Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3

"Once upon a time there was a man named Akira."

Quick disclaimer as I do not wish to waste your time:

Although I generally write in standard review format, this one will be different. There will be no subscores, so if you were looking for a quick score scan, there are some decent reviews posted on this Gamefaqs page that you should check out. This is for someone different. If you, like myself, have followed the Dragon Ball series for some time (I remember the first time I read it in S. Jump), this may resonate with you. What I have for you is a history, and more importantly a story.

This was so very close. I have followed the Dragon Ball series since it was first released in the 80s. The idea of a Dragon Ball video game was immediately attractive to both producers and us, the consumers. But for a long time, the product just could not be delivered.

The first attempts at porting Dragon Ball to a video game platform were.... disastrous. I don't really blame the designers, but their takes on role playing game versions and street fighter style fighters were very bland. This, I think, has a lot to do with the problem of trying to translate the manga's blazing fast combat, while making the game reasonably controllable. The result was a lot of prerecorded animations where your character went off for 4-5 seconds after a sequence of buttons were pushed. Not exactly a "skilled" system for fighting.

I am not a person without hope, though, so I found myself purchasing disappointment after disappointment on famicom and superfamicom, returning to the import stores every year, hoping that the latest rendition would not suck. To be fair, some of the street fighter style versions on super famicom did start to become marginally entertaining, but certainly not very engaging.

Every year I still walked back to the import store, hoping something had changed. But it never did.

After years of waiting, I gave up on the franchise. Oh, I still visited my book shelf to reread Akira's manga every year, thinking how logical it was that there could be a good videogame version of this very entertaining series. It just never came, so I stopped looking.

Some years later, I was walking through a Babbage's, when I saw The PS2 version of Dragon Ball (Budokai). Looking at the nearly anime quality graphics on the back, I was intrigued but hesitant. I had been deceived by pretty art too many times by this run of games. My normal routine before buying a game is to do some pretty good research from critics and online forums, but the Dragon Ball crowd is rather a funny one. We want the game to be good so much, that the reviews tend to come out very angry and disappointed, or blindly complimentary, trying to wish it to be good. In short, reviews with scores rarely are very usable for this game.

So on a warm summer day, I broke routine, and made my first, non-researched game purchase. After I made it home, I sat in front of my PS2 with the game in for 10 minutes without turning it on. All the old memories of disappointments washed over me, and I seriously considered returning the game for fear of going through all that again. I heard my lost teenage voice again, "It could be a good game, if only someone would try." I remembered that this was the sweetest moment, the hope that this was the one. And I remembered that the next moment was the most bitter; realization of another failure.

I pushed the button, and the console whirred to life.

I was not disappointed. I played for the next few hours, releasing characters, reliving the Saiyan Saga, and actually had... fun. I tried to piece together what was different this time? It came to me eventually, that once the idea that the game had to play like streetfighter or Tekken, or some other fighter was released, the game had vastly improved. Gone were the complex button configurations, and the need to do nasty half circle charge back forward moves. Simply by making the movements easier, taking away awkward dash mechanics and allowing the characters to move with the simplicity they had with in the series, the game felt free, engaging, but not complete. But this was the key. The programmers had previously tried to slow down the characters to meet our paradigms, but the better way was to let them move a quickly as they should, and simply the control scheme to let us keep up.

Not all of the characters were included though. Sure they put in all of the strongest, but some of the most entertaining characters in the series were not necessarily the most powerful. Some were just the comical, the hopeful, or simply the heroic. So I continued buying the series all the way up to the Budokai Tenkaichi series Atari has been producing. On Tenkaichi 2, they came very close to a great Dragon Ball game in allowing you to fight through all the subfights in the series (starting at the Z storyline). I did not necessarily like to new control scheme with the Wii in/out commands as they were cumbersome, but they were playable. The only two improvements I had in mind were the addition of the last few characters hitherto unseen, and adding depth to the story telling as much of the dialog was glossed over in the game making it less penetrable to someone who had not read the series and seen the animes.

Enter Tenkaichi 3. All the characters a fan could ask for. Better yet, the control scheme was streamlined again, making excellent use of the Wii remote to make the pacing even quicker. But then a sad realization. The story had been cut. I could barely make out the story sequences and progression under this new system. Oh, I understand why they did it. This game is moving more toward a multiplayer environment, and giving less importance to the story features. Is that necessarily a bad move? No. But here I have to disagree with the philosophy Atari took.

Akira Toriyama is one among thousands maybe millions of Manga artists. And here's the kicker, he's not very good. Oh his artwork isn't bad, it has a style to it. But comparing it to all the manga guys in the world he's just average. The Saiyuki legend that Akira used, has been used in hundreds of other mangas. So why was his so popular when other's weren't?

It was Akira's unique storytelling that made him a hit. It was the childish art style mixed with the dirty jokes and adult humor. It was the exaggerated takes on what was already a very tall tale that made us (or at least me) laugh. It was his ability to make us believe in self sacrificing characters in the middle of a puppet show that was... magical.

I believe cropping out that piece of it makes this game just another game.

If you've made it this far, you really must love Dragon Ball as much as I do. I know it's mostly for the kids now, but this is a story I grew up with, and still enjoy. I hope that Tenkaichi 4 is in the works, and if they leave everything else alone and just put the story back that #2 showed us, we may finally have the game that the manga deserves.

This is certainly worth buying. If you are a Dragon Ball fan, or are new to Dragon Ball, forget the anime version. Go to a Borders and pick up the manga, the first manga, not the Z or GT, so you get a feel for the original storyline. Then play through the game, and the experience is quite dazzling.

Thank you for reading. I'm off to the old bookshelf :)

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 12/29/07

Game Release: Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3 (US, 12/03/07)