Gotta find the balls

France has always been the number one door for Japanese animation and games in Europe. Nowadays that's no longer true because Japan's influence over the entire world is creating a new generation of kawaii baka-chan teens (which are basically the only words most western people who select Japan as their location on Facebook know).

It's hard to imagine a game based on an anime series named Dragon Ball being released in France before the 90s (and 4 years later in Spain). And they even had that show on TV. That is very impressive. Of course, the game was also catastrophically released in the US at about the same time. I don't know what those guys in the US had in their heads, but they had to screw anything good that was brought from Japan. That tradition still seems to remain nowadays (Evolution... yuck!). The US version of this game is called Dragon Power and suffered a major editing. I wonder what they named Goku... Sam? John? Ritchie? And I don't even want to imagine the rest of the names. Edit: meanwhile, I already learned that they kept Goku's name...

This is how they did back then: you replace the cute Japanese covers with some horrific artwork that shows general stuff like a karate kid wearing a bandanna. Then you replace the main character that actually looks fun and cartoonish with an atrocious freak that has absolutely nothing to do with the character on the cover. You take away the boobs and the pixelate-suggested sex content. Finally, you remove some interesting parts of the game to make it more Americanized. I find it hard to believe that they replaced the rice cakes in Alex Kidd with... burguers... Also, it's okay to hit on Chun Li, Sonia and basically all other female characters in fighting games. However, it was completely unacceptable to hit Poison in Final Fight because it's a women. "Yeah, let's also hide some of the additional pixels that show too much of her body and accept the poorest excuse ever invented by the makers of the game (the one about her being transsexual)..." Well done!