Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

Overview

One of the first things you see when you turn on Brain Buster Puzzle Pak is the warning, “This game only uses stylus.” This is really representative of the whole experience where localization is concerned. I’m one of the most unforgiving people you’ll find for this kind of thing, and it really set me up with the expectation that this game was going to be a train wreck. It turns out that while the localization is clumsy, to the point where entire words are left out of sentences in the tutorials, scrubbing the whole thing of meaning, the game itself is surprisingly solid.

BBPP is a collection of five brain teasing puzzles: Sudoku, Kakuro, Slitherlink, Light on, and Nurikabe. Don’t feel bad, I’d only heard of Sudoku when I picked up the box.

Sudoku

I’m not going to get into the details of how Sudoku is played, you can read about that elsewhere. Sudoku is the life of any party it attends, and it has had several incarnations on the DS. There are a few things we hope for in a Sudoku game on this platform; standards that were set by older games which are, unfortunately, generally ignored by newer ones.

The benchmark by which Sudoku on the DS can be measured is the Sudoku game that was bundled with Nintendo’s Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day that was released in 2005. Not even the later Sudoku Gridmaster, also published by Nintendo (this time developed by Mitchell) and even tagged with their “Touch Generations” label, could stand up to that presentation, with much lower production values, clumsier control and a lack of any kind of hint system. Brain Age‘s Sudoku was not perfect, however, with barely over a hundred puzzles and no random puzzle generator, and sometimes finicky handwriting recognition.

BBPP‘s Sudoku doesn’t stand up visually to Brain Age either, and there’s no option to hand write the numbers into the cells. Instead, you select one of the numbers, then tap the cells you want to put the number into. Fortunately for BBPP, there are a lot of little extras that add a great deal to the experience, and the Sudoku game itself is compelling enough to make you completely forgive the underwhelming presentation.

Putting a number in a cell that conflicts with what you’ve already entered gives you warnings: things turn red and make unpleasant noises. There is a Memo button that changes things so you can put small numbers in the cells as a “maybe” without getting these warnings. You can also flip through several guide options. One highlights every instance of the number you have selected, so you can see which sections still need that digit. I found that very helpful. Another highlights the section you last touched, along with the row and column of cells that intersect it. The third option lets you turn these guides off, which is great for those who prefer to go it alone. It would be nice to be able to remove the color-coding from the numbers as well, in case you wanted to make the screen a little less confusing to look at, but we can only take what we’re given.

Completing a puzzle gives you points based on how quickly you solve it. There is an ITEM subscreen, from which you can choose to use an “answer ball,” which reveals the correct answer for a single cell and decreases your score by one, or look at how many panels have been awarded. More on panels later. Little red balloons with faces will periodically appear and wander around the edge of the grid. If you tap them they pop. Pop three, and you get another answer ball. You’re also given undo and redo buttons, which don’t seem to have limits on them, but these don’t seem terribly useful.

At first listen, I was convinced I’d be turning off the sound after a while. Somehow, despite the lack of variety, I was surprised at how pleasant the acoustic guitar piece that serves as the Sudoku music was. After hours of listening to it I found myself either not being aware of it at all or simply wondering why it sounds so sad.

Kakuro

What? Sounds like something you don’t want to see skittering across the floor when you turn on the light in the kitchen at 2am. Surprisingly, I find Kakuro more engrossing than Sudoku, if that’s possible. Kakuro plays like a crossword puzzle with numbers, complete with blacked out squares. Instead of the clues you’d get in a crossword puzzle, you get numbers: the sum of all the digits that will fit in the range of cells. Digits can’t repeat, just as in Sudoku. You’re not given any finished cells to start you off, so what you get is a harder version of Sudoku that goes a lot faster because there tend to be fewer cells to fill in.

The controls and options in Kakuro are identical to those in Sudoku, but it has a space theme, with meteors zipping around instead of smiley balloons. The music is not as nice, but again isn’t a problem.

Nurikabe

Nurikabe is another new one for me, but I found myself feeling far more engrossed in the gameplay than the other two. The game plays even faster than Kakuro, and the mechanic behind it is simpler. You’re given square boards of varying sizes with digits in a small handful of the cells. You need to fill in the empty white cells with gray cells, creating “islands” of white around each of the digits that are the number of cells in size that the digit is. For example, if the number’s a one, you’ll surround that white cell with gray. If it’s a five, that white cell and four other cells in a single mass will be surrounded by gray. The gray areas have to be contiguous over the board. In practice, it is usually surprisingly easy, but occasionally, depending on which way I approached the puzzle, I got stuck for a long time.

The controls are effectively the same as in the other modes, except instead of numbers you get gray squares, white squares, and gray dots that are kind of a “maybe,” which works like the Memo function. The game is played over a koi theme. Koi are the colorful Japanese carp that you often see in decorative ponds and tattoos. Koi swim around the edge in place of the balloons and meteors, tap three to get an answer ball as in the other modes.

Slitherlink

With a row of hits I was ready to rock some Slitherlink, only to find that it’s the problem child in this brood. While the concept and the style are really good, the imprecise control makes it difficult to enjoy. The way Slitherlink is played is interesting enough: you’re given a grid of dots with some numbers in it, and you plot segments from point to point around the board, bordering the given numbers only the number of times that the digit indicates. You need to create a complete circuit, with none of the lines touching. The game is surprisingly challenging, which is great, but plotting in the segments is very difficult because they’re so small and the dots are so close together. The frustration level is very high when you’re trying to draw a single line and additional ones are sprouting off in every direction because you’re not dead-on.

It’s not hard to come up with ideas for how this could have been fixed. A zoom function with the ability to pan around with scroll bars would have made any of the games better, but this one in particular is just too hard to manage without.

Light On

Light On reminded me somewhat of Minesweeper in that you’re given numbers and you use those as a guide to figure out what’s touching them. Light On gives you a small grid with some squares filled. Some of the filled squares have numbers, and those numbers tell you how many light bulbs are adjacent to that square. You need to place light bulbs in the open spaces in such a way that will light up all the open spaces. A beam of light comes out of each placed bulb in all four directions, and no beam can strike another bulb. It’s a very unique game but I found it remarkably easy, blowing through all fifty puzzles in well under two hours of continuous play. This is a shame, because I found the game a lot of fun.

Unlockables

The poor localization in the game makes unlockables very difficult to understand, even after reading the explanation in the manual. When completing puzzles, you’re randomly given a panel. But instead of telling you this, the game congratulates you that Drawing Board has been awarded. What?

It turns out that Drawing Board means panel. A panel is a tile with a piece of an image on it, kind of like a square puzzle piece. There are simple puzzles you can assemble and solve using these pieces on the corners of the main menu, which looks like a map of a town where the puzzles are buildings. Once you have all the panels to complete a picture, you can put it together, and once you’ve put together all the puzzles in a set, something is unlocked. Training mode is an example of something you need to unlock. Oddly enough, two of the pieces of the map that you unlock go to Training, which makes it seem as if they had something else in mind for that spot on the map and it just didn’t come together in time.

Gathering all the panels from the Sudoku game is a different matter entirely. The puzzle for that one is a Sudoku grid, so it takes a little more studying to get it together, and your reward is a pile of additional Sudoku puzzles to solve. It’s an interesting take on the idea of giving the player more puzzles when you complete the ones you start with, but since you have to do the puzzles in order anyway, slowly gathering puzzle pieces in the process, it really just amounts to a pleasant surprise for those who think they’ve run out of pre-generated Sudoku puzzles. I found it especially entertaining that because of an error in localization, you’re told that the number of Sudoku puzzles has increased by 100, when it has actually increased to 100.

Training

Training is a big part of what sets this title apart from the competition. Many Sudoku games only give you a fixed number of puzzles. Brain Buster Puzzle Pak gives you 50 of each puzzle, which sounds anemic. However, in Training, it will randomly generate puzzles of any type in the game for you, effectively giving you an infinite number of puzzles to solve. Training puzzles are not ranked, and there’s nothing to gain by completing them, which makes sense. The puzzles you’re given in the game have been put together a certain way and some attempt has been made to put them in order of difficulty. Random puzzles could be very easy, or very hard.

Having random puzzles in there is great for giving this kind of game legs. I really didn’t expect them to put something like that in because earlier Sudoku titles denied us this.

Is it worth it?

The developer chose to try to ape the Brain Age model with this game, by popping in a Japanese professor (like Kawashima in the Brain Age games) and constantly extol the virtues of concentration for a healthy brain. You’ll also find multicolored parrots in the game with mortarboards… it’s not clear what they’re about. What is clear is that while the game is very rich on content, it falls flat on two levels: presentation and localization. Both make critical tasks in the game, such as navigating the menus, challenging, but in the end, none of that matters.

At a budget price of $20, this game is a great value. There’s a good variety of puzzle styles, some of which are genuinely challenging. Slitherlink is nearly unplayable due to the controls, but even if you cut that game out of the set, it still amounts to roughly $5 per game, which is more than reasonable. Random puzzles in training mode extend the game’s life almost indefinitely. Unlockables are shared across four available profiles, meaning if you’re sharing the game with someone else you can get to them faster. It really comes together as a good package despite its shortcomings, so if logic puzzles are your thing, I recommend you pick this one up.

I give Brain Buster: Puzzle Pak three point five out of five.