Retro Review - Dragon Ball: Advance Adventure

These days I have played several Gameboy Advance games and they always bring me good memories and it's amazing how many games there are in this console, many are excellent that I'm sure many people don't know and I made a list of those games to later make a Retro Review. And although the game I will talk about today is quite well known, especially what it is based on, it is an excellent game, which will make you relive your childhood and will bring back many memories of your childhood. And it couldn't be more than Dragon Ball, however unlike most of the games of this saga that are based on the mythical Z saga, this game is based on Dragon Ball, the first Dragon Ball, the one that started it all and my favorite saga of this franchise.

Today's Retro Review is about: Dragon Ball: Advance Adventure.

Dragon Ball: Advance Adventure is based entirely on Goku's first adventure, his first meeting with Bulma and his first adventure searching for the Dragon Spheres. That first adventure where we meet most of the iconic characters of this saga which have endured through many years. Dragon Ball, personally I always liked it more than Dragon Ball Z and the later sagas of this series, because it has a better level of humor and it was a much more adventurous series than a series of absurd fights with absurd powers. Dragon Ball Advance Adventure summarizes very well all this first part, quite faithful and successful, perfect to remember this story again.

Graphically it is a game that is quite good, it maintains much of the essence and charisma that we saw in the anime, with lots of color and character designs very faithful to the original product. It is a game very pleasing to the eye, due to the good use of colors, which are very similar to what we can see in the anime.

The character design is great, they are practically the same (with certain graphic limitations due to the Gameboy Advance), but even so they are very good, have very good animations, fluid and quite varied. In this way the characters of the game (especially Goku) are seen with enough life on screen. Of the old Dragon Ball games, this is perhaps one of the best in Pixelart's work, it's quite a nice game.

Its scenarios are also very well done, and we will be able to see very representative places of the Dragon Ball saga, very well recreated and with many details and with great variety. There is a decent variety of scenarios to go through and visit.

In the sound aspect is quite normal, with melodies that are very well with the situation or with the scenarios, as they fit very well with the whole environment, but they are a bit repetitive, however they are quite good. Dragon Ball: Advance Adventure, has 81 melodies of relatively long duration and also with some sound effects quite typical of the Dragon Ball saga.

Dragon Ball: Advance Adventure OST Playlist

Dragon Ball: Advance Adventure is a game of the beat'em up, platform, adventure and action genre quite classic, it brings together all the most representative elements of this type of video games and creates a title that despite having fairly common elements, is an entertaining game from start to finish. Especially because we control Goku in one of his first adventures.

We will advance in the scenarios, which will be full of enemies and using Goku's fists, his sacred staff or even later in the story when we learn the Kame-Hame-Ha, we can defeat those enemies who deign to hinder us. Throughout this adventure, we will find the classic items to recover our life, which will be in the form of food (something logical considering that Goku is a character who likes to eat a lot).

In addition to the beat'em up mode there will also be shoot'em up type sections, in which we will have Goku riding on the mythical "flying cloud" and we must go flying and defeating enemies or chasing them. In addition to this, we also have a 1vs1 fighting mode but with a type of gameplay a little different from the classic fighting game, it is a little more "strategic" and perhaps it is a little strange and confusing at first but it does not take much to get used to it.

Unfortunately Dragon Ball: Advance Adventure is a fairly short game, we will complete it so fast that we will be left wanting to continue playing, fortunately, this game has a fairly high level of replayability, we can also play in two player modes, as well as the fight mode against a friend or against the AI of the game, it is quite entertaining and thus will give us a few more hours of entertainment.

Dragon Ball: Advance Adventure is a game that was made with love and despite its limitations is a pretty good title of the Dragon Ball saga, which most of its games are based on the Z saga. Goku's first adventure is my favorite, without any doubt and remembering those moments again through this videogame is a very strong feeling.