[8/4/07] Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2

[Devia Eleven]

 

Published by: Atari / Namco Bandai

Developed by: Spike

Genre: Fighting

Number of Players: 1-2

Release Date:

US: November 19, 2006

Japan: January 1, 2007

Europe: March 30, 2007

Australia: January 31, 2007

 

Tenkaichi 2 is a nice upgrade from the first version. This version includes lots of other modes and features. The combos are tweaked a bit from the last game, instead of having 2 or 3 different melee combos, there are now 6 or 7 different melee combos, which I think was a nice improvement. The story line is also re-vamped from the first version, where the stories are more accurate and more elaborate.

 

 

They actually have every saga, and every movie saga along with some What-If stories. These are stories that are fictional, stories that were made up by game developers. It has more modes, such as: Ultimate battle which is sort of a Mortal Kombat based mode, where there are different towers full of enemies. Each tower has different missions, which makes that mode one of the best in the game. If you have Tenkaichi 1 data on your memory card, the game will give you a bonus of 1,000,000 zeny, which you can use to spend on Stats and Potora earrings to make your characters stronger. The RPG system is pretty solid. Everyone in the game starts out at lvl 008, which means they have no earrings attached.

 

 

You start out with Attack +1, Defense +1, Speed +1, Ki +1, and Health +1. If you equip all five of these earrings to one character, when they level up, each earring will become +2. the highest number is +19. There are also other earrings like Blast 1+ 1 and Blast 2 +1, and Final Blast + 1, which increase the damage done with a character's final attacks. There are other earrings that just give you different abilities, like increasing your ki gauge at the beginning of battle, things like that. You can also choose which music you want to listen to in Vs. mode, and there's a tag mode too, where both players can have up to five characters on their team.

 

You can even enter passwords from Budokai 3, which give you strong DBZ characters without having to do the work of Leveling them up yourself. You can finally transform in-game! The special effects are better, the voice overs are much better, you can even change the voices from English to Japanese, giving you that true DBZ feel. In story mode you can actually fly around the earth, and walk into towns and talk to people. When you enter a town, the boundaries are short, and there's only one person to talk to. And most of the time when you talk to them, they give you hints like: If you fight a character stronger then you, you can level up. Okay..I already knew that, it's just common sense. Sometimes when you talk to people in towns, they join your team, which means they fly around along side you, and if you fight someone, EXP Points go to the entire team, leveling up everyone with an equal amount of points.

 

 

To start off with the bad side, each character isn't so diverse. There are up to 125 characters, and most of them have the same moves. Every single character can do the same melee combo. And also, the characters are severely unbalanced, you can pick a lvl 103 Hercule, against Lvl 008 Goku, and Goku would be out powered. That doesn't make any since, Why? Because if you've watched the anime you would know that Hercule can't even fight his daughter and win, let alone Goku, the strongest sayian-jin in the universe. In story mode, they always put you in impossible battles, like in the anime where Yamcha finds the androids, he never fights them, but in the game you have to fight and defeat And 20, which never freaking happened. So what the game developers thought was this, let's make up impossible match-ups in the story mode, so we can make the story mode harder. Well, they should know the entire story line like the back of their hand. If you have this game, and there's no one else to play with, this game can get boring prety quickly. There are other modes to keep you busy though, like the Tournament mode or the Story mode, or just unlocking hard to get characters.

 

 

One thing that bothers me the most, because I am a hardcore DBZ fan, are the damn models. they made it so Goku could only be played with at 40 years old. His face looks elderly, but in the first part of DBZ this guy was like 20 years old, and he was a bit chubbier in the beginning. but no, they get Goku from the Buu saga, and put him in the Sayain-Jin saga where the appearances don't fit. What they could have done to make the game better, was to add more costumes, have better models which have the correct body structure at the right time. Have better story modes, allow you to walk around the city and buy items, talk to more people etc. Have online play, more and more combo combinations, larger and more stages, and more modes. Such as Team Battle, watch, etc.

 

I give this game a 7.

Graphics - 8

Sound - 6

Tilt - 6.1

Gameplay - 7

Value - 5

 

Grade: B

Edited June 9, 2008 by Side