Dragonball Z Budokai

Game Title: Dragonball Z Budokai
Console: Playstation 2
No. Players: 2
Release Date: Dec 2002 (USA), Feb 2003 (JPN), Nov 2002 (EU)
Genre: Fighting
Developer: Dimps Corporation
Publisher: Atari
Age: General

Dragonball Z Budokai screenshot
Story
85/100
Dragonball Z Budokai takes you, the player, through several of sagas seen in the anime. You will play as several different characters and fight battles as seen in the anime. First you’ll play through the Seyian Saga, then the Namekian Saga, then finally the Cell Saga; unfortunetly the story doesn’t go very far. Still you get to fight the important battles that made you love DBZ so much. The story line follows the anime pretty much on the dot. What’s cool is that each saga you’ll be able to unlock alernative endings in each. Since this is Dragonball naturally you stumble upon Dragonball that when you collect all you can summon the mighty Shenron and make a wish, of course you get to pick from the “wishes” availbe to you but still Shenron is cool! Razz

Gameplay
80/100
Playing this game is interesting it gives you a wide array of possiblities to test your skillz. The game is broken up into different “styles” of fighting, which you unlock more features and things as you beat and complete the sagas in story mode. If you don’t want to go into story mode you can go straight into dueling either 1-on-1 or 1-on-computer. You’ll get to select from characters that appeared in the story, you’ll unlock more as you progress the story. Then you have Tournament Mode which basically puts you against several computer characters, if you reach far enough through the tournament you’ll receive prize money which you’ll be able to spend in the skill shop, but I’ll get to that later. If you need to practice before you take on the tournament or story there is Pratice Mode, which gives you the ability to fight for as long as you want without losing health, it’s a good place if you need to master how to do your characters super move. If you’re in the mood to collect everything you can unlock the Hercule plot line which is just extra fun player with the sorry excuse for a player Hercule. What’s great about this game, unlock many other, you have a certain level of customobility with your characters. There is the skillz shop and edit skillz option which breaks down character moves and power up into capsules which you can buy and add to your character. Example: Vegeta’s Galick Gun attack is his basic “beam” move in the game well as default his skillz give him on Galick Gun you can buy more Galick Gun capsules and power that move up, my custom Vegeta has five Galick Gun capsules which means his Galick Gun does x5 than a regular one. (Yay!)

Graphics
70/100
Alright this grade might be influenced by the fact that I played the other Budokai games too, but still the graphics still suck. For a fighting game their rather horrible, but the characters aren’t too off key in how they appear in the anime. Overall this was the first attempt the budokai series made so I shouldn’t expect everything to be perfect, but when now I come back to play and I see how bad it was compared to the others. The firing of beams is pretty shameful, the character designs are pretty basic. The graphics department of this game was pretty “blah” in terms of fighting games but tolerable if you fan of DBZ and wanted so see the how it would feel using the spirit bomb–and it feels good. What might be considered a plus is that they use actual cutscenes from the show and do other famous cutscenes from the anime in game format.

Controls & Camera
75/100
The controls in this game are pretty basic: punch, kick, “fire”, block; you can perform special moves when you complete a combo like “Wolf Fan Fist” for Yancha or “Final Flash” for Vegeta. Besides that there really isn’t much complexity to this game you just have to remember how to do what. There really isn’t much in terms of a camera function in this game, if anything you camera will automatically adjust as you move around the area–which in your basic fighting game a 2-D with 3-D dodging/stepping ability.

Music & Sounds
75/100
The music is pretty on key with what you would expect from a Dragonball Z game, nothing suprising there. The voices are cool because they use the actual voices from the show, which is very nice, it feeds your ego that you really are Goku saving the world.

Replayability
75/100
Like most standard fighting games, once you unlock everything the only left to do is fight. The game doesn’t go into much dept so collecting everything isn’t going to be hard or time consuming.

Overall
75/100
A much anticipated game for DBZ fans. The game delivers but probably not enough. The game only covers 3 of the many sagas, very few characters to play with–ok there is a good number of players but not all. There aren’t many stages to play in, and once you’ve done everything there isn’t much insentive to do much more. But I suppose this is all part of their plans as they are releasing more Budokai games with more characters, better plot line, more complex game play like baby rabbits–those sneaky bastards.
Still this game does have things the other Budokai games (so far) don’t, this game is the only game where you play parrel to the story and follow the anime pretty accurately, the other games (so far) tend to take a lot of liberties. It really isn’t worth it to buy just to be feel as if you’re playing the actual saga but I’m just giving you the info. This game pretty much laid down the fundation on which all the other games–which there are now 3 others: Dragonball Z: Budokai 2, Dragonall Z: Budokai 3 and Dragonball Z Sagas; and two more in development for the Playstation–poping out like freakin rabbits I said–build on.

By Cherubim

Get your shtuff here:

Dragonball Z: The Anime Adventure Game