Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3 Review

I only played the single player for this game and while I am sure this game was never meant to be played for that, I will admit that for a fighting game campaign, I found it a lot more compelling than I initally thought going in. This game is easily the most nuanced and indepth anime arena fighter ever created. There's lots of little stuff to the combat that most arena fighters of this kind don't really have and this game is easily the most refined of all Tenkaichi games. You can play a distance game with ki blasts and energy moves or you could try to play up close and personal, or you can dash around and knock your enemies down. The infamous Dragon Ball trope of, "waiting for your enemy to power up" actually serves as a decent risk reward system where if you power up, your opponent can get a free hit in on you and combo but if you let them power up and do energy blasts and dodge out of the way, you can drain their ki energy much quicker and you can either go in up close or try to nail them with your energy blasts. It's the kind decision making that I am surprised an anime arena fighter like this even has. To add to all this every attack can be teleported out of the way or blocked, well most attacks can be blocks but back to the decision making I said earlier, unblockable attacks take a while to be charged up and you can dodge them if you time your dashes right. There is also smaller naunces to fighting that I don't know but would take take too long to describe. I consider myself to be a casual fighting game player and at best but BT3's combat and mechanics feel rather impressive AND it's faithful to the series it's based on is icing on the cake. There is a reason why this game has a competitive scene.

I mentioned the campaign before, and I think it is one of the more interesting fighting game campaigns in terms of how the game uses it's mechanics to recreate key story moments from the show. This is probably the closest thing to a fighting game campaign being scripted but it's done well here. When the characters are getting beat up, the game tends to give you the illusion you are fighting a hopeless battle by lowering your HP compared to the enemy and your damage output but when you are winning, the game will let you transform or switch character and you will be beating up the character you were previously losing against. It's a rather clever way of recreating the dire moments of the show. During fights where the villain wins, you will play as that villain in that Saga instead like Frieza and Cell, which is surprisingly a decent way to incorporate the fights where the villain wins but not have it be where the hero wins in gameplay but in the story, he loses. There is also moments where you do a beam struggle or when a character is scripted to do a special attack to win the fight but it feels earned since some of these fights can be kind of long. My only big issue with this story mode is that the game is faithful to the story of DB 70% of the time. There are some major parts that get skipped over and some of the fights never actually happened in the series. That and the story mode can start to get samey after a while when playing it for a few hours since it's scripted arena fight after scripted arena fight but the game ends before the fatigue starts to set in.

Overall, I haven't played this game in over a decade and surprisingly enough, the game holds up and is one of the better if not the best anime arena fighter ever made. I really do get why this game has the cult following it has.