The following is an in-depth review and analysis of the video game Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 3. If you haven't played this game before, I highly recommend you do so before reading any further as I will be covering most of the games in the Budokai series in this review. So spoilers on any events will follow.
Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 3 was a fighting game in the Budokai series of fighting games under the much larger umbrella franchise Dragon Ball. It was developed by game developer Dimps, published by Atari, and released in 2004 for the PlayStation 2. It also had an HD re-release on the PlayStation 3 and XBox 360 along with Budokai 1, this time published by Namco Bandai, as the distribution rights were transferred in 2008. Budokai 2 was intentionally left out due to the popular opinion that Budokai 2 is the worst one. That said, this review will only be covering the original release on the PS2 as that's the version I have played. In the future, once I get around to playing the HD version, I may do an update to highlight the changes, but for now, I will only be discussing the PS2 version.
Budokai 3 opens up to an intro that has high quality animation with meh choreography and the best intro song to any dragon ball game that I have ever played, bar none. The song is so good, in fact, that it's the only Dragon Ball song, other than the Japanese GT opening, that I still listen to periodically in my own life. The intro itself shows some characters that will be playable in the game. Excluding the obvious ones, namely Goku, Vegeta, Krillin, Piccolo, Gohan, Goten, and Trunks, the intro also includes Uub, who does nothing other than look confused, Gotenks, who gets his ass kicked by Kid Buu, Meta-Cooler, who kicks Gohan's ass, Gogeta and Broly, who end up fighting each other before Gogeta fires a super Kamehameha, killing him instantly based on the animation, and a somewhat silhouetted Omega Shenron, who Goku powers up to Super Saiyan 4 to fight before the intro ends. Of course all of these characters are unlockable and playable in this game and, while ruining that discovery may make unlocking them less fun, if you watched the intro entirely once you booted up the game, this was something that was going to happen no matter what.
Then we get loaded into the menu, which shows that we have a few modes. These are Dragon Universe, which will serve as the game's story mode, Dragon Duel, basically versus mode, Tournament Mode, where up to 8 players can compete in a tournament, Practice Mode, which besides the practice mode, also comes with an optional tutorial that puts the mechanics into the context of the dragon ball universe with scenes where you play as a character being taught by your opponent, who can range from Piccolo and Krillin, to Vegeta and Goku, to Adult Gohan, up to Bulma(?). Bulma is not actually playable. However, if you have the Greatest Hits Version on the PS2, or one of the HD versions, Bulma will be an alternate skin for Videl. On top of those, you also have options, where you can adjust many things related to the game, including the controls. I never had to change them because this game uses my ideal control scheme for a fighting game, but it is nice to have the option there for those people who want to use a different set of controls. Then we have the shop, where you can purchase a number of skills falling under one of four categories, which I will go into later. And finally, though not immediately available, you can unlock a mode called Dragon Arena, which is easily my favorite mode in the game. I'll talk about it more later on though.
If you go into Dragon Duel right out of the gate, you'll see that the only characters that are there are Goku, Kid Gohan, Krillin, Piccolo, Tien, and Yamcha. Other characters are in the game but they have to be unlocked in various other modes. Most of the unlockable characters can be unlocked after playing Goku's story 3 times total if you're good enough to do everything right in each playthrough. In the first playthrough alone, playing Goku's story will unlock Raditz, Nappa, Vegeta, Recoome, Ginyu, Frieza, Majin Buu, Super Buu, and Kid Buu. Compare that to Vegeta for example, whose story mode will only unlock Trunks and Kid Trunks. Krillin will only unlock Android 18. The only other character Krillin's story can unlock is Android 16, and even then, that has to be done on repeat playthroughs. Each version of Gohan unlocks each other, with Teen Gohan unlocking Cell, and Gohan unlocking Videl, Goten, and Supreme Kai on repeat playthroughs. Completing Gohan's story will also get you Great Saiyaman. Yay.
As for Dragon Universe, it's almost what you'd expect of a story mode in a Dragon Ball Game. Almost. You see, in Dragon Universe, you can choose to play as one of a total of 12 different characters whose story you'll be seeing from their perspective, though it's worth mentioning that three of them belong to some version of Gohan. The characters that have story playthroughs are Goku, Kid Gohan, Teen Gohan, Gohan, Vegeta, Krillin, Piccolo, Tien, Yamcha, Uub, and Broly of all people. Most of the stories have the first playthrough be entirely true to the anime series they pertain to. Goku goes through the entirety of DBZ, as do Vegeta and Piccolo. Tien gets a few fights, namely against Saibamen, Nappa, a Cell Jr, and Super Buutenks, which serves as a sharp difficulty spike at the end of his story if you're not on easy and you haven't spec'd him properly. Every playable story character, except the younger Gohans and Broly gets a hard boss eventually but most of those require repeat playthroughs and specific story paths in order to get to them. Tien, on the other hand, fights Super Buuhan by default, which means you'll want to prepare properly for this fight.
After the first attempt, where the story pretty much forces you to follow the correct narrative by not showing alternate story paths, you can then replay those stories and get additional content or, in Krillin's case, an extension. Some of these alternate paths include Goku and Piccolo training together to prepare for Nappa and Vegeta, because apparently Raditz never killed him, Goku getting his potential unlocked by Guru, which is 2 automatic level ups, Vegeta, Goku, and Piccolo can all fight Cooler and then Meta Cooler, Goku, Vegeta, and Gohan all get a boss fight against Broly, Goku and Vegeta can both get a story route where they fight Gotenks as Gogeta, and extend that further to fight Omega Shenron as SSJ4 Gogeta, Goku gets an alternate story route where Vegeta kills Frieza as a Super Saiyan and Goku has to fight Vegeta, which then leads into the Cooler stuff, really no avoiding it to be honest. Krillin's story can be extended past the Namek Arc straight to the Cell Saga where he gets a Boss fight against Perfect Cell, Yamcha can have his final fight with Tien swapped out for Vegeta, and even Uub can fight Omega Shenron if you play right.
The sole exception to all of that is Broly, who gets no alternating story paths, which is most likely due to the nature of his character in the game itself. Firstly, while Broly is not the only unlockable character to get a story, he is the only one who has to be unlocked in repeat playthroughs of certain stories. Even Uub can be unlocked on a first go if you beat Kid Buu the right way. Broly, however, can't, there's no way around it, which means that his story probably didn't need any alternate paths as far as Dimps were concerned, since some players may have never unlocked him to begin with. And even then, the nature of his character and backstory are changed somewhat due to the change in his introduction and role.
Although the Alternate Story Paths involving Broly vary somewhat, all of them seem to have something to do with his evil energy affecting Majin Buu so that he would revert to Kid Buu and then have to be defeated by himself, although this particular story path is most prevalent in Gohan's story. Gohan also makes mention that Broly's appearance was foretold by Future Trunks, something that gets repeated in Broly's story when you fight Gohan. As a result, why Broly has come to Earth or where he came from has changed slightly from the Broly series of DBZ Movies, though by how much is left unclear because Broly's campaign consists mostly of just non-stop fighting. Of the optional stuff, the only one that's not a fight is the one where Broly destroys Baba's Palace, which is actually a nice in-character thing for Broly to do and the terrain around there adjusts accordingly. You also have optional fights against Vegeta and Piccolo in different places. Broly then defeats Goten, Kid Trunks, Videl, and Gohan twice. However, in the second fight against Gohan, Gohan actually has his Ultimate Form he used against Buu, referred to in-game as Elder Kai Unlock Ability and is a transformation rather than a separate character. The ending cutscene also seems to suggest that Broly died in the destruction of Earth. Other than these changes, though, the plot in Broly's campaign seems to be largely based off of the movie Broly ~ Second Coming.
The stories' cutscenes are noteworthy, just like the ones in Budokai 1, but for a very different reason. Budokai 1's cutscenes were noteworthy for how well they portrayed the events of the anime in 3D graphics. Budokai 3, on the other hand, shows the cutscenes in still images with text bubbles. Sometimes dialogue will play over them but not all the time. Most likely the reason this was done was to increase the number of gameplay improvements they could make from Budokai 2, given that they only had a 1 year development cycle. Given that cutscenes would later return in Infinite World and Burst Limit suggests this as well, since those games use largely the same assets as previous games. This is the reason I don't really mind the way the story was portrayed in this game, especially since, if you're playing an anime game, as in a game based off of an existing anime, you're probably not playing it for the story you're already well aware of. A number of people gave the game's story flack for not using full length cutscenes the way Budokai 1 did and that might have been possible if the game had more time to be developed. But for a fighting game that was developed within the space of roughly a year, they did what they had to in order to innovate on the gameplay.
The gameplay in Budokai 3 is drastically different from previous iterations as well. While the control scheme was basically the same, a large number of the roster's characters are returning from Budokai 2, and the Capsule system is still in play, there are a number of changes made to these elements, and especially the fighting.
In battle, you still have the punch and kick combos that can be lead into special moves, special moves can be activated with certain input shortcuts like in Budokai 2, sidestepping, blasting, blast deflecting, and clashes are all still present. However, some additions include beam struggles, which are a staple of DBZ and should have been in Budokai 1 and 2 if you ask me, tapping the block button allows you to dodge melee attacks in exchange for losing ki, so that you can catch your opponent at the end of their combo cool down, Ultimates have been modified, and Transformations are abundant, there are two particular changes to make note of. First off is Hyper Mode. Hyper Mode is a state that enhances your character's strength and prevents you from staggering in exchange for losing the ability to block and having your ki drain while it's active. If you run out of ki, Hyper mode deactivates and you have to recover. From Hyper Mode, you can initiate two different types of attack: Ultimates, which have a timing game where you have to get a meter more full than your opponent in order to win. You only get three taps in total, so timing is very much key to filling the meter. The other thing you can do is the Dragon Rush. In Dragon Rush, you have 3 phases. In all of these phases, you play a sort of rock-paper-scissors type game where the defender has to match his button press to the aggressor. If you match at the first phase, you take minimal damage and the aggressor gets punished with a little damage of their own. If you block in the second or third phase, you take smaller amounts of damage but progressively larger as you go. And if you don't match in any of the phases, you get to witness a cutscene for a special move that deals massive damage. Most characters will have one of three canned animations play depending on their state or the character themselves but some characters get an equipable move that serves as the cutscene and usually deals more damage than the canned ones. These ones can range from Instant Kamehameha, to Final Flash, to Galactic Donuts, to Victory Pose, of all things. Okay.
In story mode, the characters have RPG elements on them where they are affected by a few stats. These are health, ki, attack, defense, ability, and computer. Health increases your overall health, ki reduces ki consumption on your abilities, attack increases your damage output, defense decreases the overall damage you take, ability increases the damage on your special moves, ultimates, and dragon rushes, and computer affects how well the character plays while being controlled by an AI. Computer is really only useful in Dragon Arena where you can play on your memory card against a friend's set of characters, so avoiding it for everyday use is advised and won't really hurt your performance at all.
The character roster is also quite large. In total, there are 38 characters that are selectable at any time. The back of the box says over 40, but that figure includes character-specific skill forms like fusions, Super Buu's absorption, Mecha Frieza, and Meta-Cooler. If those are factored in, we get about 43 in total. Most of these are temporary and while some are permanent, they can also be risky to pull off. The only exceptions to both those rules are Mecha Frieza and Meta Cooler, who are by far the most broken forms in the game. In order to activate them, you have to equip Frieza or Cooler's spaceship, depending on which one you want to use. Then your health has to run out. Once it does, you are given access to the form in question, and your health is completely restored. The reason this is broken is because it requires no skill or thought in order to pull off or use effectively, it effectively gives you double the maximum health of any other character, and it also buffs you in the event the complete regeneration isn't enough for you to outlast your opponent with. It also means that the player going against this has to be better than their opponent to the point that the fight would have to be a complete stomp in any other situation with any other game.
Vegito and Majin Vegeta are much better by comparison. Vegito is risky to pull out, having only a single button prompt that, if it matches the opponent's, you are left with a minimal moveset to work with but if you get it right, you get Vegito who, incidentally is, stat-wise, the second strongest character in the entire game, and also has max Base Ki in Super Vegito form, which makes him a good reward for any players who want to risk it.
Meanwhile, Majin Vegeta can only be pulled out once Vegeta is on his last health bar but once he's out, he has the strongest ultimate in the game. His ultimate, Final Explosion, is a one shot one kill, kind of thing. If you win, your opponent dies, regardless of their health. If the opponent wins, though, you die, no matter how much health you had. As a result, this move and this character are reserved for those players who need an out when in a bad match up but is much more fair about it than Cooler and Frieza.
By now you've probably unlocked a good number of the characters so now's the time to talk about the capsule system. In this game, characters have somewhat customizable movesets, where certain moves can be added or removed and replaced with things like items or stat boosts, or even extra challenges in some cases, and these moves can be bought in the shop or found in the various story modes at certain points. The game is clearly well built around this but there are a few problems with this.
Firstly, the shop has a very limited selection of what it sells when you go into it. Generally, it has 3 special moves, 3 support skills, and 3 items. Once you've gotten far enough into the game, the shop will also sell transformations, Ultimates, and Dragon Rushes that cannot be found in the story modes. After that, you also get the various breakthroughs for characters who don't have story modes because the characters with story modes can wish for a breakthrough from Shenron. And various system skills will appear at different times as well. The problem here is that, for the most part, the limited number of purchase options available when you go in means that the stuff you can buy is somewhat randomized. Sometimes you can go in and find a new skill that you can buy and other times the shop will only have skills that you already have. The problem is that, if you go in, and you find a skill you don't have but you don't have the money to buy it, you have to leave, get the money from story or tournament modes, and then come back and try to get the skill that may not appear again for a while. A better solution to this would be to show the same number specials, supports, items, and system skills every time but remove the ones you already have from the catalog so that, when you go into the shop, you can only get new items. This way, it reduces the randomization somewhat.
The other thing is that certain skills in the story mode will only appear at certain places at certain times. But they won't always. This was especially a hassle in my last playthrough where I wanted to get Final Form 100% for Frieza and it never showed up in the shop, so I had to play Goku's story mode and do the same thing over and over again until I got it. If it appeared in the shop, like some other skills from story modes do, this wouldn't have been such a hassle.
The major issue with these is that the unlocking process was not due to skill, which would've been fine by me. The problem is that you could completely lock yourself out of the 100% skill collection if you had bad luck in the shop or the stories. Limiting the randomization a bit would've made this far less tedious.
After unlocking a certain trophy skill, you are then given access to Dragon Arena. Dragon Arena gives you access to your characters and stat makeups from the story modes and applies them to a mode where you have to fight as good as characters that get progressively stronger until Level 99, where you fight every character in the game with maxed out stats. This can be a real challenge, and defeating Omega Shenron was satisfying.
There are also two characters that can only be unlocked by taking on stronger opponents in Dragon Arena. If you take on characters that are higher leveled than you, eventually certain characters will break in and challenge you. These yield various skills you can't get anywhere else in the game, and two in particular give you new characters. Defeating Nappa will get you the Saibamen, and defeating Piccolo will get you the Cell Jr. And before you ask, Cell gives you the Cell Games Tournament Mode, which is why he couldn't give you the Cell Jr. These two characters really only have one or two basic skills and really offer nothing that couldn't be done by any other character, so I guess it's good that they're entirely optional.
And that was Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 3. Budokai 3 was a milestone for Dragon Ball games, and especially for Dragon Ball Fighting Games, as it's one of the few fighting games in an anime franchise that can stand up to franchises like Street Fighter or Tekken in terms of depth, replayability, and overall quality. Whether it's better than any other game or not is up for debate but I would say that it's commendable that it's as good as it is, given that it's an anime game that really stood the test of time.
No comments:
Post a Comment