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DragonBall Z: Budokai 3 
Release date: 16 Nov 2004
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Mygamer review
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One step forward two steps sideways…
In 2003 a train wreck disguised as a DBZ game hit stores, continuing to milk the gaming market. By and large this year's installment is definitely an improvement, offering more levels and characters, a more authentic feel and a well done single player mode that's fun to play. With major changes-not necessarily upgrades-to the fighting system and game play, Budokai 3 is easily the best Budokai to date.
After remapping the controls to your liking you'll enter the single player Dragon Universe, a pseudo-RPG where you choose from eleven characters and as you progress you gain levels and Z points to add to your stats, which include ki, health, attack, arts and a few others. The game levels are 3d maps that you can fly around at your leisure, either moving directly to your next objective or exploring and finding hidden items, dragon balls and enough money to cut down on the number of tournaments you must suffer through. At any point you can train at the battle point or save your progress. Not only do different portions of the story play out depending on the character you use, you can play through the story again and again with the same built up characters and then duel them against other people's built up characters in Dragon Arena, similar to Final Bout's Build-up Mode--Epic.
The only real problem with Dragon Universe is that the story sequences are just static images with pictures of characters on them and there frequently isn't even voiceover. Sometimes you'll hear the characters speak and sometimes you won't; there's no rhyme or reason as to why-even the tutorials, which are quite good otherwise, are all text. Huge chunks of story are left out of these sequences so unless you're intimately familiar with the show or if the phrase "Bulma has Piccolo Chi-Chi" means nothing to you you'll be completely lost. Even the flying controls leave something to be desired; the left analog stick moves you forward and back and the right analog stick moves left and right. Both of these functions could have been mapped to one analog stick.
After completing a playthrough you must unlock a character's "memories" which alas are not RTMs but rather collections of all that character's sound clips throughout the game. You can sit and listen to them under the "Bonus" menu. You must also unlock additional voice data called Story Reenactments by reenacting key story sequences such as Piccolo using Special Beam Cannon on Raditz, and herein lays one of Budokai 3's greatest faults.
New to game play is dragon rush; a three phase move, each phase requiring both fighters to push a button and if they happen to press the same one the move is blocked and subsequent phases are skipped. The first sequence offers four buttons to choose from, the second offers three etc, the chance of pulling off the next move decreasing each time.
Phase three is different for each character, and all this means you only have a 24.5% chance of using your phase 3 attack-in Piccolo's case Special Beam Cannon. Dragon rush is exciting the first dozen times but it's nothing but a crapshoot in more ways than one. Warp Kamehameha and Final Flash are also third phase dragon rush moves - say goodbye to them. You will lose and win battles time and time again because of luck rather than skill since phase 3 can be the difference of 1,000hp and inevitably affects the speed at which you level up as you receive points for highest combo. Even if you unlock these "Story Reenactments" they're appallingly useless: clip 003 is Kid Gohan yelling "masenko-ha!" Hold on while I wipe the spit from my forehead…
Another new trick is the ability to counter and pursue opponents by teleporting; not only circumventing energy blasts and cancel combos but also speeding up game play - you can even counter an opponent's teleport with one of your own. It's tricky but when you can pull it off it's great. Death moves can be followed by a teleport, however only at certain distances. Pressing guard just as an opponent strikes allows you to duck or parry kicks and punches but you can't duck on command. One of the best new features are the beam struggles that occur when two death moves are activated at the same time and they meet - this is what we thought would happen last year.
While transformations still yield no upgrade to speed or defense, they are easier to maintain and much more useful. By default the first three ki bars auto-recharge and after each power-up an additional bar recharges so you can maintain power-ups (even Super Saiyan 4) until you're damaged with only one ki gauge left. Transformations such as Frieza and Cell's second and third forms can't be reversed no matter how much damage you take-a welcome improvement over the original Budokai. In addition to the usual transformations there is also hyper mode, which all characters must enter prior to initiating a dragon rush or ultimate move. In this state the CPU invariably flees from you, even attempting to back up when against a wall. When executing a finisher, two meters appear and whichever player fills his meter up more wins, determining whether the move is blocked or not. With certain attacks this makes no sense because it's unclear as to what the opponent is doing that blocks; with Piccolo's hellzone grenade it's not a question of a power struggle as it is with Super Kamehameha and Budokai 2's analog-mashing power up was more fitting. Even on level easy the CPU wins this almost every time.
Up to four ki blasts can be fired in rapid succession and you even have some control over flight, but once in the air you're stuck there unless your opponent is still on the ground. In addition to the ability and equipment skills you can now add item skills as well for activation at any point during a battle to either restore health and ki or affect your attack and defense abilities, helping to lengthen the fights - Duel mode even lets you add or remove life bars. You'll even see some weapon usage with characters such as trunks and Dabura outside of just finishing moves.
Despite many new improvements Budokai still suffers from many old shortcomings. Death moves fired while an opponent is recovering do no damage and players still can't access skill descriptions when equipping characters for tournament or duel, but you can still equip capsules that are unusable such as potara in Dragon Universe or Big Bang Attack when playing Dragon Universe as Majin Vegeta (Final Explosion overrides Big Bang Attack). Most pre and post-battle character dialogues remain generic; Kid Gohan says "nice to meet you" even when he's fighting Goku. At the very least why not recycle the dialogue from Budokai 1 like they've recycled everything else? Almost all move and taunt animations remain exactly the same and even when flying you hop to sidestep left and right. Environment wrecking moves have returned, which makes me wonder why they were ever removed. At least this time after selecting to fight again the level resets to its normal state allowing you to re-destroy it.
By and large the graphics have been improved but for every improvement there's a problem. Character postures and ki-gathering animations are at last quite varied and not only are the aura particle effects great, they start small and become more intense; leading to much more dramatic transformations but for reasons I'll never understand the aura comes instead of and not in addition to the blue lightening at Super Saiyan 2 and 3…WTF? Burst zone is no longer a solid black background and has a genuine anime feel to it plus you can even do a bit of damage to the ground. When in a beam struggle the energy moves between the two characters as the users fight it out so you can see who's winning and when a Super Saiyan is KO'd his hair turns black…usually. Many if not all of the character models are untouched; Majin Buu is too short and Super Buu remains deformed and featureless. The Super Saiyan 3 hair model was marginally improved but for the most part it's still a giant motionless beehive.
Some characters including Goku and Vegeta have a bunch of outfits while others such as Gohan have two…that means one less outfit than last year and equipping Supreme Kai's outfit doesn't change his appearance. Outfits also can't be changed in Tournament. Pre-fight level flythroughs, large character models and cinematic dragon rush sequences give Budokai 3 a larger than life feel. In some cases the levels look almost too realistic. Add one point to graphics if Dragon Universe's still images don't bother you.
Audio falls short due to a severe lack of audio. Tutorials and most story sequences are entirely text-based and once again Cell has returned with his bag of voices. He starts a fight in his first stage, yet during his character intro he uses his perfect voice then five seconds later uses his first stage voice, then during dragon rush switches between voices indiscriminately. You'll also find Launch's sneezing and talking every time you go in or out of the shop extremely annoying and you'll be reaching for the mute button in no time flat. When you do manage to come across voices in-game they're very good as always and all of the sound effects are dead-on, taken directly from the show.
The Budokai franchise is an example of why game companies should take their time rather than cranking out the same title every year - the in-engine dialogues from Budokai 2 weren't great but they were better than what we got this year. After all is said and done this is the best Budokai to date however there are still two or three major flaws preventing Budokai 3 from being a truly great game.
Review by Dave Kaplan on 29 Nov 2004
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