Dragonball Z Kakarot Part 17 (Finale) - Gokou's Next Journey (DLC #6)

 

The final episode of Kakarot, after years of returning to it every so often for these DLCs. Why did I start doing this game? Because it really is the best DBZ game out there.

This is the sixth and final DLC. Even if they decide to add more eventually, this is it for me. About 95% sure they're done though, and they've kept this game running long enough. The DLCs have gotten shorter and shorter, and this latest one is pretty tiny considering it took like 8 months since the previous one.

We start with a quick recap of the final Buu fight, which you play out of course.

This tells you right away that they had to pad things out a bit for this DLC, but I don't mind repeating the final battle of the Z series. It's a good battle.

Super Saiyan 3! Being able to transform mid-fight and use new abilities etc is an awesome aspect of this game.

It's an RPG, kind of, except the battles play out almost like a 3D fighting game. The difference is you've got levels, stats, items, etc.

The fight finishes with a beam tug-of-war, which I just stumbled into, but it was the perfect ending to the battle.

Cut to ten years later! Gokou is living a quiet life and training his granddaughter Pan.

What? Dragonball Super? Shhhhh. This is End of Z! Nothing happened!

Our first mission is to go fishing. Kakarot is good at capturing these quiet moments between the characters that we don't really get to see much of in the show.

Oh my God, Pan is adorable.

Later, the whole family is having dinner, and Gokou announces that he's entering the next World Tournament and wants the rest of the family (the ones that can fight...so not Gohan) to also sign up. Chi-Chi correctly points out that nobody has a chance against Gokou anyway. Well, here's the thing...

...he wants Pan to fight in the tournament and has high hopes that she'll go far. Then they go off to train some more!

That's right, Gokou is BEATING PAN. And you have to play as him for the beatings too. My God, game.

They find Goten sneaking around. He's afraid to enter the tournament for some reason...or just doesn't care, since he's a teenager now and more interested in... whatever it is that he's doing in his room all the time.

Next, they train, and Gokou BEATS GOTEN.

Vegeta is all mellow and middle-aged now. They tell Goten to cancel a date he's supposed to go on and fight in the tournament. There'll be plenty of time to date later! Unless there isn't. Maybe he'll get older and realize life passed him by and he never really dated anybody because he was too busy playing video games and training for tournaments. I mean Gokou and Gohan lucked into their girlfriends, who's to say Goten will be so lucky? Let him go on a date while he can.

Pan warms up for the tournament by flying in a circle around the entire planet really fast. This wunderkind seems to be super-powerful for her size/age.

So who's going to be the hero of the next Dragonball series? Is it...

A) Vegeta

B) Broly

C) Uub

D) Pan

Well wait, we all know it'll be Gokou again. Also we have a lot of unfinished business with things like Beast Gohan and Black Freeza. I assume we'll get that series eventually. Maybe the one after that will be the Pan series, who knows? I'm just surprised Super has been off the air for six years now. Previous DBZ posts over the years always had me saying "I'm sure Super will come back soon enough" and it never actually did. Do the owners of DBZ not want to make tons of money?

Bulma points out that Pan shouldn't be fighting adults. lol tell that to Gokou. Nope, the intent here is for her to fight in the grown-up division.

Chi-Chi has worrisome news. She hasn't been able to reach Master Roshi on the phone. Has he finally croaked? He's been like 80 years old for about 40 years now.

Look at this fantastic world map. You could spend tens of hours living in the Dragonball world if you wanted to with this game. As a kid I would have loved to have something like this.

Gokou soars over to Kame House to check on him. Not sure why he didn't just instant-transmission, but that power is so fundamentally broken that I'm not surprised they're just ignoring it.

Phew, Roshi is still alive. His phone is out, because some Freeza Force rando goon is hacking into the phone lines to collect info for Freeza. This leads to a sidequest where you fly over to another island and beat up said goon to get the phone working again.

Back to the main plot, Gohan's house is lined with books, no surprise.

Our heroes arrive at the World Tournament, and Pan is the most excited out of all of them. Everyone else is all jaded and "been there done that" but for Pan this is all new.

Goten is suited up for battle and looks a hell of a lot like Yamcha. It's sort of like Yamcha has gotten a second life. I hope this doesn't mean Goten is going to be the resident perennial jobber character in future DB material...

Pan sees her other grandpa, Mr. Satan, and unlike most of the cast he actually does look older. He's rooting for Pan to win the tournament.

But wait! Here's the mysterious Uub, who hails from a distant village. He's super-powerful, despite appearing to be just a regular human boy. He needs to win the tournament to get the prize money and feed his starving villagers.

Gokou immediately knows what Uub is. Uub...is the reincarnation of Kid Buu. Gokou asked him to come back as a good person in the next life, and...uh...it just kinda happened. Not sure how Gokou knew that would work, or that he'd be here, or what. Uub doesn't know any of this and has no memory of his previous life.

IT'S BUU SPELLED BACKWARDS GUYS

Some guy walks over and starts old-shaming Vegeta, who then backhands him clear out of the arena. I'm pretty sure he just murdered that guy!

Also...Vegeta is "old"? Japan!

You only get to play out two tournament fights. Gokou vs Uub obviously, and Pan vs... Wild Tiger? Who?

I expected this guy to just be some jobber, but he's actually REALLY strong and poses a legitimate threat to Pan.

Also wondering what the fans in attendance must be thinking, seeing this small tyke locking horns with this giant muscleman.

After that we get Gokou vs Uub, also a first-round match. Detecting Uub's great power, Piccolo calls this the real main event.

Looks like our heroes are watching the fight from a nearby nuclear testing bunker, Oppenheimer style.

There are two fights with Uub, and the first is pretty easy. You just kinda manhandle the guy.

Second fight, the platform is all cracked and Uub has now powered-up with pink Buu energy. In this fight Uub is way more of a threat and easily the toughest fight in this DLC. Flight is disabled for the tournament fights, so no running away during the fight, and healing items are also inexplicably disabled. This might be the only time in the game where that's the case, and contributes to this fight being tough.

Took me 3 tries, but I got him. Oh, and also Super Saiyan transformations were disabled! The main reason I lost twice was because I kept discovering surprises like these.

Third time, I won by a good margin with plenty of HP left over. Gokou knocks Uub out of the ring...

...and catches him, rescuing him from a ring-out.

Gokou basically annoints Uub as the new protector of Earth when he's gone. Really? Not Pan or Gohan or Goten? This kid who he knows nothing about except that he's reincarnated from a demon?

Gokou visits the Fallout Shelter to let everyone know that he's like, gonna go take off and live with Uub now. BYE!

Pan is devastated. For one thing, it's kind of ridiculous that he's just abandoning Pan like this to go live with Uub. For another, he has instant transmission, so he could pop in every day if he wanted to, but again they just kinda ignore that and the implication is that he'll be gone for a few years.

Gokou and Uub fly off, forfeiting their tournament match in a double-DQ. Uub can't fly yet, despite his vast power. Just needs to be taught, which is what Gokou is gonna do.

Wait, what about the tournament prize money and feeding his village? Are they just forgetting that whole thing? Maybe Gokou is gonna feed everyone with his fishing skills.

And who actually wins the tournament since these two forfeited out? We don't know, they don't tell us. Though it stands to reason that it's either Pan, Goten, or Vegeta, since they're the only other powerful people there. Pan is the only one who really seemed to want to be there or win, so it would have been cool to see her beat Slacker Goten in the final round or something after Vegeta no-showed his matches. I don't know, I'm just making up the booking here. They spent a lot of time building up that Pan was competing, only to just sorta leave that story hanging.

Annnnd that's it for Kakarot. Great game here, even if it might be a bit of an acquired taste. I don't think you can do better than this for a game that really fleshes out the world of DBZ and lets you explore/train/interact with the cast. Just a superb game all around.

Wait a minute, who's that guy above Gokou, in the middle there, with the beige jacket? Never seen him before.

As with all of the DLCs, there's some extra content here. Go back, and you can do an optional side-story where Gokou tells Pan stories about all of the great battles of the series. What follows is...

...Black Freeza?? Are they going to give us Ultra Instinct Gokou vs Black Freeza?

Nope it's just regular Freeza. In any case, Gokou just tells the story of how he fought Freeza, Cell, and Buu during the Z series. Not sure what other fights you get to re-do in this mode, if any. Gokou has his modern blue gi (which is probably developer laziness, but is also how Pan would probably be imagining the fights).

It's a cool idea, but there isn't much else to it. Dragonball Super didn't exactly happen in this canon and it plays things out like Gokou basically just did nothing for ten years after Buu. So if they try to make End of Z canon with Super at some point, it might be a little weird. Regardless, that's it for Kakarot. Waited a long time to get this one finished-off.