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The Lowdown
Pros: Eclectic blend of characters, party game action, easy to learn
Cons: Boring and unbalanced gameplay, poor AI, characters aren't as
interesting together, bad camera
 Purchase
at Play-Asia
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Dream Mix TV World Fighters is a smash brothers clone developed by Hudson,
most known for their Bomberman and Bloody Roar games. Hudson doesn't have as
many "mascot" characters as Nintendo does so they teamed up with Konami and
Takara to add in a couple of extra characters. The full cast of characters
includes: Bomberman, Higgins (from Adventure Island), Optimus Prime (from
Transformers), Simon Belmont (from Castlevania), the Mascot from Konami's
Baseball series, characters from BeyBlade and Licca (from Licca family and
friends). There are a number of secret characters to unlock including Solid
Snake from Metal Gear Solid fame. However, even with all of these characters
this game doesn't offer anything new to the genre or have the same charm as
the Smash Brothers series.
The bulk of the game is battling against other mascot characters. Moves are
performed by pressing one button for a standard attack and another button
for special attacks. Mashing the standard attack button unleashes a combo,
you can also do more moves by combining a direction with the standard attack
button. Special moves include transforming (for the two transformers),
dropping bombs, throwing spears and even boomerangs. Most of the special
attack moves are designed to hit enemies far away, so they're either
projectiles or extended reach attacks. To avoid attacks you can block and a
circular shield will encompass you or you can jump over attacks. This part
of gameplay is pretty standard compared to Smash Brothers.
The main difference between Smash Brothers and Dream Mix TV world fighters
is the way you eliminate your opponent. Instead of having a life bar, at the
beginning of the stage a giant heart will shoot out little hearts. You have
a limited amount of time to collect these hearts, which end up becoming your
life bar. When you're hit, you drop hearts and when you're slammed to the
ground you drop more hearts. The attacker can choose to collect hearts from
the opponents or can let the disappear after a short amount of time. If you
lose enough hearts you release a large heart. If you collect this heart
you're given a second chance and come back to life. If you fail to do this
your character becomes much smaller and you can wait to collect another
large heart as a "comeback" move. This system doesn't work as nicely as the
Smash Brothers system, where you knock an opponent off a platform. One
problem is that one player at the beginning of the match can get lucky and
capture a lot of the hearts, making it almost impossible to eliminate that
player. Another problem with the system is that matches can be a little too
fast. When three players are throwing projectiles on screen, hearts are just
flying everywhere. By the time players attempt to get up they've already
vanished making the match last a few seconds. You can set a number of
matches like best 2 out of 3 or so forth, but in general matches don't last
over a minute.
Another one of the problems with Dream Mix TV World Fighters is that the
characters seem a little out of place. You have giant huge hulking
Transformers fighting against a little girl in a pink dress, who gives equal
damage. You also have the bloody roar, mystical beast characters going up
against a kid who shoots spinning tops. Smash Brothers had a lot of common
ground between the characters. All the characters come from the same
universe, the Nintendo universe, almost all of the characters are really
well known mascots, they all have the same graphical style to them and
probably best of all they have an equal balance of heroes and villains.
Dream Mix TV World Fighters isn't as engaging due to the character variety
as Super Smash Brothers.
Besides that Dream Mix TV World Fighters doesn't have much to hold up a
single player mode. You can play through the entire "arcade mode" in less
than half an hour. The enemy AI in the game is pretty stupid. Enemy
characters don't really collect a lot of hearts, so you already have a huge
advantage from the start of the match. Besides that enemy characters will
stand around and do absolutely nothing to defend themselves in early
matches. This makes winning way too easy. Even in "hard mode" the AI isn't
much better, it may attack you and that's about it. Doing this will unlock
another character, but there are few characters to unlock. Besides that
there is a challenge mode where your goal is to collect the most hearts,
which is a big yawn. The characters don't need much skill to master, so
there is no reason to keep playing this game by yourself unless you are
truly bored.
Graphically, the game doesn't look too bad. Each of the stages are theme
stages and have a style towards the theme. For instance the Adventure Island
stage is full of palm tress and water while the baseball stage has floating
bases, which is kind of cool. The game runs at a pretty smooth frame rate
even when a number of characters are running around and throwing
projectiles. At the same time the character models look pretty decent. At
the same time nothing looks particularly amazing in this game either. The
biggest graphical blunder in this game is the camera. The camera doesn't
seem to zoom in and out properly, which means a lot of the time you'll be
seeing your character as a far away stick figure. This problem is heightened
when you're a tiny character. A tiny character is 1/4 the size of a normal
character, making it really hard to find your character on screen. The
camera acts worse when your character gets hit outside of its boundaries and
for a few seconds you'll be off screen. Since you can't really see what's
going on in battle, players are often mashing buttons in sheer confusion.
This is both frustrating and boring.
Overall, Dream Mix TV World Fighters, isn't anything special. Unless you're
craving a party fighting game this game has way too many problems to make it
enjoyable. Add short replay value to that and you got a dust collector,
instead of a game.
Console Comparison
The Gamecube version is the sure fire winner. At least with the
Gamecube you can play with four players off the bat. Without the
Playstation 2 multitap you're forced to play Dream Mix TV World Fighters
as a two player game, which is just too awful.
Import Friendly
All the sound clips from the fight announcers are in Japanese and so
are the menus. Luckily, the sound bytes are mostly annoying and inane
information to the game. This game takes about two seconds to learn and
thirty seconds to master, so you won't need to understand Japanese to
play it.
US Bound?
This game doesn't have a US release and it is unlikely that it ever
will debut in the US due to licensing issues.
Overall
This game falls flat in both gameplay and entertainment
value. Even if you're favorite video game character is featured in this
game save your cash unless you really like party fighting games.
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