4/5 ★ – RawMetal's review of Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi.

System: PlayStation 2 Started: May 2, 2005 Ended: November 10, 2005 Flashback Review The Budokai games were a staple for the Dragon Ball Z Fighting Games Era, but Budokai Tenkaichi took it into another level. When I first heard about this it was quite a mouthful with the title but at least when I look at that intro cutscene, it actually gets me pumped. This game pioneered from Budokai’s 2D Fighting to 3D Fighting and it became the norm to modern day DBZ Games until Dragon Ball Fighterz came out. When I got this game, it was on my Birthday as a gift alongside Pokémon Emerald. When I played it at first, I was bummed out that it went from 2D to 3D but After constant playing, I got used to this as there are more characters in this than the Budokai games, there is a Battle Damage mechanic when your character runs out of health and story missions that covers the movies as well as the GT Baby Arc surprisingly. There is a tournament which carried from the original Budokai games to keep it traditional and an arcade ladder where you fight your way to the top as soon as the mode gets difficult the more you climb up the ladder. The fighting in this game is well paced as you will be flying over the place in a large map and perform combos to your enemy and those combos can be pretty quick, so you have to time it extremely well to perform a combo breaker. I personally say this is a solid Dragon Ball Z Game, but the later sequels were a step up. However, everytime you start a fight against your opponent, you will always press the lock-on button so it can be annoying. Budokai Tenkaichi started a new era of Dragon Ball Z games where the rest of the DBZ fighting games will always be in 3D especially in games outside of Budokai Tenkaichi that they will try to do it very differently by fighting in different camera angle perspective instead of straight forward traditional 2D Camera Perspectives. Games such as Burst Limit, Raging Blast, Battle of Z and even the Xenoverse games carried the Fighting Mechanic in different camera perspectives. Would say give it a shot but the next sequels were far better than this in terms of more sagas covered and more characters.