I’ve been non-stop playing Super Dragon Ball Heroes the past week, and I’ve already clocked nearly 50 hours and I’m loving it. Instead of focusing on the positives, and the franchise finally coming westward like some other reviews, I wanted to talk about areas the game could improve. Don’t get me wrong, I think the game is great but there are some glaring issues, such as lack of polish, quality of life and in general? Features.
Something that really stood out to me during my playtime was the translation. There was consistency issues, and the overall localisation wasn’t well done. Considering there isn’t even English Dub/Voice Acting, or English Card Art it really makes me wonder why the translation is so poorly done. So much of the text is just awkward, wrong or just vague. One of the many examples of this is the power stat, and power levels for cards. I’ve seen so many people get confused between the two.
The hub area, Hero Town also struck out at me. The camera is locked at the player’s ass-height and you can’t move the camera at all. I’m not asking for a hub town as big or detailed as the Xenoverse games, but it really could have been better designed and laid out. Right now, the town is tiny and isn’t actually worth exploring. Hell, it’s even easier and faster to just navigate through the menus to get where you need to go.
Also, in some ways the game is just too faithful to the arcade experience that it starts to disrupt the gameplay. For example after matches you’re still shown a “thanks for playing” screen, which just pads out the time inbetween when you can play again, it becomes frustrating. They could instead share that message when the player actually quits to the title screen.
I’ve also seen people complaining about the PvP and Meta, and I agree to an extent. Though, I don’t think the Secret Rare cards are entirely to blame though, if you take them out of the equation and just stick to 4 or even 3 star cards you can still easily finish games in 1-2 rounds. It’s just an issue overall with the game’s design, Bandai cares more about PvE and PvP is more of a courtesy.
One of my suggestions to help remedy this is “for-fun” themed modes, where they could change weekly or monthly. For example you might only be allowed to use 2 star cards, or only Namekians in your deck. This would be a great alternative for people who still want online play, but want to stray away from the meta and be more creative.
I think not being able to use custom decks online with friends is pretty dissapointing, which leads me into the idea of custom rulesets. They already exist with the Zeno or Porunga Shenron battles, so it would just be extending on that idea and giving us a bit more freedom with how we play with friends.
I really hope Bandai works on the game because they do have something really awesome going on, that’s just hindered by bugs or lack of polish. Although they’ve been more or less silent with the issues, especially plagueing the PC release, they have announced there will be future content updates which makes the future look a bit more bright.