"Utter dissapointment: The DBZ saga."

Let me begin this review with a short story:

My best friend and I wage war over many activities; the most popular one is a good fighting game. We are both avid fans of the Dragonball series and enjoy each game we can get. The most recent game of the series, Dragonball Z Budokai Tenchaichi 3 put us both in a feuding frenzy.

The pendulum swung heavy in both directions but we both vowed to dominate the other since the last game in the series. Basically, this cycle can be broken down into three steps;

Step 1: Buy the game.

Step 2: Unlock everything.

Step 3: Pit our best fighters against one another.

Dragonball Z Budokai Tenchaichi 3 delivers on every step except one: Step 3.

The second game completed this step by allowing both players to place their memory card in the Playstation 2 and draw characters from respective games. Tenchaichi 3 does not allow for the same reason and fails miserably.

Now, I know what some of you out there are thinking. “If it doesn't allow you to load two memory cards, why not just import them using the password feature?” And the answer to that is because it's the password feature.

Have you ever tried to use this aspect of the game? It gives you a 28-character long alphanumeric password that is also case-sensitive. In order to import a character you need to load the first memory card, copy this monster of a password down correctly, load the second memory card, input the password and save. There are a lot of places for errors to occur.

Transcribing is a big issue as you might copy the password incorrectly. If you do, you'll need to go back look at the password. However, it's never the same password. The developers did this to prevent people like us from copying passwords off the Internet to get incredible characters but this creates more problems within the interface of the game itself.

Another problem is the loading and saving. The game automatically loads a memory card in the first slot during startup. Saving only occurs automatically for Dragon History and Z-Evolution. Every other aspect of the game requires that the player go to the Options menu and save.

In our case we copied the passwords of three fighters. Two of them were copied properly despite heavy scrutiny. We saved the two correct ones and copied a different password for that character. At this point, 20 minutes had passed and frustration began to set in. In our haste, we neglected to load the second memory card. After we input the third character password we saved. This replaced all the memory of the second memory card with the first. All of my hard work had been ruined.

This game should not be this frustrating. I purchased it for one reason: I wanted to kick my friend's ass using my custom characters. This game does not reinvent the wheel when it comes to game play. What it does is fall short of its predecessor. There's not much you can do to improve a game that was already great. But the one thing you can do is make sure that the quality of the game does not degrade with each new edition. Tenchaichi 3 does and that's why it gets a 4 out of 10.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 12/25/07

Game Release: Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3 (US, 11/13/07)