Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3

Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3 for the play station 2 is an over the shoulder fighter that takes place in 3-D destructible environments. Like all of the budokai games, you take control of a character from the anime series and fight others through several different gaming modes. Each of the budokai games have increased the number of playable characters, and tenkaichi 3 goes over the top in this regard, adding characters that never even threw a punch in the anime series. All of the characters from previous titles are here including Hercule with his jet pack, but many of the characters will be unknown to anyone who isn’t a hardcore fan of the Dragon Ball Z and the original Dragon Ball cartoons. Although it’s a fan service to see them here, sometimes less is more. With so many characters, many of their fighting combos and special moves overlap with each other to the point that your just using the same character with a different skin. There are even multiple characters of the same person. Goku and Vegeta are the worst cases of this, but I understand why the game did it. There is a Goku before he went to Namek that can’t go super Saiyan, one after Namek that can, one after the Cell saga that can go all the way to super Sayan three, and the one from the GT series.

The game’s main menu also gives you a great deal of options including character references which give background on every character for those who don’t know who someone is. You also get to listen to chichi’s comments about them, some of which are pretty funny. Aside from that there is the story mode which lets you go through the series and movies including a few “what if” scenarios. Ultimate battle mode has several endurance round matches you can play through. The duel matches let you fight against friends, the computer, or just watch the computer fight itself which is very entertaining. You can fight one on one, tag match, or a big team battle with up to five characters selected for each player. And of course there is the training mode. Like all budokai games, tenkaichi 3 has a world tournament mode, but unlike the other games there are several different tournaments to enter.

You can fight in the regular tournament, a free world tournament with no ring, the cell games in which your damage carries over to the next fight, otherworld tournament which has stronger enemies, and the Yamcha game which selects your character for you. Your prize for winning these matches is money which you can spend in the evolution mode for skills, power ups, and special abilities that you can use to customize the characters. You can also spend it on the characters themselves to increase the number of power ups they can carry, but everyone has a maximum of seven. You can also have three different load outs for each character, further increasing the roster selection. You can also win dragon balls and unlock hidden characters. Once you collect all seven dragon balls you can use them to summon one of the three dragons to unlock a character, item, map, or a lot of money