 Review By: Siou Choy |
Developer: | Namco Bandai / Spike |
| Publisher: | Atari | |
| Genre: | Fighting | |
| ESRB: | Teen | |
| # Of Players: | 1-2 | |
| Online Play: | No | |
| Accessories: | Memory Card; Unlock Battles with Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 1 or 2 | |
| Buy Now: |   |
It’s déjà vu all over again, as Akira Toriyama’s DragonBall gets yet another videogame adaptation. Thankfully, it was a fun show, and had some measure of merit to it, unlike certain other vastly overpopular shonen manga whose digital counterparts have recently passed my way for review. Yes, parts were excruciating (Raditz/Frieza/Cell), but others (the Tournament, the Android Saga, the whole Trunks/dystopian future thing) were both amusing and even engaging, in an overly drawn out, soap opera fashion.
And you can’t deny Toriyama’s E.C. Segar-like flair for creating unique, quirky and likeable characters, from the “big stars” to the most obscure. It’s often the more minor, lesser powered characters that carry the thing (Mr. Satan, Bluma, Videl, Roshi, King Kai), and I admit to having a clear favorite (Android 18) among the batch. In fact, Dragonball (particularly in the “Z” series) is a hell of a lot like the early Thimble Theatre/Popeye, when you come down to it, right down to the strangely loveable ugliness of the character design, and it may be this simple fact that really defines the series’ ongoing appeal and makes it stand out from its many inferiors among the crowd.
All that said, our focus here is not the series per se, but its many gaming offshoots. Today’s victim: Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3.
One of the real pluses with Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3 is that you can choose almost anyone from the DBZ series to play as. The big negative? Most of the characters you get to choose from are actually the same person over and over again with slight modifications. Is “Super Saiyan Vegeta” really worthy of being considered distinct from the more familiar “Second Form Vegeta”? In pretty much every other fighting game in existence, these sort of minor variations are found in the character selection menu as the (generally unlockable) second or third costume choice. Here, they’re spread throughout the character selection menu as if we were discussing separate and distinct entities – presumably in an attempt to give the appearance that there are more playable characters available than there actually are. Admittedly minor gripe, but really now…please.
Posted: 2008-07-05 08:01:25 PST