Dragonball Z Budokan Tenkaichi 3 review (Wii)

How many Dragon ball Z games have there been over the years, God know, they just seem to keep on coming despite the anime itself being long dead. This is no bad thing though, unlike some other licensed franchises some reasonable games have been created out of bringing the anime to home consoles. The fighting games of the last couple of hardware generations have really been the pinnacle of the transition, with each one making slight improvements over the last one. How does this one measure up though, is it enough of an improvement over the last game as to make this a worthwhile purchase?

Back to the beginning

Well one thing this instalment has over previous instalments is an expansion on the storylines with the inclusion of the original Dragonball storyline. To be honest I’m surprised they’ve never done this before, it is regarded by the fans to be the best of the Dragonball shows and you would have thought they’d have used this before the somewhat substandard GT storylines. With the inclusion of these storyline comes a whole load of new characters not used before in the series., this won’t really make any difference to anyone but fans of the show though.

And even those fans may be a little disappointed by the lack of difference in strengths between the fighters, even the weakest fighter can square up against the strongest without too much trouble. It’s obviously this way so there’s no favourite characters for the multiplayer game, but they could have got round that by having character classes, grouping characters of similar strength together, maybe it’s something they should consider for the inevitable sequel. Mind you, now they’ve incorporated every existing storyline in this latest game you’ve got to wonder if there’s any real reason for another game after this one.

The usual suspects

Apart from the inclusion of the Dragonball saga, the main single player game follows the usual sagas seen in previous games, but this time they’ve divided them up a little differently. Rather than fitting the stories from the movies in their appropriate slots in between the TV sagas they’ve combined all the movie stories together and labeled them the ‘Special saga’. These are completely separate from the TV show storylines, o you can play through just the TV shows if you want, there doesn’t seem to be as many fights in the stories as in previous games.

I suppose it’s inevitable the amount of games there’s been that they’re running out of fights to put in to new games, but they’ve done a reasonable job of not repeating too many fights. But for the most part if you’re a fan of the show you won’t find anything too surprising here, except the ‘What if’ saga, where you get to fight in battles that never happened in the show, but could have in some alternate reality version somewhere. This all adds up to a pretty substantial single player story mode, and with 160 plus fighters lots of variety for the multiplayer game.

Double the fun

Whilst there is plenty to the single player game, with lots of modes other than story, multiplayer is really where the longevity of this game lies. It’s not that It’s an amazingly deep fighter, apart from the extensive character roster it’s quite a bog standard brawler. It has a certain appeal for the fans, but that’s not what makes it a good multiplayer though, it’s the Wiis motion control scheme coupled with the over the top attacks. You can play the game using the classic controller, or a game cube controller, but it’s just not half as much fun using a standard control system.

And whilst it’s fun playing the single player with the control system, it’s a lot more fun sharing the sofa with a friend and battering each other. The control system does take a while to get the hang of though, even if you’ve played the previous game, as it has been refined. It doesn’t help that the tutorial is pretty lacklustre either, being nothing more than a series of pictures and text for the most part, but once you get the hang of things it does feel quite intuitive, especially when you’re pulling off a special move, it’s very satisfying.

Stay offline

One aspect of the games multiplayer that doesn’t quite work though is its online component. Fighting games never work particularly well online, It’s not like this is a particularly technical fighter like Tekken or Virtua Fighter though, surely a little bit of lag isn’t going to make too much difference, is it? Sadly though it does, I don’t know what went wrong, maybe because it’s a third party game running on Nintendo's network, lets hope so because that doesn’t bode well for Super Smash Bros Brawl if this is the best we can hope for. It’s not exaggerating to say this is the worst online beat ‘em up I’ve ever played, there is some serious slow down here, to the point of playing in slow motion.

Even the Dead or Alive games on the Xbox and 360 were never this consistently bad, they might have slowed down as much at points, but for the most part they worked well enough for a button basher. For a game like this, and lets not kid ourselves here, if it wasn’t for the different control system this would be a bog standard button basher, it shouldn’t have any real problems online. At least the offline game is solid enough, just a shame about the online as it was meant to be a major selling point over the last game.

Fun for all

Really this is the definitive Dragonball Z game, for the fans anyway, there’s not much they can do to improve it, bar maybe a class system and some working net code. For everybody else it’s a solid enough fighter with a fun control system and a wealth of options. It’s a game most people can pick up and with a little practice do OK, perfect for the more casual gamer, hardcore beat ‘em up fans will not be impressed though, but they’ll be off playing their Tekkens and Virtua Fighters.