If you're wondering how battles go down in a card-based DBZ game, it's not as complicated as you might think. Every round, you and your opponent pick a card and whosever card has a higher attack rating wins the round. Win a round with a Strike or Event card and you'll be treated to a dual-screen still-frame animation of your character launching his/her attack along with a brief sound bite (the FUNimation DBZ cast also lent their voices to this game). Damage is calculated by subtracting the losing card's defense value from the winning card's attack value. Defeat comes when one person's energy bar is drained completely.

Strategy in DBZ: HD comes into play in which cards to use and when. For instance, you may want to save those Use cards for non-battle situations. You may also want to play that seemingly useless one-star Switch card for a chance at swapping for an enemy's Z-star Strike card. There are also Power and Defense Combos which let you tack on multiple cards that share the same attack or defense value for increased power. Oddly, the game doesn't make these immensely useful tactics available until almost 25% into the story mode.

While Dragonball Z: Harukanaru Densetsu tries to be a more newbie-friendly card-battling videogame, its simplicity is ultimately its downfall. Specifically, there's no deck to speak of. One of the aspects of collectible card games that makes them so exciting and addicting is being able to choose which cards to take into battle with you. DBZ: HD issues cards to you at random, making for an experience that's based much more on luck than skill. Not that you'll even need much fortune since that Z-star Strike card always seems to plop into your hand right when you need it.

DBZ: HD's stages are sure to bore most after a few hours of random-battling your way through altered versions of the same tired DBZ story arcs narrated by laughably-translated talking heads and pathetically-animated sprites. Have fun breezing through most enemies, only to be pummeled by a considerably stronger boss and forced to repeat the entire half-hour-long stage. Level-gaining is also dysfunctional with more or less random stat increases and no clear indication of what those stats do. Finally, multiplayer is disappointing with no co-op story mode and the single-cart versus experience one with no music and missing audio for the person with the empty DS.