Games that marked the user of SNES and Mega Drive.
Dragon Ball Super Butoden forever changed the conception we had of Goku's video game. The title, appeared in 1993, was the big ball for our territory. Many other games had already come out, but that first approach to the 1-on-1 model, in the purest Street Fighter style, but with the vicissitudes of the Toriyama universe, seemed like a dream come true. It was a year later when we received two direct opponents. Super Butoden 2 for Super Nintendo and Buyu Retsuden (L’Apel du destin) for Mega Drive. Both arrived in Spain during the month of June 1994, as indicated in Dragon Ball Dai Budokai, the history of Goku video games by Daniel Quesada and Antonio Sánchez-Migallón. And they starred in the great 16-bit duel.
Who lived the war of consoles of the nineties, we know perfectly that for things of age and sense of belonging (incredibly not a few, now in adulthood and with responsibilities, continue to do the same) we used to defend our own as best. Although it is also true that the desire to go to the house of the friend or cousin to play another one, called Super or Mega Drive, was enormous. The option of playing what we did not have on a day-to-day basis also generated a powerful attraction. If we even left games and consoles!
(move images left and right)
One of the great debates that children lived in the mid-nineties was to know which Dragon Ball game was better. Super Nintendo had opened the ban with Super Butoden, an ideal title to generate envy in the schoolyard. But in the following summer two balls came together. On the one hand, the sequel and best delivery of the three of Super Nintendo. On the other, the response of Mega Drive with Buyu Retsuden. The first, as explained in the book of our fellow Hobby Consoles, had left at the end of 93 in Japan, but it took six months to do so in Spain. The second, directly that summer.
Both did it in French, being the neighboring country and ours the only PAL to receive them, although later some were also distributed in other areas, such as Portugal. It was usual, and although not desirable, something more we understood from French than not from the Japanese versions that some stores imported and which, adapter through SNES, were the jewel in the crown for more than one. The two games were analyzed the same month at HobbyConsolas, with high marks: Super Butoden 2 took 93% and Buyu Retsuden, 89.
It is curious that Butoden 2 is considered the best in the saga when it has an interesting hodgepodge of characters and plot to develop complex. The first installment covered the great battles of Goku, from his confrontation with Piccolo at the end of Dragon Ball to the great duel with a perfect Cell that we had not yet met in the anime. But this second installment featured the end of the Cell arc, including its small offspring, and a mix of films ranging from the Silver Warriors to Broly's first. David Jaumeandreu places it in his Dragon Ball, the video games of a generation:
"In June 1993, the Cell saga came to an end (…) in the absence of fresh content to explore in the main chronology, TOSE turned to the latest films to establish a script." “Super Butoden 2 starts like this with the previous one of the tournament organized by Célula and, after raising us with the victory, it derives in a peculiar plot that combines the events of the films Los Guerreros de Plata and Estalla el Duelo,” he says. In fact, in this sense in Dragon Dai Budokai they add that, for Spain, “the game arrived before these films had been released in our country! In fact, we had to wait until the end of 1994 to introduce the films in our VHS players, so for the average of the Spanish public, playing La Légende Saien was the only way to know the history of these characters. ”
The Saiyan Legend
Located chronologically, it's time to talk about what each one contributed. Super Butoden 2 was an important advance over the first part. On a visual level, the game took relevant steps in both character models and animations, scenarios and special effects. But it is that playably, it seemed a dream come true: we could load ki to launch special attacks, something that was not in the first installment; We could throw enemies, fight underwater … And perform special attack clashes for the first time. Yes, in addition to dodging or blocking, we could answer a Kame Hame Ha with another. If we add to all this the possibility of making the famous Meteor Attack, spectacular combos to destroy the rival, the result was a game for hours.
The big hook in the game modes of this installment was in the story, which not only mixed the explained events of the official arc and the movies, but offered the player different paths. According to the characters we used, the decisions we made and the result of the fighting, we were discovering new lines of dialogues and new confrontations. Something that brought great replayability. And a curious detail that Jaumandreu remembers in his book: "exceptionally, it is the only Dragon Ball fighting game in which Goku cannot be chosen from the beginning."
Another curiosity is that although today we find the need to have the original soundtrack of the anime, something that little by little seems to be introduced (this is what Xenoverse 2 and FighterZ have done via DLC, and will start Kakarot), in That moment didn't bother us too much. Surely because those midi notes of Super Butoden 2 were simply spectacular. The high and futuristic rhythm of the Trunks theme, or those first blunt notes of Vegeta's. Not to mention the darker tone of the music of Cell, worthy of a villain and final boss of a recreational machine.
The explosions, the blows with the ground, the energy of Ki overflowing and the scenes and images during the story mode, where other characters like Bulma and Satan could appear, did the rest for a game with a curious template, but part of our story: Gohan (for the first time in SSJ2), Vegeta, Trunks, Piccolo, Goku, Cell, Jr Cell, Bojack, Zangya and Broly, the premiere of a legendary saiyan we didn't know.
The call of destiny
The users of the SEGA console were in luck with the arrival of their first and only Dragon Ball game. Buyu Retsuden was the formula that TOSE developers found to bring the series experience to their console. This delivery can be considered as a kind of mixture between the first and the second part of Butoden, to which to add several peculiarities of its own. The most interesting was the character template, which differed from the view in SNES and was very attractive. To common names such as Piccolo, Trunks, Vegeta, Gohan and Goku, an unpublished hero was added: it was the premiere of Krillin in a Dragon Ball title. On the other side of the board, Cell and Frieza were the great villains, but the others were not left behind: A18, Recoome and Ginyu. Both with particularities: the first could be invincible for a while and the second, he could use his body change technique that left very good afternoon in thousands of Spanish houses, especially when our opponent was a rookie who did not know that option in the game .
On a visual level, the Mega Drive game kept the type, although it probably didn't shine that brightly because of the console's color palette. It had some amazing scenarios, such as the Hyperbolic Time Chamber or Namek's design, as well as our own scenes where we could see characters like Vegeta, Trunks and Gohan in the base state. In fact, the story mode had its own way: each character had an original plot of his own, something that invited us to discover them all even if they were not linked to the official plot of the series.
The title had to adapt to the demands of Mega Drive and its three-button command, having to enter a command for ki attacks or press the direction twice to move at high speed due to the lack of L and R buttons. fights, of course, kept the essence Butoden with meteor attacks, special attacks (without shock of waves), split screen to move around the stage, etc. Of course, with a rhythm of combat that looked much more like the first Butoden, although it had a turbo mode to accelerate it.
Super Butoden 2 was much better received and in fact, within this time it is considered the best exponent of Dragon Ball (although Hyper Dimension later came out, and at least as far as mechanical and visual section is concerned, here there is no discussion of what it is much 'more fighting game', but that is another debate), but this does not mean that Buyu Retsuden was a very interesting delivery, both for its own character and story template and for the fact of being able to enjoy Goku and company in Mega Drive.
The Butoden saga, where these two games are born, had three more iterations. One in 95 for Saturn known as Shin Butoden, the good version of Ultimate Battle 22 although neither the definitive Dragon Ball as for many years was said, especially because he did not leave Japan and few tried it to convince himself of his words. The other, Dragon Ball Kai: Ultimate Butoden, DS game that we will never understand why he did not leave Japan. A great game in mechanics, character template and history. The last attempt was Extreme Butoden in 3DS, a title that failed in gameplay even though it had a fanservice unleashed by the number of assistant characters available. At least it was the seed for Arc System Works to do FighterZ later.
