In an effort to spice up the combat, a new addition called drama pieces have been added. Before a fight begins you’re allowed to assign several drama pieces that will provide you with some kind of bonus once certain conditions are met. For example, let’s say you assigned the drama piece “Senzu Bean”. Once your life gets critically low, a cut scene will interrupt the action involving a support character showing up and throwing you a senzu bean. When the action begins once again, you’ll find that your character has recovered some life, all of his ki, and will have recovered some fatigue as well.

It’s an interesting idea, but the execution is flawed. The big problem with drama scenes is that while they are short in length, there is no way to skip them and they happen too often in fights. While it may add some cinematic flair, the fact is that it breaks up the pace of the fight far too often and over time will feel more like an annoyance than a feature.

On the positive side, the game looks and sounds fantastic. The character models look gorgeous, the special attacks are chockfull of cool looking effects and particles, and the huge moments in the story like Goku and Vegeta’s climatic battle and Goku’s first transformation to a super saiyan are masterfully recreated and are a joy to watch. The game also gives you the option of switching between Japanese and English voices, so both subbies and dubbies will be able to enjoy the game in the language they want to hear.

Overall, Burst Limit is a decent effort for a current gen Dragonball Z game, but falls short on many fronts. The gameplay just simply doesn‘t feel enough like Dragonball Z to recommend it to fans and isn‘t deep or unique enough to recommend it to fighting game fans. The characters fly too slow, attacks don‘t feel powerful enough, the stages don’t have enough interactivity to them and aren’t even destructible (What’s a DBZ game if you can’t knock your opponent through a building or mountain?), and the character roster is a huge step back from last gen DBZ games.