3/5 ★ – KHFanXIII's review of Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi.

I remember first playing this game as a child (after seeing my cousin play it) and thinking it was the coolest thing ever. It was fast, it was a huge spectacle, and it had a third person camera (something I really preferred back as a child). After buying it myself though, I realized that it was hard, very hard (or I just sucked quite a bit), so I never really beat the story mode and mostly had fun in the versus mode with friends. After all these years though, does it hold up? How hard actually was the story mode? This game is fun, it's a nice little time and was the first to go for that more arena fighter type style. This game brings us closer to replicating the anime and that's always very neat. The battle system actually has a lot in common with Budokai 3, with beam struggles, teleporting, and instant special moves being carried over. But not to get too ahead of myself, let's explain the battle system. You have very basic punch and kick combos. Nothing akin to a fighting game, but more akin to a brawler. There are also guard and energy buttons which function as you'd expect. The basic strategy with melee is to push your opponent back long enough to charge your Ki. You're able to do this by filling up a little meter in the bottom right, which fills up whenever you hit an opponent with a punch or a kick, and when done holding the last button and then letting go. Depending on how much you filled the meter and how long you held the button to charge, you will send your opponent flying back. But, as alluded to before, the real meat of the combat are what this game calls Finishing Moves (which can be broken down into two categories) and Super Finishing moves. Like in the Budokai series, you have both a health bar and a Ki bar which you can charge in combat. Performing these Finishing Moves cost a certain amount of Ki so the sitting there and charging aspect is still very much a part of this game. The first category of Finishing Moves are what I like to call the Beam attacks. These are your more basic iconic attacks (the Kamehameha, the Special Beam Canon, etc.). These can cost a varying amount of Ki and usually do around 10-20% of damage to your opponent's life bar. Colliding with an opponent's beam also initiates a beam struggle which is super cool just as it was in Budokai 3 (although in this game you can give it extra power by sacrificing Ki). The second category of Finishing Moves are what I like to call Rush attacks. These will have you rush toward your opponent and perform an automatic melee attack frenzy. Similiar to Beam attacks these can also be to initiate a type of "struggle." If you and your opponent are both rushing at each other using a Rush finishing move (or by Ki Dashing) you will enter a Melee Struggle. This attempts to emulate the fast one-two attacks you see in the anime and does do it quite well. And now we have Super Finishing Moves. Throughout a match naturally (and unnaturally as in you can do certain things to increase this faster) you will accumulate little dots near your Ki gauge. After getting one of these dots, this will allow you to overcharge your Ki meter filling it up twice until it maxes out with a blue bar. This blue bar is constantly draining but when you have it, it's basically like having unlimited Ki for one move. As in, even if the bar is almost about to run out, you can still use any of your Finishing Moves. The main benefit of this is access to Super Finishing Moves though. ONLY while in this overcharged state will you be able to perform a character's Super Finishing Move. These are usually the more powerful iconic attacks (such as the Spirit Bomb, Big Bang Attack, etc.). These will do a lot of damage, anywhere from 40% or more (depending on the move) of your opponent's health bar. These are super cool spectacles to witness and are quite amazing (although easy to dodge if you don't time them right). So what makes up the bulk of battles is the punch, punch, punch, send flying, charge Ki, special move. Really that's all there is to it. There will be a couple of battles that give you trouble and (if you're like me) and want to see certain character's Super Finishing Moves, then some added difficulty, but really the game isn't that bad. Oh yeah, the story. Well, as I said before, difficulty-wise, the story isn't that bad, but let me explain how it works. Story mode in this game is called the "Z Battle Gate." Each Z Battle Gate is a different saga (or something else) in the DBZ story (so you have a Saiyan Saga Battle Gate, a Frieza Saga Battle Gate, etc.) Each of these contains several (and boy do I mean *several*) battles that took place in each saga. This is pretty comprehensive. It even includes battles such as Tien vs. Yamcha when they were training for Vegeta and Nappa's arrival on Earth. And also some GT stuff, movie stuff, and some what-if stuff (however, most of these are underwhelming, aside from a few you unlock at the end). There. are. a. lot. And with this comes a bit of repetitiveness. It gets a little boring at times slogging through these battles when you just want to get to some of the cooler ones. Like, I do appreciate how inclusive it is with the DBZ story, it's just due to the repetitive nature of battle in this game, having so many of them just really wears through a lot of the charm the combat system had. Most battles are just beat the enemy, but some of them will have special win conditions. Examples of these would be "Survive Until the Time Runs Out" or "Defeat Enemy with <Insert Finishing or Super Finishing Move Here>". Those Survive ones are pretty tough at times tho, because you both have to survive a time limit, and also not kill the enemy so you basically have to find a way to keep the enemy at bay for however long the time minute is. The story itself is told through before and after battle quotes. The only real animation in the game is just them getting ready for battle so it's usually just them standing around with some flat texture mouths (which are actually quite neat due to how they emulate the anime style of mouth flaps much better than Budokai 1's take on this), which isn't great. It's better than nothing I guess? But even then I think even the visual novel approach of Budokai 3 is better, and obviously this game got no where near as good as Budokai 1's story presentation. I never really tried out the other modes as a kid or now as an adult so nothing to report there. Oh yeah, the graphics are pretty nice as well. Very cell-shaded and probably the closest yet to replicating the anime. Overall, this is an okay game, but it definitely feels lacking compared to Budokai 3.