First of all, it offered gamers something no other DBZ games could offer. While lots of DBZ games on the hub have things called "pbags" you could beat on to gain skill, only DBZ-U offered "cbags," in which you could stow your gear, and "tbags," from which you could brew invigorating drinks.

Second of all, it offered convenience to players. People who play online games or chat in chatrooms didn't come there to do a lot of reading and writing. That's why you see so many online conversations that go like this:


dbzgohan22131: r u there?
gohan221231dbz: im
dbzgohan22131: ur name sux


DBZ-Ultriment was the first game on the net that parsed player speech for extraneous words and letters, removing punctuation and translating "you" to "u," "your" and "you're" to "ur," "I'm interested in learning about the real you" to "a/s/l," and so on. This saved all players a little time and effort whenever another player inconsiderately used entire words to form a complete sentence.

Third of all, whereas most games tend to get stale quickly, DBZ-Ultriment added new features at higher levels to keep things fresh. For instance, when you got to level 23, you got an overzealous nephew, and when you reached level 46, you gained a little green alien that only you could see. I know a lot of players were outraged to find out that level 53 was just a dream... but really, would you have kept playing if your character died for real? I don't know how many people made it to level 76, but I know I appreciated the spunky lesbian sidekick.

Fourthly, and perhaps most importantly considering that DBZ-U was a fan game, was the fact that it stayed true to the artistic vision of its source material. I defy anybody who spent any time at all walking around the world of DBZ-Ultriment to find one thing that isn't a direct translation of something from the show.