Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3 Review

The Budokai Tenkaichi games threw out the fighting game plane and put the camera behind the fighter, and the third one is where that gamble finally pays. Combat happens in an open arena in three dimensions: you charge across it, blast through a mountain, get knocked into the sky and beam struggle on the way down. It is not a technical fighter and it never wanted to be. It is the show, played.

What makes it the last word is scale. A hundred and sixty one characters, transformations counted separately, drawn from every corner of the franchise including the films and the specials, with day and night stages, weather, destructible terrain and a create a fighter mode nobody asked for and everybody used. Assembling that much and keeping it playable is the achievement, and it is why the difficulty grade sits where it does.

The story mode is the weak half and always was: it retells sagas you already know in menus and stills, and the writing is a summary rather than a telling. The S is not about that. It is about a game that gave a generation the fight they had been imagining since they were eight, and that nothing in the series matched for nearly twenty years.