After nearly two decades, I picked this one up again. Surprisingly, I was impressed by how competent the story mode is as a recap of the Saiyan-Cell Sagas, with a lot more cutscenes than I remembered. The combat is good but not great, and there's a decent amount to get out of the game through the World Tournament mode and unlocking everything, but I didn't have to motivation to do it all 20 years ago, and I sure don't now!

Either way, it's a completely fine DBZ game, and it's a lot better than most of its predecessors from the previous console generation. It's very simple, but I was having enough fun that I finished the story mode and did a handful of World Tournaments. The weird inconsistencies that really irritated me as a 13-year-old (yellow Spirit Bomb and Kamehameha, Cell's voice doesn't change mid-fight when he changes forms, etc.) felt more charming than annoying now, but that's probably because I've played better DBZ games since, and at the time this was the best we had. I wouldn't recommend anyone go out of their way to play this unless they're trying to go through every Dragonball game. It's fine!

22

This game deserves some respect because of how much it pioneered the fighting game genre, and propelled the Dragon Ball Z franchise forward; but when you really look at any mechanic or feature, they’re all executed in the worst possible ways. I’m not the biggest fan of fighting games, I’d even go as far as to say I fucking hate them—mostly because I completely suck at every single one I try… but I still wanted to give this trilogy a shot because I remember all three so fondly.

The story is a mixed bag. Its simplicity can be commended, as it streamlines the story of the anime in an approachable and understandable way; but it can also be criticized for skipping a ton of epic fights and moments, in favor of implementing multiple—repetitive mainline battles. Gohan fights Perfect Cell four times… and each one is largely the same except now, you have two health bars instead of three! It’s boring. So many story moments are completely ruined, with a few hits immediately resulting in you losing your transformation which ruins the spectacle of the fight. It’s also worth noting that the music is terrible, and nowhere near the quality of the show—or even some of the other games. It barely resembles the anime, and sounds like a poor imitation that is unbelievably generic. When all of these issues are weighing down the experience, it’s hard for me to care or feel invested in this version of the story—although I will say that the locations are instantly recognizable so it deserves some points for that. Oh, and the bonus chapters are cool! Vegeta turning into a Super Saiyan before Goku will always be dope.

But obviously, the main draw of the Budokai franchise is the fighting. And… uhm, it’s crap. Like I said before, I’m not the biggest fan of this genre, so I’m not going to pretend like I know what I’m talking about when it comes to the abundance of mechanics in these games; but there’s not all that many here? And it’s very strange how if you’re playing on anything but easy, the AI will be the most aggressive, annoying piece of shits you’ve ever played against. I can’t get an attack in because they won’t stop spamming, so it leaves no room for me to do anything; and yeah, I know, I know… I should just “git gud”, and that’s fair. But it’s still annoying nonetheless. The choreography isn’t fluid either, with attacks looking the slowest they’ve ever looked in a fighting game, it’s almost like it’s in slow-mo. Most of these things can be summed up as the game being outdated, you can see this with the art style—as it's missing that iconic cel shaded look. I still like the simplicity of it though. But something I won’t forgive is some of the special moves looking completely wrong, why is the kamehameha yellow? How can you possibly get that wrong? There must be a reason, I don’t know though. In conclusion, bad game. Hopefully the sequels improve.

Playtime: 3.4 hours

Every Game I've Ever Played - Ranked (By Score)
Dragon Ball Z - Ranked
2002 - Ranked

Depois de abandoná-lo fui obrigado a completá-lo como uma forma de desafio e digo que minha impressão sobre ele melhorou um poquinho só.

O jogo é feio e datado mas é acostumavel depois de 1 hora de gameplay;

A música é horrorosa e a abertura é tão ruim que fica boa se olharmos ela como um meme;

A jogabilidade é cruel, o soco dos bonecos é curto, parece que estou usando um dinossauro, a hitbox é cagada e a cpu é desbalanceada até mesmo no normal, gerando situações onde ela prevê os seus movimentos ou faz combos absurdos quando você menos espera. Por falar em combos, pra usar os golpes especiais é só apertando uma sequência impossível de botões, criando momentos onde soltar um simples kamehameha é um ritual (que quase nunca da certo porque o bot consegue se defender no meio dos combos);

A história é bem... Dragon Ball, né? Então não tem muito o que discutir, só tem um diferencial é que ao contrário dos demais esse aqui vai somente até o fim da Saga Cell, isso ocorre porque na tv americana o anime estava nessa saga ainda e pra não spoilarem eles decidiram fazer só até aí.

Curiosidades:
-O kamehameha de todos os personagens é amarelo com excessão do Cell (não faço a mínima ideia do porquê).
-Existe uma forma exclusiva do Cell onde ele absorve o Kuririn onde a aparência dele é basicamente um Cell Jr. laranja com o símbolo da tartaruga no peito.
-O jogo tem alguns minigames interessantes durante a história, o meu favorito é o primeiro onde você tem que girar o analógico pra ficar na reta do makankosapo.

Gameplay: 1/10
Gráficos: 4/10
Música: 3/10
História: Dragon Ball

Considerações finais:

Dragon! Dragon! Rock the Dragon!
Dragon Ball Z!
Dragon! Dragon! Rock the Dragon!
Come get me!

Dragon Ball Z!

Dragon! Dragon! Rock the Dragon!
Dragon Ball Z!
Dragon! Dragon! Rock the Dragon!
Come get me!
Dragon! Dragon! Rock the Dragon!
Dragon Ball Z!
Dragon! Dragon! Rock the Dragon!
Come, a-come get me!

Dragon Ball Z!
Dragon Ball Z!

Pretty good fighting game by Atari and Bandai. Pretty fun, but not many characters in this installment. The story mode is the best of all of the Budokai games, this one being the most faithful story wise. Includes fucking awesome Legend Of Hercule unlockable which puts Hercule against the Z-fighters from the cell saga. GameCube version is supposedly better because it came out after the PS2 version, thus making the graphics better supposedly. Sequel is on GameCube as well. Also on PS2 (but no cel-shading), with an HD version of it through the Budokai HD Collection on PS3/360.

Vegeta's gonna drop his BALLS when he sees how good we've blocked his overhead. He's gonna be like "oh no, my Dragon Balls!"

I've been a Dragon Ball fan for a very long time, yet I've never really played the games. Play a little bit of Budokai Tenkaichi 3 at a friend's house as a kid, I adored Raging Blast 2 (hope to play that again eventually), and I played 20-ish minutes of FighterZ. But I always wanted to dive into the games more, so I might try to do so more this year, starting with the Budokai games.

I always loved seeing gameplay of this game growing up cause even by the mid-2000s it looked way older than it actually was, subsequent games pretty quickly looking more their time, it made it charming. Though I was also much less interested back then because the Budokai Tenkaichi games looked way more like actual DBZ battles (and with insane rosters).

The story of Budokai is pretty simply just retelling the plot of Dragon Ball Z up until the Buu Saga. This is a pretty eyerolling thing nowadays because so, so many DBZ games have just retold the show/manga instead of doing something original, and it's 50/50 on if it does the Buu Saga (the Buu Saga is skipped so often that I still don't really know everything that happens in it or the order of events or much about Buu himself). However, in 2002, it was pretty novel (I assume) as the story hadn't been repackaged for a fully voice acted 3D game before. I love the Saiyan, Frieza, and Android Sagas, so I don't mind re-experiencing them since it's been a while for me, though I couldn't help but notice how much is skipped throughout.

The battles between the Z Fighters and Nappa/Saibamen is a mere footnote. Krillin, Gohan, and Vegeta collecting the Dragon Balls and fighting the Frieza's minions and the Ginyu Force are just mentioned in a few words and shown minorly in cutscenes. Once Goku is taken out from his heart virus, there's a few fights as Piccolo (the only character you play as besides Goku and Gohan iirc), but there are a number of other encounters that are skipped. As it turns out, though the game doesn't tell you this, after doing the main story (the final fight between Gohan and Cell), you are able to go back and play through most chapters of the story that wasn't previously covered. Piccolo vs. Saibamen, Piccolo vs. Nappa, Vegeta vs. Recoome, etc. Did they think players would find the game too bloated if they included these parts at first? I think people new to DBZ would be quite confused by this. Hell, Dodoria isn't even in this retread despite being a playable character in tournaments/duels. How strange.

However, the story retread has some nice surprises as well. After filling in the missing chapters, another chapter will unlock where you play a "what if" scenario where the villains win. You beat Goku and his friends as Frieza and he has his wish for eternal life granted, for instance. Nothing too crazy, but neat to see before it would become more common in the games. I recommend the Cell one more than the others if you don't feel like going for them all.

Besides the story mode, there's two modes of the game. Duels (PvP battles) and the World Tournament. The tournament is where you'll be spending most of your time. If you want 100% then, uh, you're in for a long ride. There are 23 characters in this game, each of which have a bunch of skills you need to purchase from Mr. Popo. You only get money by placing 1st or 2nd in the tournament, so you're gonna be grinding it out a lot. But that's not the worst of it. Each character has a particular skill that can only be gained by Shenron granting you a wish; to do so, you need to buy all seven Dragon Balls individually for every single character. Yeah, no thanks, that's so much grinding. And the tournament sounds like a not ideal time for such grinding as simply being launched out of the ring once takes you out of the tournament. Save yourself the trouble and don't try for 100%.

Oh, there's also a Hercule mode after you unlock him. I didn't feel like unlocking stuff so I didn't go after it, but it sounds like it a sort of arcadey mode where you only play as Hercule and fight in various nontypical conditions.

But none of this speaks to the main gameplay. How is it? Well, it's much more of a standard fighter than a lot of other DBZ games succeeding it. Fights are mostly 2D, but with the ability to shuffle along the z-axis, mainly just to dodge attacks (ala Tekken... I think. I haven't played Tekken). Most DBZ games allow you to input a command to do special moves - Kamehameha, Galick Gun, etc. - at the cost of some Ki energy, but instead you have to do specific combos in order to pull them off here. Punch > punch > punch > punch > Ki energy for a Kamehameha, things like that. That one in particular works well, but I found that anything more complicated was quite inconsistent. This is very likely a "me" issue, just not able to execute the commands correctly, but it seemed like they'd only come out when I wasn't trying to do them instead of when I was trying for one. Not helping things is how you regain lost Ki. You have to hold the guard button, then double tap (and then hold) the direction away from your opponent. It sounds simple, but it felt so finnicky, and there was never a good opportunity to charge Ki. Getting opponents away is already a task, but once you start charging up, your enemy will just blitz you anyway. Later games (from my limited experience) will have the computers charge their own energy when you start because of how annoying it is otherwise, but I guess they didn't consider that in this first time.

The main gameplay was a lot deeper than I expected, and I was continually discovering things as I played, which was pretty cool. But the previously mentioned hang-ups really hurt the experience on harder battles. Speaking of which, the final fights against Frieza and Cell, and Piccolo's fight against Napa were huge random difficulty spikes. They fight so much harder, and you are given less health than them. There are a lot of easy fights between these ones, so it truly is just one hard battle that's really annoying, followed by a bunch of rather easy ones, and then a random hard one again. It made the lack of specials working all the more frustrating cause I was counting on them to help me out, but they just never worked for me (again, this might just be a me thing). I like the idea of making specials a sort of reward for doing a combo, but it more often than not came at my detriment.

Also, something that was quite comical to me is that losing Ki energy will make characters revert forms. Perfect Cell, for example, will revert to his first form upon being low on Ki. Not even his second form, it's only the first and last form I'm pretty sure, same with Frieza. This makes no sense in-universe because Cell can only revert to old forms if the androids he absorbed are knocked out of him, but here he just goes back to basics if he's a little tired. It was amusing in these cases, though it was kind of annoying when you want to keep Super Saiyan but it's so cumbersome to charge Ki and it keeps dropping.

Overall, Budokai is a good time. It's frustrating at times, but when a battle is going well, it's fun, and I find the graphics quite charming, and the roster surprisingly large. It's very much an early take on this kind of game, though. It wears its age on its sleeve, but that's part of the appeal, to me.



also if you do the post-game chapters, the finally boss is technically yamcha, that's perfect

Wish I could rate this 3.25 stars, but I can't. I'm gonna round down.

Checked out some DBZ stuff in honor of the GOAT's passing. I'm mostly familiar with Budokai 3, never played this one before.

I do like the story mode's structure, presenting the story just like the anime, with the intros and recaps and such. But I wish there's more of it, the mode is so brief and skips a lot of cool stuff from the original story.

This is one of the earlier PS2 DBZ games, and even then the game still looks pretty nice. The 3D art style is well directed, and sufficiently matches the anime and manga's aesthetics. It definitely would have blown my mind away if I was a DBZ fan back when this came out.

The gameplay is pretty rough in this one. I never liked the way you do special attacks in these games, I wish you can just input a quarter circle forward or something like that for a Kamehameha instead of the punch button sequence. But beyond that, the feel of the controls is just a bit off, it's can be sluggish and awkwardly unsatisfying at times. Not to mention the game still lacks some visual oomph that the later DBZ games would have.

Budokai 1 is a decent start that would set up some of the best DBZ games ever made, and that's all it really needed to do. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to continue my DBZ binge.

Just ok for me.

I bought this one thinking it was Budokai Tenkaichi 1 because I was curious and wanted to play it to see how it compared to BT3.

So turns out DBZ Budokai was it's own thing and I was really confused. Played it for a bit but wasn't interested after playing the BT games.