Decent game and even though it costed me more than your usual used PS3 game tend to do at coventions due to how rare this game has become, I was looking for a quick game to beat on PS3 and Burst Limit overall fufilled that role nicely. I don't think the game is amazing and I feel like Shin Budokai might be the best Budokai game overall from the ones I played including Budokai 3.
I'll start with what I liked, as a guy who still remembers the Budokai games' controls and mechanics from being a kid all the way to now, Burst Limit generally felt right at home for me. You got ki attacks, ki guage, fatigue meter, energy attacks from standing, teleporting, doding while tapping the guard button and so on, if you have never played this game before and the only experience with DBZ fighting games are the Budokai games, you'll feel right at home here, I know I did.The game looks very nice and the visuals still hold up for the most part, characters look very vibrant and are animated pretty well. The animations during fights and cutscenes are great. My only big gripe here is that the mouth movements don't 100% match the english voices but I am fine with this.
The story mode is...decent enough, it's the bare minmum for a single player campaign with a narrative, it's Raditz all the way to Cell with some confusingly told, "what if" stories thrown in but it's a decent campaign, I do at the very least prefer it over the "visual novel" story with fights that Budokai 3 had all though Shin Budokai does get more points from me for having an "original" story however not as well presented as Burst Limit's. I also like how you can choose the difficulty of each fight, and it came in handy for me since by the time the time Pefect Cell was defeated, I was starting to get bored and wish the game would wrap up since the "What if" stories aren't very good.
The music is also quite good and got me into the fights when they played, the opening theme is fantastic and is the most iconic and well known thing about this game outside of the visuals.
With the good out of the way. I'll start with the bad, an infamous aspect about BL is that it doesn't cover the Buu Saga and while I wouldn't have minded this, what bugs me is the fact that is the fact the game doesn't roll credits after you beat Perfect Cell, it rolls credits after you beat the Bardock and Broly Sagas and both are very incoherently told and I had no clue what was going on. Couldn't you have turned these last few fights with Bardock and Broly into a Buu Saga? It seems like Dimps didn't have the time or money to do it so these poorly told what if stories was the consolation prize.
I also dislike the "drama events" since they are just unskippable cutscenes that just leads to annoying stat changes and it does little to to change the fights since it rarely made a fight easier or harder except for the difficulty spike fights like Final Form Frieza or fighting Super Saiyan 2 Gohan as Broly.
Other things that annoy me about the game is some of the changes made to the mechanics for example, you don't need to power up anymore, ki will recharge faster if you land hits on your opponents, it seems very unfaithful to the show nor does it make for interesting gameplay since powering up was a risk reward aspect of a Budokai game. Do you power up ki and risk an opening for the opponent to hit you or take that risk and power up an energy attack.
Speaking of energy attacks, regular energy attacks no longer drain ki but ultimate attacks do and ultimate attacks for like Shin Budokai where you press up on the d pad and circle to use. As a result, I would never use my weaker ki attacks and would wait till my ki meter if full and do my ultimate attack since it does much more damage unless if the character has a grab attack since those attacks are much harder to land and your opponent will dodge the attack 90% of the time.
The fatigue meter works like Infinite World's and like that game I am not a big fan of it in BL either. I would rather have fatigue be an active part of gameplay where it can happen to me if I use too much energy. Aura sparking does effect fatigue from what I can gather and it just seems like a seperate meter to keep track of, I would rather keep track of 2 meters than 3 since 3 just adds more busy work, and I would rather have ki be connected to fatigue since it's faithful to the show and it makes ki management more of an active role during gameplay.
Aura sparking felt useless and I could go through much of the game without it since ultimate attacks can be done without it and I rarely found much of an advantage in using it.
Overall, DBZ Burst Limit is an okay game in the Budokai series, not sure if it really did it's job at supposedly being a "next gen" Budokai game at the time, but it is better than Infinite World all though not as good as Budokai 3 or Shin Budokai. If your PC can run a PS3 emulator and you can find a way to have it work on it there than BL is worth checking out, not really worth the heftier than usual asking price for used PS3 games with that said.
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