Dragon Ball: Advanced Adventure is an underrated game worth playing

Dragon Ball: Advanced Adventure is a video game that often goes unnoticed by gamers, but it is a remarkable take on the early years of the Dragon Ball franchise. Most Dragon Ball video games are based on Dragon Ball Z, the franchise’s most popular iteration. Given that these sagas focus on fighting and epic battles, it’s no surprise that these games usually take the form of fighting games. However, Dragon Ball: Advanced Adventure, which is often overlooked, took a slightly different approach both in its gameplay mechanics and its source material.

The game eschewed Goku’s adulthood and instead adapted his younger years. Based primarily around his fight against the evil King Piccolo, the Game Boy Advance title used the original Dragon Ball series as a basis. Though this might have kept it from being as flashy as other games, the result was a more than respectable beat ’em up that soared higher than the magical Flying Nimbus on rather limited hardware.

Originally released in Japan in 2004 for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance, Dragon Ball: Advanced Adventure was one of the last GBA titles to come out before Nintendo’s new handheld hardware, the touchscreen DS. It was thus even more ironic that it would pull from the classic series Dragon Ball instead of the more popular Dragon Ball Z or even the now non-canon follow-up series, Dragon Ball GT.

The more adventurous and grounded prequel series made the most sense for the game’s scope, which wasn’t as bombastic as the events of Z or the fighting games based on it. Instead, it was a beat ’em up with loose fighting game mechanics, perfect for portraying the early days of Goku before he learned what a Super Saiyan even was. The basic gameplay has Goku relying on his basic martial arts and bo staff to take on his opponents from Dragon Ball, using items and combos to boost his ki and unleash attacks such as the Kamehameha Wave.

In this way, it combined the beat ’em up elements of Capcom’s Final Fight with the powerful Super Combos of Street Fighter. This was particularly ironic given that it was developed by Dimps, who would go on to work on the latter. There’s also a one-on-one mode similar to a fighting game, where 30 different characters can duke it out against each other. Clearing story mode allows players to replay it as Goku’s rival and friend Krillin, while other fighters can be used in the similar Extra mode.

With its fun and challenging gameplay rewarding newcomers and longtime fans of the Dragon Ball franchise, it’s no surprise that Advanced Adventure received good reviews. Unfortunately, this hasn’t kept the game from being as forgotten as some of the earlier arcs on which it was based. Despite the positive reception, Dragon Ball: Advanced Adventure isn’t typically mentioned among other fan-favorite games based on the series. Part of this stems from the fact that it’s an adaptation of Dragon Ball instead of Dragon Ball Z, thus missing elements such as the various Super Saiyan transformations or characters such as Vegeta, the powerful Androids, or Goku’s nemesis Frieza.

Dragon Ball as a whole is something of a black sheep when compared to its successors given its more adventurous tone, though some fans actually prefer these more grounded attributes. If anything, this makes Advanced Adventure even more unique in a series that’s mostly based around its direct sequel. Likewise, it was a title on the Game Boy Advance, a handheld console that, while beloved, wasn’t seen in the same light as the PlayStation 2 or Xbox. This made the game descend even further under the radar, and it didn’t help that Nintendo’s radically different DS was right around the corner as the game came to market.

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