Hey guys. Here's another one of my collections. It's "ドラゴンボールZ III 烈戦人造人間 Dragon Ball Z III: Ressen Jinzoningen (lit. Incredible Battle with Androids)."
I'm not sure if any of the Famicom DBZ games made it overseas since the series wasn't really a thing until the mid 90s ish in North America.
Anyway, the game mechanics is pretty interesting; I haven't come across anything else like it. Basically, everything that you do—whether it be moving on the overworld map or fighting enemies—is controlled by cards.
On the overworld, you can move your character according to the number of stars you have on your dragon ball on the top left corner of your card. Whenever you select a card, the card flips over to reveal a character which gives you special effects. The icons on the bottom right of the card represents the type of effect you can get. The boot means you might be able to get a special effect related to movement on the overworld map, the heart might let you heal, and the dumbbell might prompt events that give you XP.
When you battle, you have to look at the balls, the "suits," and the event icons of the cards. The dumbbell and boots don't do anything useful in battle, but the heart icon might let you heal and the fist icon gives you an attack-related event. If you match the "suit" with the Z Fighter's fighting style (e.g. Goku is 神 (god), 亀 (turtle; Master Roshi) and 界 (King Kai), you can do an energy attack. If you don't match it, it's just a normal melee attack. The number on the balls show how strong the attack will be.
Once you pick a card for each of your characters, they go at it automatically.
The pixel art is really cool and watching the fight is actually fun, but the game is waaaay too easy. I was playing it in a stream tonight and basically had to cut my stream short because the game just ended so abruptly!
This was yet another game my grandma got for me before I left Okinawa for Canada. I'm super happy I got to beat after all these years!
Edit to add more screeenshots
How freaking cool is that??
I didn't hate it, bit it was weird and as a teenager in the 90s with nothing but a really sketchy translation of the script I had no idea what it was.
They bought the card system back for a DBZ RPG on the Nintendo DS. Can't remember what the game was called, but I had fun with it. It got panned pretty hard for the weird mechanics but I kind of knew it from my time with the Super Famicom game. Check that one out if you're keen, but it definitely plays differently, more like moving around a board game.
I'll give it a go! My cousin had one involving radits (not sure if I spelled that right) but we were too young to figure out how to play it, do we never got very far in it. Do you have any other weird FC/NES or SFC/SNES games that you would recommend?