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.