DANDAN Z

DANDAN Z is a deliberately throwback fighting game that embraces the limitations and personality of early handheld-era design while filtering it through modern indie sensibilities. Developed by RETSUZAN and published by Henteko Doujin, the game positions itself not as a competitive, feature-heavy fighter, but as a compact, character-driven experience meant to evoke the feeling of discovering a strange, forgotten fighting game cartridge from another timeline. Its identity is rooted in nostalgia, simplicity, and local play, and nearly every design decision reinforces that intent. The game’s roster consists of a modest but colorful selection of fighters, each built around exaggerated archetypes and playful backstories. These characters range from martial artists and delinquents to psychics and oddball combatants, giving the cast a quirky charm that fits the game’s retro tone. While the lore is light and mostly decorative, it adds personality and humor, helping the fighters feel distinct despite the game’s limited visual and mechanical scope. The focus is clearly on flavor and immediacy rather than deep narrative development. Mechanically, DANDAN Z strips fighting game controls down …

Retsuzan has a long history making games in 2d fighter maker, and now with Pixel Maker, they've created a whole series of gameboy styled titles. Dandan z is a neat little package full of fantastic characters thet you might recognize from retsuzana previous works. It's very well animated, the combat is responsive and they kake the nost out of 2 buttons and the small gameboy form factor.

I actually really like what I've messed with in this game, but both my qanba arcade stick and my ps4 controller cause both player 1 and player 2 to be controlled at the same time, and there's no options screen to assign controllers, so I'm kind of out of luck to both do training mode and play with a friend offline. It's really a shame because I think there's some really good ideas in this simple game and it'd be the easiest recommend if I could... like, play it.

Starting this review with useful info. You can't reassign or change buttons. There's also issue where one controller controls both p1 and p2. Might make it hard to play offline. Also when I had my fightstick set to DPAD mode I couldn't do down left diagonal. weird controls stuff going on with this game. but otherwiese it's a fun fighting game for a fake GB system. I like it for my single player purposes. It's only two button for light and heavy attacks, but there's a bit of depth to this game.

I want to make it clear that I am not a fighting game guy. I'm bad at them, but I do very much enjoy the spectacle of the genre and the visceral thrill of just beating the crap out of opponents. With that said, I love this! I can't be sure, but it very much seems like this game could actually run on GameBoy hardware, as opposed to just apeing the color scheme. The game is [i]very[/i] basic (I don't even think there's a difficulty select), but it does a lot with a little and it really captures the charm of GameBoy gaming. There are ten characters, and I was impressed to see that each one has a unique stance and attack style, making them very visually unique. While it would have been easy (and arguably understandable) to copy-paste a body and just put a new head on it to fill out the character roster without consuming too many limited resources, everybody has their own personality reflected in how they look and move. There aren't a ton of frames of animation, but they are used very effectively to make each character interesting (Afro Joe has hand-drawn afro jiggle physics!). It's a great roster, and while their motivations are paper-thin (each character gets an intro and an ending)…

For context, I'm more of a Capcom fighting game sort of player, and not a particularly good one. I also played way more Killer Instinct on Game Boy than that game deserved. I'd like to think I have some idea what that old handheld was capable of. With DANDAN Z, it is mostly there. The graphics are actually pretty good for something pretending to be like something that was on the old Nintendo handheld. And I like the sort of yanki and superhero late 1980s/early 1990s vibe. The controls feel pretty good. I'm grading on the curve of Game Boy, and even Game Boy Advanced, Fighting games. But I certainly played much stiffer fighters on those than DANDAN Z. But pulling off classic Capcom fighting moves worked pretty well here. While it is still early into my play time, each of the fighters seem to have a decent move set. My issue with the game is largely with the computer. With the one difficulty, the computer feels very same-y during each fight. Meaning that once a player finally cracks how to defeat the first dude, rest aren't going to nearly as much effort. This is bad. Both that the opening fight should be on the easier side, if the game doesn't have difficulty settings, to allow …