Dragonball – Battle Field: End of the Universe

Created by Final Flash back when The Arena was still Games & Stories, DB:Battle Field was the first epic RPG of OtakuBoards. Made during late v1/early v2, Final Flash would create a new thread for each story arc. Each arc would be fully planned out by Flash with an endpoint in mind which the narrative would work toward as individual character stories progressed. The ‘roster’ of the RPG was relatively open although there was little to no change to it after the switch to v3 (due to which the first 3 threads are missing).

Originally RPers posted stats of their characters, similar to the power levels seen in DragonBall Z. These were meant to be slowly increased as the character would undergo whatever forms of training. After a while these stats faded away, having become obnoxiously huge and obsolete, and serving no real purpose. At the time this departure from stats was very unheard of for RPGs of a similar nature, but this separation from stats seemed to cause the DB:BF posters to find another purpose for writing (other than trying to be the strongest). This caused an explosion in concept exploration (time travel; perception of time; space travel; alternate dimensions; death & reincarnation) and character development (side-quests; personal feuds, alliances & rivalries; history) in addition to Final Flash’s tournaments, villains and twists.

The post-quality was, at times, still as poor as other RPGs from the same era, but even the quality improved over time.

DB:BF had a climactic end: a two-part post by Flash in which the universe ended. All participants of the RPG were satisfied with its end, even after over 40 pages and nearly 1600 posts.

Flash attempted to revive the ‘franchise’ with DB:BF – Post Apocalypse, a back-due-to-popular-demand continuation of the story with fresh characters in a new universe. Many new RPers also signed up such as Chaos, DeathKnight, Juuthena, Shinobi and Mitch. This sequel did not approach the same level of success as its predecessor.  Although the post quality was improved and the same degree of planning was put forth by Final Flash, the RPG  did not have enough  groundbreaking ideas at work to keep its players attention.

Concluding post – Part 1 | Part 2
Post Apocalypse – Sign-ups | Thread

Categories: Notable Threads, RPGs