Believe it or not, UB22 was a very popular import back in the day. It makes sense after all, the anime was taking off hardcore in NA and not only were companies scrambling to continue the dub of the show (infamous flashbacks of loops back to Raditz after Goku dunked on Recoome) but no new DBZ video games were made for a while, leaving us basically with importing this, maybe one of the super famicom games or trying to track down the rare original american release of GT Final Bout which somehow got over here.

At some point Atari and Infogrames decided to localize this game very late into the PS1's life cycle, which led to hugely negative reception. Gee, wonder what would happen if we localized and released this near-eight year old game? I'm sure people will be easy on it! Especially with it's highly-pixelated sprites walking around on early-3D backgrounds and stiff gameplay!

The graphics kinda make me think of it as an inversion of Sailor Moon Various Emotion on Saturn, which had terrible looking pre-rendered 3D sprites on stages that looked like flat backgrounds from the anime. Which is pretty appropriate to compare it to, since the game feels about as stiff and the special moves feel every bit as delayed as it's fellow low-quality anime fighter. UB22 looks better, but that really doesn't say much because I struggle to think of other games that look worse than Various Emotion.

The fighting is very unsatisfying and leaves a ton to be desired, but at least the music rules and the anime cutscenes are neat. This isn't the worst fighting game to grace the fifth generation of game consoles, but it kinda sucks because I really want my fighters to either be good or full of utter stupidity like a lot of western developed ones, because there's just really not much to talk about other than "it's not great".

This game is very bad. The controls are weird and unintuitive, making combat feel clunky. Adding onto this clunky combat is just how sluggish it actually is. There is seemingly no way to perform real combos, just press buttons and hope for the best. The game also just lacks polish across the board, it looks ugly and the menus are uninspired and bland. If there's one good thing to say about this game, it's that the opening cutscene and a couple of the songs from the game are nice, but it's still not enough to save this game from being absolutely terrible.

Between this and DBGT Final Bout, PS1 DBZ fans were really screwed.

Even by the standards of the time this game looked awful, especially comparing it to it's contemporary fighting games, like Tekken or hell, Toshinden. You have crappy looking 3D backgrounds, but with these really jaggy looking 2D sprites for the characters, who have some of the worst animation on them you'll ever see. Everyone just sort of glides around, and not in the DBZ kind of way, like Goku just feels like he's shuffling at 20 miles an hour or something.

The character select is a gigantic mess, it just literally has all the character sprites scattered all over the fucking place (no neatly lined out portraits or anything), and you just clumsily have to maneuver over to the character you want.

All the moves look and feel the same, kamehameha is just a fireball, final flash is a fireball, whatever Zarbon shoots is a fireball.

There's also cheats to unlock more characters in the manual instructions???

Steer clear, please

Remember how huge DBZ was in the US in the early 2000s? The Buu Saga was finally getting localized, and we were all watching it go down on Toonami each week. It seemed Super Saiyan Mania was limitless amongst young teens. I was so caught up in that Diet Weeb bubble that I saved up allowance for a few months and bought Ultimate Battle 22 right when it came out. I desperately wanted to love it, and for a week or two, I convinced myself that I did.

But it's garbage. I made myself play it because of the characters that are represented, but the game itself is a mess. It makes perfect sense why they waited 8 years to localize this one, they knew it was a dud and could only sell it if franchise hype was at an all-time high.

And 12-year-old me ended up learning an important lesson about game expectations and buyer's remorse.

This feels like a crappy bootleg game that somehow got an official release. Not even the worst fighting games on the Super Nintendo felt this effortless.

The visuals are absolutely atrocious, the sprites and backgrounds do not complement each other in any way, and every character controls like they have a broom jammed up their asses (and that's when they respond to button inputs, because most of the time, they do not).

It shows how huge DBZ popularity was, in that all the kids back then were all over this trash game.