To purchase this item click here!Dragonball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3

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If you are into fighting games, this is a great game to get.

You either love or hate Dragonball Z, but if you love it you will probably enjoy this game. If you hate it, you may enjoy the unique fighting controls that the game has to offer. But regardless of whether you love or hate Dragonball Z you will be disappointed, nay, angrily bitter about the online play.

So lets get this out of the way. If you are purchasing this game because you want to beat up your friends in multi-player online ecstasy, you should probably look into other games. The online component is a train wreck to put it nicely. There were many attempts by the community to encourage Atari to get off their butts and fix the problem. Nintendo even made a press release stating they were aware of the problem and provided Atari with code samples that they could use to correct the problem. But, alas, Atari let us down, and that is probably why they keep needing to borrow money to stay afloat.

Even though the online game is inexcusably bad, the actual game is enjoyable. If you are a fan of the series you will appreciate the new story mode. In previous titles you had a series of single match battles you would go through for each saga. Each saga might contain 5 to 10 battles, but in this installment their is an entirely new mechanic. Each saga is a single battle with trigger points. I know a lot of people in the community complained that a full story mode was not present, but I certainly appreciated the new approach to the story mode.

Another plus for the game is the wealth of re-play value…if you enjoy the fighting mechanics. There is the new story mode, tornament mode, ultimate battle, and I am sure a whole ton that I didn’t mention. Each mode has it’s own slant. Tournament mode is basically the same as it has been in previous games, but the difference is that you can only play certain tournaments at certain times based on the internal game clock (not real time). So if I fight in 3 tournaments it might adjust the game time by 3 hours. Each tournament also has it’s own special rules, for instance Yamcha’s tournament randomly selects the character your are going to play with.

Ultimate Battle was in the previous game but it worked differently. In Tenkaichi 2 you had numerous totems you could work your way up, sort of like Mortal Kombat 2+. In Tenkaichi 3 there are actually 3 games types inside of Ultimate battle; Dragon Sim, Mission 100, and Survivial.

Dragon Sim is a game where you select a character and train him between battles. Training consists of selecting what you want to work on, for instance attack. If you select attack you may either gain or lose attack points, and you almost always lose defense points. You need to plan your training carefully to ensure you have decent stats before the next battle. Your health is also persistent in this mode, so if you take a lot of damage in the first battle you are going to need to rest more during training to regain your health for the next battle. When you rest you lose attack and defense strength though. Overall this is a fun mode to master, although there is a lot of chance involved with the training.

Mission 100 is…100 battles. They are basically package battles with teams that you fight, with specific rules. This very much acts like the Ultimate Battle mode from Tenkaichi 2, but you don’t see the totem you are walking up, it is simply a tag battle. I found the later battles to be the most difficult battles in the entire game.

Survival is an exhausting tag match. The general idea is You as your character of choice, vs a crap-ton of fighters. After each fight you regain a little health, but you have to be able to win fights without taking a ton of damage to win. I found Cell especially helpful in these matches because you can use his life drain ability to restore your health if you get low, and his transformations give him life back as well.

And of course you have standard Duel matches that you can beat your friends up in.

During each game modes you unlock Z-Points, the games currency. There are so many ways to collect Z-Points it is unbelievable. You use Z-Points to purchase Porta’s (attribute modifiers) for your characters. Unlike in Tenkaichi 2, these are not single use items, and they don’t gain experience. Instead it is more like you are unlocking the power-up to be used on any character. I like the unlock aspect a lot, but I still preferred the original power-up scheme in Budokai where you unlocked attacks and transformations as well, so you could really customize your character, instead of just modifying the characters stat attributes.

Overall if you are looking for a good fighting game, I think this game would be a good purchase on either the Wii or the PS2. I have the Wii version and the game controls are a lot better than for Tenkaichi 2. From what I understand not much has changed for controls on the PS2 side. If you did play Tenkaichi 2 you will need to give yourself a little time to adjust to the new control scheme on the Wii but it is well worth it.

My rating: 4.5 stars