Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3

"Dang, somebody got to the "Over nine thousaaaand!" tagline before me."

It all started when Budokai became a Virtual ON-type game with the first Tenkaichi, giving something new to the DragonBall Z fans. It was the first time fans were able to use Chiaotzu, Master Roshi, and Mercenary Tao. Then came Tenkaichi 2... which included more characters and the ability to transform during a fight. It was the debut of first-form Janemba, Hirudegarn, Tapion, Kibitokai, Pikkon and many others. Now, the dream-matches are forever endless with the new Tenkaichi, BT3. Appule vs. Arale. Captain Ginyu vs. Babidi. Spopovich vs. SSJ4 Goku. Zarbon vs. the frickin' Pilaf Machine. (I'm dead serious!)

GRAPHICS: 10/10
The old characters and stages still look gorgeous as ever, and so do the new characters and stages. Check out Nuova Shenron, costume 2...the got the "shiny" effect perfect, it's incredible. The animations are true to DBZ, especially the rush-supers. Zarbon's still as beautiful as he always was, Hercule is still as comical as he always was and the Super Saiyans still give off the light aura of awesomeness. Nothing has really changed since BT2. This game still has the best anime cel-shading ever. The interface has nice graphics, too.

SOUND: 8/10
I personally prefer BT2's soundtrack over this one, but if you like the music in DBZ games, or the music in DBZ period, you'll enjoy this. It's a mix of rock and synths, perfectly tailored for battle or whatever else you're doing. The voiceovers are good, if you're a fan of the Funimation dub, you'll enjoy the English voiceovers, but if not, you can switch it to Japanese. (Babidi's Japanese voiceover ftw!) Also, in the character reference guide, you can hear what Chi-Chi has to say about each character, which is a definite plus. ("This is Cell when he ate #17". "And this is Cell when he ate #18." lol) The special entrances, also, are still great as ever...When I got to the finals of the Big World Tournament as Spopovich and Hercule told me to “lay off the steroids”, I cracked up. By the way, the "over 9000" meme is referenced in the story mode.

GAMEPLAY: 9/10
Kicking ass is still fun as ever, and with the awesome new characters, you have new ways to do so. The new characters are probably the best we've had so far, every now-and-then I take a break from beating the living crap out of everyone with Zarbon to beat the living crap out of everyone with whatever new character I just unlocked. BTW, Nuova Shenron is to BT3 what Omega Shenron was to BT2...overpowered as hell. More characters have Blazing Tornado-type "dash-attack" moves now, it's not just Pikkon anymore. Nam, Nuova Shenron, Eighter, and Spopovich come to mind right off the bat. In fact, those type moves were given to most of the new guys. Hand-to-hand combat is still fun as hell, you've still got the "you need godly reflexes to pull this off but it's worth it" techniques, like the Z-Counter and the unblockable Just Smash. Also, there's still all the aerial combos, blast combos, and rush combos you could ever dream of pulling off.

The difficulty in some tournaments is too easy, but you can use 1-star and some 2-star tournaments to practice with characters you haven't used yet. There's more than a hundred unique characters, and many different versions of the main heroes. You're not going to know how to play them all right away. Even if you mastered everyone in BT2, there's new characters to learn how to rock it with. Most of the newcomers, however, have to be unlocked through Dragon History and winning tournaments. The annoying "traveling all over the place" thing from BT2 is removed, so you can just pick the fight you want to play and work on completing it. If you play it on normal, you'll probably run the whole thing through in a heartbeat, but you know me, I hardly ever do something on just "normal", so I cranked that bad boy up to three-star (hard) difficulty and got one hell of a challenge, which is good because it's what I demand from any game I've gotten good at.

The Sim Dragon mode is flawed, yet still strangely addictive. The training is kind of left to luck, there are some times where you'll actually overtrain and become weaker, and negative-effect encounters mixed in with the positive ones...but it's still a great amount of fun, another good way to become more proficient with a certain character, and another awesome way to earn your Zeni. The mini-games are fun, although sometimes frustrating (except for the Popo game), and if you beat them, you get stronger, so you're flexing your mind strength to improve your on-screen avatar's physical strength. I think it's sort of awesome, myself. The Mission 100 is also fun at times, and beating enough will unlock survival mode, which I must say is well worth the effort of unlocking.

REPLAY VALUE: 8/10

You've got characters, stages, a survival mode, Z items, and a lot of other things to unlock, and when you're done unlocking stuff, you've still got high scores to beat. Zeni are once again useless once you've unlocked everything and powered everyone up, but at least doing so will take a long, time-consuming while. Even after the Zeni become useless, you can still have fun in Duel mode against strongest-difficulty opponents, your friends, whatever. One thing players like to do is "combo hunting", looking for the ultimate surefire way to take it to your opponent, and since there's a HUGE amount of characters, there's a lot of opportunity.

OVERALL: 9/10

I've had a LOT of fun playing this game. I'm still trying to unlock a few more characters and power up everyone. I highly recommend this to fans of fighting games, fans manually-controlled mech-battle games like S.L.A.I and Virtual ON, and of course fans of Dragon Ball Z. The amount of gratification that comes from turning someone around with one of Nappa's triangle attacks before setting up an aerial combo is priceless. There's always going to be a challenge, whether it's getting a high score, powering everyone up, or trying to beat a Great Ape with Hercule, you've always got something to do.

Rent or Buy?: BUY IT. You're not going to unlock everything in a week unless you're totally obsessed with the Tenkaichi games and stay up for like 3 nights in a row doing nothing but playing it. (If you're going to do so, I recommend drinking Jimi Hendrix Liquid Experience to burn the midnight oil ^_^) Besides, PlayStation 2 games aren't that expensive these days.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 05/28/08

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