees.
The "Action-RPG" elements of Kakarot and the "Live Service" elements of Xenoverse 2 (which is still getting DLC almost a decade later) show that the franchise is no longer just a "seasonal release." It’s a platform.
Critical Insights for the Modern Player
- Don't skip the handhelds: Some of the best combat is actually on the PSP (Shin Budokai) and Nintendo DS (Attack of the Saiyans). Attack of the Saiyans is a turn-based RPG by Monolith Soft—the people who made Xenoblade. It’s a masterpiece.
- The Soundtrack matters: If you’re playing the older PS2 games, try to find versions with the original Kenji Yamamoto score (if you can overlook the legal drama). The music is 50% of the atmosphere.
- Context is King: You can't judge a 1990 Famicom card game by the standards of a 2024 Unreal Engine 5 fighter. These games were experiments in how to translate "infinite power" to limited hardware.
- Community Mods: If you're on PC, the Xenoverse 2 and FighterZ modding communities have added more content than the developers ever could. From custom characters to "What If" sagas, it's where the real innovation is happening.
At the end of the day, playing through the history of these games is a lesson in persistence. The developers didn't always get it right. Sometimes they got it very, very wrong. But the attempt to let us scream into a microphone to charge up a Kamehameha—even if it didn't work—is why we're still talking about it forty years later.
If you want to dive in now, start with Kakarot for the story, FighterZ for the mechanics, and Sparking! ZERO for the pure, unadulterated chaos of being a Saiyan. Everything else is a historical curiosity that, while flawed, built the foundation for the highest-grossing anime gaming empire on the planet.
Actionable Next Steps:
- Check your digital storefronts for Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot—it frequently goes on sale for under $15 and is the most accessible entry point for fans of the anime.
- If you own a PC, look into the Revamp Expansion mod for Xenoverse 2; it fixes many of the visual inconsistencies and adds hundreds of hours of fan-made content.
- Track down a copy of Dragon Ball: Advanced Adventure for the GBA if you want to experience the original Dragon Ball (Goku as a kid) in the best 2D beat-em-up format ever made.