I never really got past Toonami as far as anime went, but I always loved Dragon Ball Z. After some time, I grew out of anime and really just stopped watching cartoons altogether. I probably had watched and knew just about everything DBZ related though.

When I came to BYOND, the first game I played was an anime game, believe it or not. Regardless of that fact I quickly left the anime section almost completely as I realized that the community was bad and the games were actually terrible. I never had anything against the BYOND Anime community or guild, but I never had much interest in it. The only anime game I've ever spent a decent amount of time on is Falacy's DragonBall Z Heroes United. Even that game I grew to realize was pretty terrible as I grew in my programming abilities and my time around BYOND. I came to think there was no hope for the anime game community.

When I heard about Dragon Ball Online 2, I was instantly skeptical. Just because something looks nice, doesn't mean it's nice all around. I also keep in mind that BYOND's repeat proc is the failure of most BYOND games. Not only does using the repeat proc for movement make the start off ugly and clunky, but the entire movement and the stop as well. The only way to bipass that is to make your own repeat proc from a loop, which is rather easy. The repeat proc turns me off from most BYOND games. Even if you have a great pixel movement system, but use the repeat proc, it will fail at least in my eyes for whatever that's worth.

So the other day I was talking with a friend of mine, Latoma, about DBO2. I told him how skeptical I was and he sparked my interest in it when he told me how smooth the movement was. Pmitch allowed me to get on and test before they went public, so here is my experience:

The movement is not pixel movement, however it is loop movement! The movement is excellent, smooth, and easy to navigate with. That alone sets it apart from the other anime games. Wait! There's more!
I was very impressed by just about every aspect of this game and its alpha test. One thing that impressed me probably the most, was how every energy blast attack you could do was very different. Each had a different way of charging, shooting, even aiming. Your normal little ki blast can be used at an almost rapid fire pace while you target the enemy and blast them with your pixel movemented projectiles. The beam blast is beautifully animated and the polish is great. Even at the end when you stop the beam, the entire beam gets smaller and dissapears before you. The destructo disk charges on top of you and launches forward when you release it. And then the spirit bomb slowly charges into an extremely large ball above you to be launched. The projectiles are all running off of pixel movement.

Battling can be very fast paced. I'm being honest when I say it looks a lot like the show when you see people moving around at incredible speeds, stopping to punch each other and kick each other, then going back to moving very fast, then repeating.

Overall, there wasn't too much to see besides basic game mechanics. Even then, I am extremely impressed. This game has great promise and I will be watching it into the future. With what I've been told about how the storyline and such will work now, I'm even more excited. This might just be an Anime game that finds me playing for a long time. That is unless the community kills it for me.