Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3
Our Rating
7.7
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Your Rating
N/A
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So apparently in Japan this game is called Dragon Ball Z: Sparking! Meteor. Sounds like some new Katamari Game doesn’t it? So while I can’t say I particularly like the name Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3, I can understand the need for change. Names don’t matter though; game-play does. On that note let’s get this party started.
I would bet that when the developers sat down to think about what they wanted to do with this game, they came up with the goal of creating the best Dragon Ball Z game ever made. I can remember when the only gaming option for American DBZ fans was Ultimate Battle 22, which anyone who has played it will know wouldn’t have even made a good Flash game. The future was looking brighter when the original Budokai was released on the PS2, and while the game had its share of flaws each entry in the series improved the formula to the apparent climax that is Tenkaichi 3.
More than anything else it’s the presentation that is going to blow away fans of the series. The game features 150 characters. Literally every version of every character is represented, from punk-ass scouter Vegeta from the beginning of the series the walking death machine that is Majin Vegita. If you are a fan of the series at all, even if you haven’t watched it since Freiza died, you will be able to find a character that you know and love.
And do they ever look good. This series has always impressed me with its use of cell shading, and this iteration is just as impressive as the rest with character models that look like they were taken directly from the show. I found the stages to fit the look of the show well too, although since they aren’t cell shaded they don’t look nearly as good as the characters, and are pretty bland compared to the big name fighting games on the market. This fault is made up for by variety though, as many stages have night, evening, and day versions, as well as interactive environments.
The presentation is topped off by an equally impressive sound quality. Music fits the theme well, and in particular the voice acting is very impressive. Characters are voiced by their actors from the show and there is a lot of dialog in the game to enjoy. Certain match-ups between characters with strong ties to each other often result in unique fight intro conversations and it adds a lot to the dramatic effect of the battles. In particular I was impressed by Atari’s willingness to leave the option for Japanese voices in the game. This is a trend that really should become more widespread in video games, and I believe that many gamers want this. So whether you watched the show when you were a kid and want to hear your favorite characters just as they always sounded, or you are a dub hating purist who doesn’t mind that Goku sounds like a little girl in Japanese, you will find a lot to like in Tenkaichi 3’s sound presentation.
Presentation always helps to elevate a game to greatness, but at the end of the day a game is a game and how it plays is what really matters, and in this area Tenkaichi is somewhat of a mixed bag. First of all while it is presented as a fighting game, from a game-play standpoint it plays a lot more like a one on one versus Zone of the Enders game. Instead of a typical fighting game camera where both players are always on screen at all times, Tenkaichi’s camera is set behind your fighter. In general you are always locked on to your opponent, and pushing left and right on the stick will cause you to circle them, while back and forward will of course allow you to advance and retreat. The stages are essentially free roaming, and due to this you can lose your lock on the opponent. Since the camera is set up in such a way that you can’t see each other at all times this leads to some fairly strategic use of the environments, using hillsides for cover and launching surprise attacks for example. This is something you would never see in a game like Tekken or Virtua Fighter, and if you go into it with the wrong expectations you will be disappointed.
You might remember that I mentioned the game has 150 characters. Anyone who has played a lot of fighting games is probably wondering how that would even be possible on a single DVD, and the answer is that the characters do not even come close to displaying the uniqueness and depth of bigger name fighting game characters. Special moves are essentially the same across the board, at least in the way that they are performed. Hit square to punch, hit triangle to shoot, and mash them repeatedly to do rush combos. End your square combo with a triangle and you will get something a little more unique. Every character more or less plays this way, although the moves that result from these commands do vary from character to character and look different. So in essence every character is equally easy to pick up and play, but the balance varies wildly, so much so that from a competitive standpoint the game is broken.
That lack of variation in character commands probably makes to game sound shallow, but don’t be misled; the basic fighting engine is actually very complex. You can counter, dash, quick dash, teleport out of the way of incoming attacks, cancel your own attacks into teleportation, and the end result of it all is battles that look like they have been taken directly out of the show. The character balance is bad to the point that it can be frustrating, but it doesn’t ruin the game-play at all. While not perfect, the game does a great job of creating scenarios that are true to the show and easy to pick up by anyone, yet complex enough to reward long hours of practice.
That said, the game has some pretty major faults. The AI is brutal and often feels cheap, even on the lowest difficulties. It is certainly beatable, but for a game that is so easy to pick up and play, I found it odd that most new players would never be able to get very far in single player. Jaded gamers will probably say this just separates the men from the boys, but it’s my opinion that games should not alienate new and casual players. If you pick easy the game should be easy and if you pick hard the game should be hard. Sounds simple enough, but too many fighting games are either way too easy or way too hard, and its rare that a game finds a good balance. The end result of this is that in single player mode you often find yourself resorting to cheap tactics. While fighting the computer face to face with melee combos and teleportation cancels with a lot of variety in my fighting style I often found the computer teleporting away from my attacks and punishing me with devastation retaliatory combos all the time, but when I just ran away and repeatedly spammed my super attacks the computer could never defeat me. I found this problem to be pretty severe, and it really shallows an otherwise very impressive game.
Another issue fighting game fans might find with the game is that it doesn’t have the same pick up and play appeal as something like street fighter. You can’t just pick it up and play through an “arcade” mode once and be done with it for the day. There is a tournament mode that picks out a random set of fighters for you to face of against, but it is plagued by problems that really ruin it. For one thing you could end up fighting a final boss caliber character in your very first match, and this would be a death sentence for a new player. Also for some insane reason there are quite a few different tournaments you can compete in all with different rules such as ring outs or forcing you to pick a random character, but the game does not allow you to choose what tournament you compete in at any given time, or the difficulty level you play it at. To me that just doesn’t make any sense at all. Why would you force a high level player to play on easy mode and be bored, and force a new player to play on a difficulty they find frustrating? Since the tournament mode is fairly broken, the best pick up and play matches come from Duel mode, which is basically a versus mode where you can fight the CPU or a person. This gives you all the options you could want, but still doesn’t make up for the lack of a dedicated “arcade” mode.
The crux of the game is actually a mode called Dragon History, and while it was also manic with its AI and difficulty, I found it to be very impressive, especially as a fan of the show. Dragon History takes you through pretty much every major battle that was ever featured in the show, and is fully voice acted. The fights are far more epic than a typical versus fight, with cut-scenes appearing throughout the fight revealing more of the story as it was presented in the show. Also it doesn’t force you to adhere exactly to the shows progression, so if you are good enough to defeat Freiza without ever transforming Goku into a Super Saiyan then the game will adapt it’s cut-scenes accordingly. The mode is very well done, but the extreme length of some of the scenarios has the potential to be frustrating as you might suddenly lose at the end of a fight by way of a well-placed super attack and have to do the whole thing over from the start.
All in all Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3 really is the best DBZ game ever created. It is not without flaws, and strictly as a fighting game I can’t really highly recommend it. But when it comes to fan service, Tenkaichi knows where its loyalties lie. No fan of DBZ should be disappointed with this game, and hopefully when the next DBZ fighter inevitably comes out, the minor faults that bring this game down will be rectified.
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7.0