Ever heard of Dragon Ball: Final Stand? It was one of the most popular Dragon Ball games back in the day, until the developer abandoned it.
So naturally, somebody decided to make a “new” version of it.
Enter Zenkai Origins.
Zenkai Origins is pretty much an unofficial successor to Final Stand, made by a team called Popo Studios. It seems to have taken a while to develop, as the game’s place was made in late november 2020. Fuck that year.
Anyway, the game just released VERY recently, about an hour ago when this was written, so I’m attempting the game review any% speedrun. Also to mention, the developer’s Discord server literally crashed when the game released lol.
The menu screen is a nice animation of a Saiyan fighting…black Buu? I dunno. What matters is that a month of development time was probably spent on that animation, because it’s sick.
Okay, into the game itself, you create your character (Which I had to do twice because I accidentally set my character to Human instead of Saiyan) and jump into the game, you take your first quest, which involves helping Chi-Chi by beating up a bunch of troublesome wild dogs.
After that, you already level up to Level 5, and since quests are apparently one-time only here you can’t re-take Chi-Chi’s quest, so where do you go next?
I don’t know for sure, but I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to complete Roshi’s questline…
But here’s our first problem, when you start the game, you’re slow as hell, but this can thankfully be negated slightly by throwing points into your agility stat.
Roshi’s first quest is hell, you have to fly to Bulma and back to Roshi, and due to my low Agility stat it took what felt like ten minutes.
His second quest is worse, you have to beat up five Crane Students, which are Level 25 compared to your Level…something 7? Well it’s worth it because you get a lot of EXP from it.
His third quest is more mindless flying around to pick up five rocks scattered across the map, that shouldn’t be so bad assuming you put a few points in Agility…
Okay enough of that, I’ll talk about the actual gameplay.
It’s good! At least for me. The effects are great, and I think the combat is fun and satisfying. If you like teleporting all around everywhere while fighting somebody, this is the game for you. The building is pretty good too, I really like the blocky building style.
Onto the negatives though, while the combat is fun, this game suffers from some problems.
Mentioned earlier, travel is slow in the beginning of the game and it’s kinda hard to figure out what quest you’re supposed to do next without a guide…
The biggest flaw is…I think you can guess. Grind. I don’t think I have to say anything more about this.
And on top of that is some kinda-pay to win gamepasses…want Broly and Beerus’ movesets? Give us your Bobux. Then again, they might not be very pay to win because I am broke and can’t find out for myself.
But I think it’s a worthy successor to Final Stand, it’s basically just that game but better.
However, what I’m really worried about is that the devs will just completely abandon the game…this happens a LOT for anime games if you don’t know.
What are your thoughts on this game?