Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

I’ve spent about a week playing Work Time Fun for the PlayStation Portable, but it didn’t take me more than a few minutes to realize this game fills an important gap in the PSP lineup, and it does it quite well with a strong flavor of Japanese wackiness.

That gap is the minigame gap. Nintendo’s systems have a thriving ecosystem living in the minigame gap akin to those deep-sea vents you can see in TV documentaries, the ones where everyone is amazed that anything can possibly live on just sulfur and heat or whatnot. Minigames live on a few button pushes, or maybe a screen tap on the DS, and now the PSP has a good game with its own special minigame habitat.

Work Time Fun is most welcome on a handheld that takes itself a little too seriously. It’s promoted for its music playback and video playback, it’s got a camera add-on and GPS add-on, and games that range from shooting bad guys in Syphon Filter to abducting bad guys in MGS Portable Ops to running over good and bad guys in a pair of GTA games. This game isn’t just a good fit for being silly, it’s also a very good game to play in short bursts. It loads quickly, minigames typically require not even a second or two of loading to start up, they can often be over very quickly, and the variety is pretty good.

This mini-game habitat comes in the form of a menu that lets you read in-game email; take one of four jobs at a placement agency; spend money on capsule vending machines that give you worthless trinkets, gadgets, or new mini-games; or go to a cantina for ad-hoc trading, mini-game outsourcing, and co-operative minigame playing. There’s also a start-button menu that lets you see all of the wacky titles given to you by the game based on what you’ve done in certain mini-games; lets you see all the trinkets, games, and utilities you’ve unlocked; and lets you change game save options. That’s it. The Gamespot review mentions that an online, web-visible leaderboard was stripped from the US version, which is really a shame. Some of these mini-games can be tough and it would be nice to see my saved game’s accomplishments visible on the web.

I won’t bore you with a deep description of the mini-games, but I will say that the visual quality is generally and deliberately uneven, with some games set up in a pixelated 8-bit game style while others use much fancier sprites to do the work for them. Sound is also different, and tends to fit the visuals, with simple music in the blocky Baseball Star game and phonograph-scratchy music — Auld Lang Syne — that plays during the final minute or two of the graphically detailed Chick Sorting game. It all works together, and the core mini-game itself doesn’t seem to be harmed by the choice of style, so it really amounts to a nice amount of visual variety.

For quick and addictive fun I could see picking this game up at greatest hits pricing or better, but probably not at its current $30 price point. That said, I recommend that you should at least rent it first and see if it hooks you like it hooked me. You’ll find yourself retrying tougher minigames just to see how well you can do at them, and you’ll also be keeping an eye on your bank account and wondering just what will pop out of those vending machines next. Dracula teeth, a cell phone chain, a ramen timer, and mahjong tiles have all popped out at one time or another.

I hope this game gets a sequel with some online functionality. At worst this should be on online leaderboard, and at best a full set of online features matching the Ad-Hoc ones which naturally I was unable to try out. Until then, I’ll be sending back this rental, holding onto my saved game, and keeping an eye out for it to drop in price.