by Tod Harrick
The Dragon Ball Z Ani-Mayhem stand-alone expansion builds intentional strategy into the game—for the first time! Those elements will change and expand the way players can use cards from all the Ani-Mayhem sets. They actually make the game simpler for those who want a simple game, and more complex for those who want to take advantage of the strategies and counter-strategies.
Dragon Ball Z is simply the most popular anime series in the world. It's just mind-boggling how many people watch the series…
Dragon Ball Z is basically about Goku, a simple man, who is possessed of tremendous physical and spiritual power.
He tries to live a peaceful life with his family and friends but he's beset by evil forces which he must overcome, and through it all he manages to keep a pure heart.
Most of his enemies, in fact, eventually become his allies, if not his friends.
At the begining of Dragon Ball Z, Goku discovers that he is actually an alien, a member of and evil and violent race.
He was sent to Earth as an infant, as a kind of "living time bomb," to wipe out all life on the planet.
An early memory loss changed his destiny.
When Goku's brother shows up wondering what happened, Goku is forced to fight his own people to defend his adopted home (Earth).
In adapting Dragon Ball Z for Ani-Mayhem, we used as much of the story as possible.
We used the concept of the Dragon Balls, which are 7 magical golden balls hidden around the world.
Anyone who brings them together gets one wish.
In the Ani-Mayhem Dragon Ball Z, anyone who can collect 7 balls wins the game.
There are 1, 2, and 4 ball cards.
But experienced players shouldn't worry about getting blown out by a lucky beginner who just happens to have a lot of balls.
We've created cards that, if you craft your deck skillfully, can block a Dragon Ball win.
We've also incorporated the concepts of Energy and "Chi" into Character growth in the game.
Although most Characters in Dragon Ball Z atart off pretty strong, most of their power comes from their ability to channel the raw "energy of life" into incredible bursts of force.
In Ani-Mayhem Dragon Ball Z, players can add to their Characters' Energy, and to an ability called "Chi" which allows those Characters to use greater and greater amounts of that Energy.
Drawing on Goku's transformation from infant "time bomb" to hero, we added a technique that allows players to use "Disasters" as their "Characters".
How do the Ani-Mayhem Dragon Ball Z cards fit in with cards from the first and second sets?
Anyone familiar with Anime will recognize that most of the Characters and Disasters in Dragon Ball Z are more powerful than Characters and Disasters from the series which we based our earlier sets on.
The power makes Dragon Ball Z so much fun.
So, we created cards that will allow players to beef-up Characters from other series to Dragon Ball Z power levels.
For instance, the new "Sparring with Kami" card transforms Martial Arts skills into Chi skills, which works particularly well with Ranma 1/2 cards.
We also gave the Dragon Ball Z characters vulnerabilities to Magic and Mecha type attacks.
This fits in with the series, as characters seem to be more vulnerable to enemies with magical powers or machines.
This also provides a balance for Characters from series like Dominion, Project A-ko, Armitage III, Bubblegum Crisis, and Phantom Quest.
We made a lot of the powers exhibited by the Dragon Ball Z characters Flash Effects (instant), with an Energy cost.
We then created cards like "Energy of Life" to provide raw Energy to Characters with Energy Abilities.
This works well with energy-using Characters like Tenchi Muyo, El Hazard and Phantom Quest.
The Dragon Ball series is incredibly long.
It ran for nine seasons in Japan.
It begins with Goku as a little boy, and runs through to when his children are grown up.
For Ani-Mayhem Dragon Ball Z, we will be using material from hte first three seasons of the Dragon Ball Z animated series, which begins with the arrival of Raditz, Goku's brother, and runs through to Goku's battle with the space emperor, Freeza.
We are very happy that we were able to use material from the Japanese versions of Dragon Ball Z, rather than those altered for U.S. television.
The which is in these cards will include footage that U.S. fans have never seen before.
The animator, Toriyama, uses a lot of chromatic effects, and sometimes inersts paintings into the animation that are better that anything you will ever see on a standard cel drawing.
Dragon Ball Z is the first Ani-Mayhem set in which we were able to use the actual digital masters for our screen captures, so the amount of material we had to choose from and the quality of the images was far superior to anything we've ever had access to in the past.
Unlike the other Ani-Mayhem sets where we used more than one series, Dragon Ball Z features just one.
The licensor (Toei Animation) insisted that Dragon Ball Z not be mixed with any other series.
The main reason we used a variety of series for our first two sets is to provide just that, variety.
Now that those sets are out, we can focus on delving more deeply into the mechanics of an individual atory, especially when it is as rich as this one.
The other reason we used four series in the other two sets, is that most Japanese animated series are so short that it was difficult to get 200 or 300 cards from one series.
With Dragon Ball Z, there is so much of it that we were easily able to get more cards than we could produce from it.
Scrye Volume 4.3 August 1997 [pg. 15]