Yamucha’s Infinite World

It’s been a while, but I told you we’d come back to video games.

Dragon Ball Z Infinite World is, to this uninformed consumers eye, like some sort of Budokai series retrospective where they crammed in a bunch of characters, added some mini-games I really don’t like and then forgot to include a “dur-dur” difficulty setting for folks like me who suck at fighting games and who want to progress by pressing punch a lot.

As you can imagine from a game that promises me more than 40 characters and 100 transformations (it also promises me “live epic battles” which is good, because I’m fed up of playing fighting games on tape delay), our man Yamucha is hardly a priority but he does make the cut, so let’s see what that sucker can do!

For a Budokai retrospective, I was sad they only included two costumes for our guy, but it turns out you unlock the third one (Saiyan arc Yamucha with the long hair) by playing the game. Yes, essentially you have to unlock his first costume last. While I’m “meh” on his whole Artificial Human arc look, I will give this game an epic thumbs up for including Banana Pants Yamucha, my favourite design of the series.

I’m shit at this game and the lagging caused by emulation won’t help so I’m stealthily choosing to train (or undertake “Warrior’s Training” according to this game’s pumped up terminology. You equip capsules in the “Warrior’s Room”. Only warriors can use capsules to buff themselves up, supposedly. I’m sure baseball fans will disagree with me.) so I can whale on my opponent, Son Goku without fear for reprisal. One choice of stage later (I pick the Tenkaichi Tournament grounds. This is the year we reverse the curse, baby!) and we’re off!

To a loading screen. Goku is climbing Karin-To Tower. Yay. God, why can’t we just have loading bars again? Were they so bad!?

Okay, we’re off for reals this time!

The first thing I notice playing this game? Without going through the game to earn Zenni to unlock it, I can’t use the Sokidan! Fuck you, Infinite World. Why do I have to prove my competence at this insanely difficult game just so I can use the ultimate attack of a low-tiered character that 95% of the players won’t even choose?

Luckily, Infinite World’s basic-ish control system means we can easily use Yamucha’s two other techniques. The Kamehameha and the Wolf Fang Fist (yes, I am using the game’s terminology for this article, I’m sure you can mentally dub in your preferred names yourself). Forward and circle for the former, back and circle for the latter. I like Budokai’s controls, for the most part. No half circles or anything that requires to emerge from my little scrub nest. I like it there, it’s warm and safe.

The Kamehameha is pretty much the same as always. It’s a beam, it is blue. It does decent damage. To be honest, half of the players in this game seem to have it and the ones that don’t mostly just have a different name attached to their beam which does the same damage and so on. It’s not very exciting, so let us move on.

So, let you move on. Again, I am no fighting game expert. In fact I’m no fighting game novice. But I can say that the Wolf Fang Fist is probably one of those attacks people who do know about these things would like. With juggling and multiple strikes and all that, I assume it can be useful. You just press back and circle to begin, complete with wolf howl, and then just keep pounding circle to strike over and over until you end with that double fisted strike, sending the opponent flying.

This is the type of move I like because it follows the traditions of my fighting game history. E. Honda’s 100 Hand Slap in Street Fighter II, Nightmare just swinging his giant-ass Zweihänder around in Soul Calibur II repeatedly until someone walks into it and falls down. These are the techniques I can master!

All Yamucha needs to do is make it so I can just use Wolf Fang Fist repeatedly, for the entire battle, until someone jumps into it.

Actually, it appears that Yamucha is considered pretty high-tier, or mid-tier, or maybe he’s “nerfed”. I’m not really sure. Anyway, what I can tell you is that his ‘PPPP’ attack (that’s punch, punch, punch… punch. Or Square four time) is one of the best in the game. This means that Yamucha, in this game at least, is good or something. I think.

And, now, finally, we come to the Spirit Ball (Sokidan). In the game, this is Yamucha’s ultimate attack. I guess it is in the series too, which is profoundly depressing.

To start off this attack, Yamucha needs to whack his opponent far, far away because the time it takes to charge the Spirit Ball is so long, if your opponent is within 20-35 miles of you, they’ll just hover over to you and slap you across the face before you’re done. After that, you engage in some pointless button mashing mini-game to determine whether the attack with fully ‘connect’ or not. Like all such mini-game diversions in fighting games, you’ll like them if you’re good at them, and dislike them if you don’t.

Anyway, you know what happens then. Our main man manoeuvres the ball to hit his opponent repeatedly, which as I’ve said in a previous article, has never happened outside a video game, and his hapless opponent is sent crashing to the earth, where the battle can begin anew.

Of course, because all ultimate attacks are basically small movies, there’s no real difference between them all save for attack power, and in that case, the Spirit Ball is fairly unremarkable. Although if you do lose the tedious mini-game mentioned above, you do get to see the Spirit Ball whack our hero full force into the face! Yay!! Noo!!

And, like, that’s it. Because this is a PS2 Dragon Ball Z fighting game, in all other respects, Yamucha is pretty much like every other character. I’m sure there are dozens of small differences that all add up if you’re not a scrub but it would all be lost on me anyhow.