With the recent release date confirmation for Dragon Ball Sparking Zero, I knew I had to increase the priority on a couple glaring blind spots in my Dragon Ball game history with one of them being Budokai Tenkaichi 2. My history with this specific series of Dragon Ball games spans most of my life however it's more like 90/10 Bt3 and Bt1. That's right I entirely skipped BT2 and only knew it existed because there was a 3. I had heard before how "this game is better than BT3 '' by what I initially labeled as contrarians back on forums, and while I still think they are as such I can at least see some angle they are coming from now.

First things first let's talk about the gameplay. If you are a Tenkaichi veteran than you know for the most part how this game plays, even with more time logged into its successor it did not take much time to readjust to its differences as BT3 itself removed specific mechanics from this game and certain aspects of BT3 that I thought were mainstays are actually non existent here. The basic combo routes are the same. Press the square-square-square-square with a triangle at different points, charge your squares and triangles for launchers, you know how it goes. Kick them in the air, smack them down, charge it up and hit them with a super. My god does it feel great to have button combinations for super attacks instead of some dumb use of a stick. Imagine a fighting game doing that, what a blunder! What really stood out to me was the lack of the instant behind the back dash, the presumed mainstay I was talking about above in bt3, is non-existent here. You are only getting behind the opponent by either doing so at the beginning of the round, getting them to lose lock on and jumping them, or vanishing behind them. The lock on itself is not only much easier to break as a knockdown from a launcher is enough to do the trick, but it is also more manual. You're only gonna get a frame one lock on if neither of the players move before the round starts. The hardest thing for me to learn is the blocking. Not only is it more directional but dash supers cannot be blocked normally, you must do the power guard using 2 buttons and your ki otherwise you are eating that damage. There was also no sonic sway, so just the basic counter is all you have for combo breakers/get off me moves. Android 17 is quite the menace due to this mechanic, delta attack will be haunting me for a couple more weeks and Kid Buu is just as menacing as always with his spamming of Mystic Combination. The characters who are unable to fly will also straight up drop out of the air after a certain amount of time regardless of what they are doing. Comboing or getting comboed? They're falling all the same. Some moves were also longer/more vicious in their animations than BT3. Bardock knees your kidneys several times vs the one in bt3, Vegeta comes careening down in your stomach and tosses your ass in spirit breaking cannon etc. I assume these mechanics are why some people say BT2 is better than 3.

The story mode, titled Dragon Adventure, is where most of my time was spent. This is your retelling of Z and the movies, and boy do they try to get the most out of every one of these. Just about every single encounter in said saga you will experience and that's not an exaggeration. Let's take Return of Cooler as an example, this is the Meta Cooler movie for the uninitiated. "The Big Getti Star allows me to cheat death!" is a quote from the man himself, and that means you will be fighting multiples of him each fight ad nauseam. Fight 3 with Roshi and Yajirobe, Fight 3 with Goku, Fight 3 with Goku and Vegeta, Fight 3 with Super Saiyan Goku and Vegeta, Fight 5 with Goku and Vegeta starting in base. I appreciate sticking to the source material but we gotta trim the fat at some point, my guy. As you are right to think, this is not the only saga that does this and my personal favorite movie "Wrath of the Dragon '' has this problem in spades. There is no good reason Hirudegarn needed to be fought 6 times in Wrath of the Dragon. What the story mode does well though is it has some actual in engine action scenes animated. There's the ones you expect such as the Father Son Kamehameha, Goku going SSj for the first time, the super spirit bomb vs buu (yes they did the thumbs up) etc and some surprising ones like a pre battle primer for Goku vs Vegeta in the Saiyan Saga and Goku getting his ass beat by Turles. Between each mission you can also fly around either an Earth or Namek map depending on where your saga takes place and each map has some extra things you can do depending on where you are in the saga. Sometimes it's just an npc giving a tutorial, sometimes it's a bonus fight with reward, a bonus character to use, and sometimes it's actually nothing but baba's z-item shop. In these areas you can sometimes find z-items, money or a dragon ball. Some of these bonus fights are wild, like Kid Gohan vs Great Ape Raditz and Nappa. This one stuck out to me because it took a few years off my life not due to its difficulty but due to how much it smacked up upside the head. So we know most do not keep their faculties and revert to wild beasts? Well I don't know about Raditz but when Great Ape Nappa tagged in and with his normal voice said "time to clean this up" and frame 1 chucked a giant rock at me I think I lost a couple years off my life. Fights like this and some story fight character roster bring me to my next point, the z-item system and how the game wants you to rely on it. This game also has 3 what if sagas that you unlock from beating 3 "unwinnable" fights. Fateful Brothers and Destined Rivals were fantastic however Beautiful Treachery had potential to be just as great but ultimately floundered. I highly recommend anyone interested but can't play BT2 to watch a playthrough of at the very least Fateful Brothers. That shit made me a Raditz fan.

So Z-items are equips that increase character stats and can give them bonus abilities. In BT2 here, characters have levels and these levels are increased by equipping the blue (stat) z-items which also gain exp as you fight and become stronger to give even more of a boost. The Ai opponents have levels to, and they almost always GREATLY surpass your own, especially early on. This means unused characters will be much lower leveled than the more common used ones. The Roshi and Yajirobe fight against the Meta coolers I mentioned? Yeah they were level 10 and the Coolers were over level 50 EACH. Fateful brothers? Level 8 Raditz vs a level 75 Piccolo. You're supposed to win these fights by the way. In terms of faithful brothers, being a what if and all, they clearly wanted you to come back with stronger gear but I still did it anyway. The Meta Cooler stuff though was required, as you have to do the sagas in order to unlock the next. Why don't I just move the leveled up z-items to these characters? Well dear reader, they reset their exp to zero when removed. So you either need to go into the ultimate battle mode (think of it like a mortal kombat style arcade mode with its varying lengths) and grind the character or just tough it out with whatever items you have/can buy or raw dog it. I am not grinding character levels up in a fighting game, I'm just not. I might love jrpgs but it's not because of their grindy nature. That being said, as you progress in the sagas the inventory of the shop increases and I found that as I was having items reach +5 levels then the shop would unlock them soon after so pacing wise it's balanced in that way. The character Ai's levels also don't really seem to match up to z-items. I got a level 53 Goku with +9 Health, Attack, Defense, and Blast 2 (supers) so he's got 5 and 1/2 hp bars, can easily to 10k (a full health bar) with standard combos and 13-15 k with supers but a 121 super buu only has 3 health bars and hits about that hard. The only fights that seemed to reflect and use special gear are the "unwinnable" ones that had the what if rewards. I noticed Gohan's which unlocked destined rivals obviously had the z-items that makes supers stronger and unblockable but leaves him open (a 2 bar stamina break state) after use. Regardless of level the AI was either gonna destroy you or be a punching bag.

The roster is a good size and most of the key players are here, and it's nice to see Z Goku just be one character (with angry kamehameha being a standard super as opposed to an ult) as opposed to being split up by arc. Vegeta on the other hand bloats the roster like you expect a Dragon Ball game to do. Animations and attacks are very much reused throughout, like the delta attack animation is also used for desperado rush, turtle school teachings and Justice combination and the standard filler moves such as high speed/power rush, high power energy wave/volley and super explosive wave return. Dragon Fist is here, there is zero excuse for any game featuring SSJ3 or 4 to not have it, so the game gets bonus points. Even classic DB gets its due here with Grandpa Gohan and Kid Goku, there is no reason in my opinion for a large roster Dragon Ball game to not include it. Put respect on the start of it all.

Budokai Tenkaichi 2 is still very much worth a play, just as much as 3, especially if you like to mess around with the customization features of these games. Though I missed some of the mechanics of its successor it's not right to punish this game for what came after. I do wish there were more what ifs than the 3 there were, especially in the GT part of the game but I also think the game's story could have trimmed out some of the fat when it came to repeat fights. As a whole I very much enjoyed playing this game over the Raging Blast duology, and kind of regret skipping it as a kid though it's no fault of my own. BT3 was what I saw in the store, this was the late 2000's after all. Now I can see what the disc fusion will give me for my copy of 3 after all this time, though I bet it's not really worth it. I still have some time before Sparking Zero to knock out the other two I'm missing and I think Infinite World will be the next one, after a break that is. My left analog stick is in need of replacing.

like the base game, there is plenty of annoying stuff to pick at here, but the best bits of it provide an experience unlike anything else. the art direction is fromsoft's best, the slate of bosses are the most fun, challenging and interesting in the whole game, the new weapons and mechanics (notably the deflecting hardtear) freshen up the gameplay while also addressing some issues with the combat of the base game (although, I will say it'd be way better if the deflect mechanic had just been added to the core moves instead of being tied to the physick), and the legacy dungeons feel like old school fromsoft in the best way imaginable. it good.