Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

I’m a longtime fan of the Ape Escape series of games and while the early outings for the Ape Escape monkeys on the PSP haven’t done well with the critics, I was still interested in the surprise drop of Ape Quest, a downloadable game for the PSP onto the Store this week. I downloaded the Starter Pack (also known as a demo) and took it for a spin.

The game is an RPG stocked with the silly humor of the Ape Escape series and characters set in a fantasy setting. You play a not-so-bright prince who rather dim-wittedly eats a magical banana that had been holding a trio of evil monkeys in what looks to be carbonite. Good old Specter does show up in the game as a magical statue you keep with you and can apparently trade money to in return for temporary but powerful spells, but other than that there aren’t any time nets to be found or capturing to be done.

You maneuver your monkey from preset dots on the map by rotating him in place and pushing forward to move along a set trail to another dot or to talk to a nearby monkey vendor or other NPC. Along the paths, which come in blue and red colors to signify relative danger, you can have sudden random, turn-based battles with enemy creatures of varying strength. You can also have random mini-game encounters anywhere on the paths. Winning a fight or a mini-game will get you chips, which are currency you can trade for special abilities or items from NPCs, and experience points that will level up your monkey and increase his stats.

The combat is straightforward enough with your monkey’s hit points called Guts and special actions able to be performed once you fill a meter by doing conventional attacks with your current weapon. I’m not an RPG player by any means but I found it to be enough of a draw to play all the way to the end of the Starter Pack level where you reach a portal that requires you to have bought one or two of the other levels of the game to continue. You can save your game, which shows this to really be a Starter Pack instead of a demo so you won’t lose your progress, and you can continue to crisscross the same map to fight more creatures, earn more xp and chips, and level up further.

The game works well with a wacky sense of humor in a fantasy RPG-lite setting, including names for the special attacks like “Yes Sir May I Have Another”. But for a download-only game with three levels of unknown length it’s a bit tough to get behind shelling out $20. I’m guessing there will be significant variety to the weaponry but I don’t know how much armor variety would be in the offing. Lastly it’s hard to guess about a difficulty progression or if the story will get more interesting than a basic vehicle to introduce the monkeys to a new genre. It’s definitely worth a try for any PSP owners with the 200+ megs or so free, but I might wait and see if it gets a bit less expensive before I buy it.