Nightmare Zero 11 months 2 weeks ago wrote:

Dragon Ball Z videogames have been known to either be hits or misses. Like almost all the NES titles were terrible, but a couple of the SNES titles, like Super Butôden 2 and 3 and the RPG series, Gokuden, were pretty good, even if I was never able to beat the latter game thanks to not knowing what the fuck was going on.

Later on, on the PS1, we were given Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout, and it was pretty good; it fulfilled the need to have DBZ-like fights while in a nice looking environment, but there were only a few thousand copies that were brought stateside. The PS1 would also suffer the existence of Ultimate Battle 22 and that game was utterly terrible.

PS2 comes around and we're introduced to the Budokai Series. Budokai 1 looked pretty good and told the story of DBZ all the way to the end of the Cell Saga, and it told it pretty well, in my opinion. The game suffered though from transformations seeming more trouble than they were worth and a subpar fighting system. We would soon be plagued with the truly terrible sequel, Budokai 2. I bought this game when it came out for fifty bucks and I hated it so much. It was a terrible game that DIDN'T FIX ANY OF THE PROBLEMS THAT ITS PREVIOUS TITLE HAD AND IT HAD A TERRIBLE STORY MODE. About two years later, Budokai 3 came out and I had little to no faith that it would be good. I gave it a try though and it turned out to be far more awesome than the two games before it. If it had ended there, I think I would've been satisfied.

Then, a year later, Budokai Tenkaichi was to come out. I thought it was just going to be a fancy name for it being just the fourth game of the series. It turned out to be a completely different game altogether though. It borrowed the concepts that DBZ Supersonic Warriors(for the GBA) brought into play: starting battles in transformed states, flying freely, massive air battles, and energy blasts seeming a little more cinematic. This game seemed to be a slight let down for me though, but it was still good. Budokai Tenkaichi 2 came out a year later, but I didn't buy it until it was a good six months old. I rented it as I was becoming heavily addicted to fighting games, but there were no new ones coming out. Budokai Tenkaichi 2 turned out to be one of the greatest fighting games and DBZ games I'd play for a while, if I don't count the awesome, but short Shin Budokai series for the PSP.

Budokai Tenkaichi 3 would follow a year later, promising to give even more of that "DBZ feel" that it keeps trying to achieve, and I was worried, initially, that the game wouldn't live up to these promises. So, a month later, after viewing some of the videos on Youtube, I decided to work around my fears and purchase the game.

Would it live up to the promises it said it would? Would it suck? Would I be making another Budokai 2 regret by purchasing a terrible game?!

Story
Same old Dragon Ball Z ventures, but the stories are told in small bits and pieces via actual fights. What I mean by this is that, while fighting an opponent in a certain story parts, they recite lines and do actions similar to those certain events from the show. For example, your first fight is against Raditz, Goku's evil big brother: the fight starts off with Goku and Piccolo going on the offensive, and Piccolo gets injured, and Goku tries to take up most of the fight until a small cutscene occurs, by hitting the R3 button, where Piccolo speaks of his new technique, the Makankôsappô. After that, the fight resumes and you play as Goku and try to buy time for Piccolo. Goku ends up badly injured, and Piccolo jumps in to fire his new technique. Whenever story mode utilizes story necessary techniques, the damage is usually meant to end the fight by causing a good 99,999 damage.

Of course, if you don't have to activate these story cutscenes and parts, and try to end the fight on your own, but most of the time, the odds are set against you. Every story mode fight has fixed stats and sometimes health or ki replenshes quickly with whatever is meant to happen in the story. Like when Goku first turns into a Super Saiyajin, you gain a handsome amount of health back and your stats go through the roof. If you didn't activate the cutscene, then you'll stay as normal Goku until you win, lose, or give in and decide to activate the cutscene.



"Don't ask how his clothes just stretch this way. Some questions are best left unanswered."

As I stated though, the story isn't told in its entirety, and, as far as I've seen, there hasn't been a game that's told the entire story from beginning to end. Budokai 1 was on its way to do so and it did it quite awesomely, even for an aged game. After that game, however, any dealings with stories usually are cut short. This isn't a problem if you've seen the series, but for people who haven't, they could end up lost.

You can watch a good example of the story mode system here.

Graphics
Like Budokai Tenkaichi 2, this is some of the best cel-shading I've really ever seen. It doesn't stand out like madness and vomit like that horrible Budokai 2 game. Its at just the right amount. Everything looks nicely detailed, even though they're using most, if not, all of the last game's models. Some have been altered a little though, and a good few of them have brand new costumes, but I don't see why the majority of them just have recolored costumes. I mean, this would be forgiveable, at first, but they've been doing this since the very first Dragon Ball Z game on the PS2. If you're running out of costume ideas, I don't know, why don't you give battle damaged costumes like some of the other characters have? That would make it feel so much better.

All of the environments are nicely done, but most of the stages are from Budokai Tenkaichi 2, but now can be viewed in the light of noon, evening, and night. This is ok, but it seems like a rather cheap way to bring in new levels.


"IMMA FIRIN' MAH LAZER!"

Energy blasts, explosions, and the hit sparks that appear when you hit enemies have been nicely improved and polished. They're less flashy and now look like they're out of the anime, but also have their own style.

Visually, this game is a real treat for the eyes, especially if you're a fan.

Gameplay
Before I mention the modes of gameplay, I'll first go over the fighting system. Essentially, its not very much changed from Budokai Tenkaichi 2. But it has become different and quite a bit complicated. First of all, the lock-on system is now automatic and you always start off locked onto an opponent. In the last game, you had to hold the L1 button to do so, but the only problem this presents is that its harder to knock out an opponent and then hid and wait to strategize or merely power up your ki. The overall homing feel is a bit different now so it feels like you're flying around more freely, but it can feel oddly chaotic. For example, if I try to kick someone to the right, I would, naturally, hold down the right button on the directional pad while flying towards them, but now, depending on how long it takes you to fly to your opponent while charging your kick, you might end up right behind them instead, especially if your opponent is inert. Rush Supers, where you do an automated combination move after hitting L1+Triangle+up for some characters, home in less and, unlike Budokai Tenkaichi 2, they now use energy whether you hit your opponent or not, but it will only take away half if you miss. A majority of beam attacks and special moves are now also automated, somewhat, where the game will zoom in on that character unlike most of them from BT2 where the match continued. The good thing about this though is that heavy beam attacks move exceedingly faster than the fucking snail's pace they were in the last game. They've added a few new evasive maneuvers. One of these being the Z-Counter, where you press up and the Square button at the same time, but I've never been able to pull it off BECAUSE UP AND SQUARE BUTTON IS MEANT TO KNOCK YOUR ENEMY UPWARDS! Apparently the CPU has no problem doing it as they'll do it at least once in every match.


"WHY WOULD YOU KICK ME THERE?!"

Speaking of the CPU, the AI of your opponents has been greatly improved. In Budokai Tenkaichi 2, even on the hardest of settings, I could win a match without getting hit once. The AI is smarter now and use techniques more often. They also don't stand around or fly randomly on the battlefield. They'll concentrate on winning to the best of their ability depending on what difficulty mode you have set. I've been playing with normal mode through Story Mode, but the harder modes make the AI seem nearly psychic, but its a great challenge because, no matter what, you have this feeling of equality, depending on your own skill.

Almost every fighter, out of the 150 of them, are nicely balanced. Of course, weaker characters still only stand less than half a chance against those of obvious higher power. Like if you put Yamcha up against Super Saiyajin 4 Gogeta, I wouldn't expect Yamcha to be victorious. It does depend on who's playing as who though. A skilled player can be triumphant with any character if they're good with them. Weaker characters, like the ones from Dragon Ball, who don't know how to fly now glide slowly to the ground instead of falling like a ragdoll upon being airborne like in BT2. We also have various clone characters, and by this I mean, there is a Goku for every saga of Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, and Dragon Ball GT. There is a Goku meant for the Saiyajin Saga, there is one for the Frieza Saga, and there is one for the Cell & Buu Sagas. There are two Piccolos; one for the Saiyajin Saga and Frieza Saga, and one for the Cell Saga where he fused with Kami. Each clone has different move sets, actions, and stats.


"And everything seemed to be going so well."

You can edit characters by purchasing or unlocking or purchasing items to equip to them. From what I can tell, each character starts off with three equipment slots, but you can pay money you earn to unlock more: the maximum being 7, plus a custom AI strategy slot where you can buy a strategy you want your character to play with in the middle of a fight. There are plenty of them and each varies with what you, yourself, would want in your custom character. Others can fight against your own custom characters via a character password.

The gameplay modes are Dragon History, which is the story mode; Ultimate Battle, which is an extra mode full of various fight events you can participate in for money; Dragon World Tour, which consists of tournaments you can enter at various times to earn money and unlockable items; Dueling, which is just free versus mode; Ultimate Training, which is just a training mode with an additional tutorial on various moves, techniques, and maneuvers; and a Character Reference mode, where you can read the history of the characters you've unlocked, and view their various costumes.

As I explained earlier, Dragon History are various fights with fixed stats, but they add quite a challenge if you want them to be. Its also fun to try to reenact some of the scenes from Dragon Ball Z, but they can be quite difficult. The scene changes happen either when an opponent takes a certain amount of damage, you take a certain amount of damage, someone finishes talking about something, or merely when a certain amount of time has passed. If you're just passing through Dragon History though, just try to win and activate the scenes of your own choice. Some are better off not being activated though. For example, in the second battle with Janemba, you start off as SS3 Goku, but if you activate the cutscene, you'll be knocked down to just regular Goku and have to not die for a good two or three minutes. You do get Gogeta later, but that's a good while away, in my opinion, especially in the middle of a fight.


"Ha! Little Mac has nothing on me!"

Ultimate Battle, while pretty good in BT2, isn't so good in this game. There are four modes within Ultimate Battle: Sim Dragon, Mission 100, Survival, and Disc Fusion. Sim Dragon has you training an individual character and fighting in various fights while your character levels up and gets stronger, but only while playing this mode; the leveling up doesn't stay permanent. This mode is basically just used to unlock more missions in Mission 100, which is used to unlock Survival, which is used to unlock...oh wait, nothing else after that, right? Disc Fusion is where you can unlock two items after doing unlocked events which you obtain by putting in your Budokai Tenkaichi 1 or 2 disc in the PS2 when you activated this mode. The two items are "ok" and the money is VERY GOOD from what I've heard, but I haven't put forth the effort to test this mode. Oh, and a warning to PS3 owners who try this feature with this game; I heard it doesn't work all the time.

Dragon World Tour is the tournament mode. You can chose to have one with a friend in the free mode, or enter one where you will fight random AI-controlled characters in various environments. There are five modes but you can only play some of them at certain times. This in some sort of in-game clock system, but you can alter the hours by going in and out of this mode over and over again, as it'll go up an hour each time you access the mode. I found this to be an incredibly stupid and annoying idea and it does nothing but try to add to the longevity of the game since its now much harder to unlock the characters and stages beating certain tournaments at random difficulty levels, but I think it handled itself just fine in the last game without this stupid add-on. Each tournament has a theme; in the World Martial Arts Tournament, you're in a restricted area where, if you go outside the arena, you lose and the final opponent of this Tournament is either Videl or Master Roshi and both of them are purposely built to make sure they knock you out of the arena with all of their stupid strength. The Yamcha Tournament consists of you playing as a randomly selected character with a randomly chosen custom mode, should that randomly selected character even have customization options. If you aren't satisified with the character they force you to play as though, you just go to the Dragon World Tour main menu screen and then enter the Yamcha Tournament to have another random character. Other tournaments have expanded areas though and you don't have to hold back whatsoever and choose whatever characters and customizations you desire, but I find these exceedingly stupid as they don't have arena areas of their own, with the exception of the Cell Games Tournament. Would it have really been so hard to make a tournament stage for some of these battles?

Dueling mode is where a lot of the fun can take place in the game. In this versus mode, you can chose a one on one fight, a team battle where you can have a team of up to five fighters and fight another team up to five fighters. There is also Destruction Points Battle mode, where you and your opponent have to make a more restricted team of your chosing; characters with higher stats as a default have higher Destruction Points, meaning you will have a limited number of fighters on your team to chose from if you pick those more powerful characters. I don't understand the concept of Destruction Points Battle unless you're probably a tourney purist who always plays Super Smash Bros. Melee with all items off and the only stage being Final Destination.


"Face to foot style! How'd ya like it?"

Character Reference mode, as I stated earlier, shows the history of each unlocked character you have, allows you to view their different costumes or transformations on their model, and you also hear commentary from Goku's wife Chi-Chi. She says a couple of funny things, but she also states contradictory things. She'll insult one version of Vegeta, and then think that Super Vegeta, the one with the bigger muscles who fought Imperfect Cell, is attractive. She also refers to anyone who is a Super Saiyajin as a "delinquent." While she has an opinion for just every character, they aren't varied much. For both Piccolo characters, she says pretty much the same thing: that she hates them and that he's a bad influence on Gohan. I guess there isn't much history outside of these two characters besides the end of Dragon Ball and that short time that Piccolo lived with Goku and his family.

Sound
Eh, this part will be the bane of my review(MOAR LIEK BONE OF MY REVIEW, AMIRITE!?) concerning THIS game. First of all, let me state that we were told that we may or may not get the original Dragon Ball Z soundtrack in this game like the japanese version, but then it was said that they were going to "remix" some of those songs for stateside. Let me tell you that none of this is true. We are instead introduced to new songs which range from upbeat battle music to original melody rock music. While I would prefer the original japanese music of the show, this is ok. A lot of the new music doesn't sound bad at all. And at least they aren't just shoving in BT2's soundtrack into this game like how they reused the same music over and over and over again for Budokai 2, 3, and the PSP titles.


"Falcon Punch!"

Voice work in this game is all here. You can chose between japanese voice actors or the english ones, but, like the last game, the translation in subtitles and voice work is altered. I guess Funimation just won't translate it correctly and just keep making Goku sound like fucking Superman. Aside from this pet peeve, I've also noticed that a LOT of the lines and dialogue fighters speak are the same exact same voice files from BT2. There are a few exceptions to this, but not many. I would've preferred a few new lines, but I guess that's just another pet peeve.

There are lots of newer sound effects though, but to untrained ears, you might not notice them. There are new explosions, blast sounds, charging sounds, and a lot of various ones made for specific characters.

My biggest problem in this section, however, is that you cannot set sound options to your preference. They shove sound effects, fighting noises, AND voices in the same catagory, and music is played at a low volume, as are some voices. If I want to hear dialogue, I'll turn up my TV, but a fight starts and then I have some of the loudest fucking sounds I'll ever hear and then I have to turn it down again, but now I can't hear the music, so I turn it back up a little, and then EXPLOSIONS AGAIN! This same problem was in BT2, but you could listen to the music without any problems whatsoever. Why was this problem so overlooked? Would it really have been so hard to have different catagories for sound effects and voices?

To correct this problem, I usually just turn off the music in the options screen and listen to my own music, but I haven't had to do that since Budokai 3. What a shame.


"This hand of mine glows with an awesome power!"

Replay Value
After completing story mode, there is plenty of stuff to unlock and purchase. You can go back into story mode and complete What If sagas or search for Dragon Balls. It will randomly summon Shenron, Porunga, or the Red Shenron from GT, and you can unlock more content or get extra cash this way. The Vs. mode also allows you to record matches and save them if you want to view them in the future or show off to friends.


Its one thing if Kasumi kicks high. Its a BAD thing when Spopovich kicks high.

The game also comes with a "bonus disc" containing, what it claims, the Top Ten DBZ Fights As Voted By The Fans. I'd like to see the results of this vote though and the people in charge of making this DVD as the fights are one to three minute clips of the old DVD box sets. Most of these fights are stupid ones too. Like when Gohan fought Brolly in one of the movies. The clip is about fourty seconds long and it consists of Gohan getting beaten badly. And another thirty second clip of GT where Gohan beats down Vegeta. These fights aren't really fights though. Where is the whole epic fight between Piccolo and Android #17? Where is the long fight between Goku and Frieza? Hell, the fight with Goku and Piccolo up against Raditz was awesome to, why isn't that in there!? They have a clip of "Gohan vs. Cell", but its just the climax of the battle, not the nice beatdown it was prior. The fans who chose these were probably just the people who wanted to sell off the DVD boxes from their shelves before the HD-DVD box sets were to come out. Either that, or just a group of retards who were drooling on themselves. I'll leave that to your imagination.

Overall A.K.A. tl;dr
Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3 is a good fighting game and a good Dragon Ball Z game. It has plenty of content from Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, and Dragon Ball GT, and has more fan service(No, not boobs) and characters than was thought possible for a game. The graphics are more completed and everything looks polished just fine. It has a unique story mode that can be either good or bad depending on how you play it. It has plenty of extra modes, but a lot of them are broken, but the Versus mode is perfect. There are some sound issues concerning the music and voices, but this is just really a pet peeve.


Now we know why Gohan is wearing glasses when he grew up.

While, in some ways, its prequel is superior, but BT3 ends up having some good improvements and some bad new stuff. So far, the game is fun and I'm still playing it. I don't regret that I bought it at all. If you're more into fighting than you are into DBZ though, you should try Budokai 3 or the Shin Budokai series for the Playstation Portable. Those games are fun and I might review a future Shin Budokai title someday.

Anyway, if you're a Dragon Ball Z fan, you've probably bought this game by now, but those who like fighting games should really give it a try. If you want to get into DBZ, I'd suggest reading up about it or buying the new DVDs that came out; the story mode in this game will get you lost with the story. If you hate DBZ and fighting games, stay away from this. Really, don't even give it a try. I already know one of my friends who will probably just hate this game for existing.

Anyway, I give this game a 9001/10.

Oh wait, I can't do that.

7.5/10
Good, but not great.