The Let's Play Archive

Dragon Ball Z 2 (NES)

by mkwong98

Part 1: Episode 1 Wild ride in space

Episode 1 Wild ride in space





Welcome to the second game of the series. We are presented with two options :

The first option is "Game start" and the second option is "World Martial Arts Tournament". The second option is an expanded version of the Tourney mode of the first game and we will look at it later. So let's start the game!




Last time, Vegeta goes to Goku's house when Chi-Chi is out. Goku throws a party and they have an eating contest where they have to eat while throwing ki attack at each other!


Meanwhile Piccolo gets drunk and starts ripping his cloths off, much to Gohan's embarrassment.


But Chi-Chi suddenly returns! Enraged by what she sees, she kicks Vegeta into orbit!


As well as pounds Goku into the ground, throws Piccolo out of the house and gives Gohan a bad hair cut while she's at it! Piccolo then goes to hide at King Kai's planet.


Vegeta returns to his home with his pride completely destroyed and hides inside a healing tank, refusing to come out.


With no alternative, Vegeta's family throw him out and forbid him to return until he finds the dragonballs on Namek and fixes his problem.


On the other hand, Chi-Chi argues with her insurance agent Bulma, who claims that injuries made by spouse is not covered by the policy.


Gohan gathers the remaining Z fighters, kidnaps Bulma and runs away from home.

And now we control the space ship heading for Namek.

If we press the B button at this point, we can move the camera freely. Our goal can be found near the top right corner of the map. We are forced to follow a track on this map, so we won't get lost. On the bottom left of the screen, we can see our party members. Unlike the first game, the game is kind enough to give us 5 members right off the bat. Three of them are supposed to be dead at this point in the anime, so this is they lucky break. On the bottom right, we have a much improved menu with five options.


The top option is to move our party. It works more or less the same as the first game except that we don't have to move the full number of steps and the cards we get are not biased. On this map, I'll move 1 step per turn to have more time to level up our party. But before we move, let's have a look at other options.


The middle left option is the item list. We start the game with Bulma card, which heals a small amount of HP and BE. This card can be used once per turn and it does not have a turn limit so the card is very useful. You can think of this card as a replacement of the inn in this game.


The second card is the dragon radar. It is pretty useless in this game as we now can view any part of the map any time we want and it is pretty easy to find out where we need to go.





The middle right option is the stat screen. Our party members start with level 11 and have around 1500BP. Most of them do not have enough BE to use their best attacks. Compare to the first game, Gohan's BP has vastly improved form being the lowest to being the second highest. The biggest improvement is Krillin's ki attacks. Not only he learns to use Taiyoken, his Scatter Shot also becomes a multi-target attack. This is the only multi-target ki attack that we have access to at the moment, so he is the star of our team.


The bottom left option is save game. This game has two save slots and this makes a very useful glitch possible. We'll see that glitch in action at the end of the game, I'm surprised that the glitch still works using an emulator. The bottom right option is story recap. Instead of a brief summary of the stage like the first game, this time it will show the cut scene at the beginning of the stage instead.

This is it for this update, I'll show the game play in the next episode. As a bonus, I made a HD version of the title screen of the last game a while ago, you can watch it here.