DRAGON BALL Z: KAKAROT

A 73 and a 93% sit side by side — that gap is the whole truth

To understand Kakarot, start with the split in its reception. Since launching in 2020, critics have pinned it around 73 (the aggregates and OpenCritic both land in that band), while Steam players handed it a 93% positive rate. This is not an argument about quality; it is two yardsticks knocking against each other. Reviewers measure its combat depth, exploration design and system heft against the objective bar of an action RPG, and naturally arrive at "decent." Fans measure whether this is the Dragon Ball of their childhood, and naturally hand it full marks.

Spell that gap out and the review's core judgment falls into place: this is not a "good action RPG," it is a meticulously built nostalgia machine.

What it owns and nothing else can take is rebuilding the entire source anime into cutscenes you control yourself — a thing the IP's own fighting game, Dragon Ball FighterZ, cannot give you, because FighterZ hands you a competitive ring and never the full journey from the Saiyans to Buu. That is exactly why, fighting game or not, some people still have to own this one.

Who should buy, who should skip, which version to get — do the math before you click

So who is it actually for? The answer is blunt: anyone who grew up on the Dragon Ball Z anime and wants to be Goku one more time — this game was made for you, it turned a childhood memory into a cutscene you operate, and that emotional payoff is not for sale anywhere else. Flip it around, and if you have no attachment to Dragon Ball and just want a hardcore action RPG with deep combat and exploration worth chewing on, the repeated combos, weak AI and fetch-quest side jobs will drain your patience — in which case the money is better spent on a proper JRPG.

If you are buying in, go straight for the new-gen version (PS5 / Xbox Series, or the correspondingly optimized PC build): it makes the last-gen era's most off-putting loading and frame-rate problems a priority fix, and the up-to-60-frames experience runs far smoother — it is the best form to play this in. Add DLC on demand: the core story is complete on the base game, while the season-pass content — A New Power Awakens at $9.99 a part, the DAIMA bundle at $34.99 — suits fans already in deep who want to play the world out, and means almost nothing to someone here for a single pass through the main story.

The commercial footnote is hard to argue with. A licensed anime game that critics filed under "Fair" still climbed to 10 million copies over six years, on the back of a community that kept buying every new arc the moment it dropped. Numbers like that do not happen because a game is mechanically excellent; they happen because it gives a specific audience exactly the thing nothing else will. Stretch the timeline and its place in the series is clear too: this is not a game out to innovate on mechanics, it is a deliberate tribute to the source. Within the IP, FighterZ represents the height of competitive fighting, Xenoverse 2 represents custom-character time-travel combat, and Kakarot fills the "complete story experience" slot — it lets you not invent a new tale but walk the most familiar one again. Three of them, three lanes, none a substitute for the others.

An overall 7.8 — on the action RPG track it sits mid-pack, neither its combat depth nor its exploration design anything special; but as a playable Dragon Ball Z box set, it does the job it set out to do. Ten million copies and six years of long-tail updates already prove that, for the crowd it aims at, this nostalgia machine is worth the ticket. All you have to do is ask yourself one honest question before you click buy: are you here for the childhood memory, or for a hardcore RPG? The answer changes everything about what this 7.8 means to you.