We Love Wii

Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3

Released: December 3rd, 2007
Genre: 3D Fighting
Developer: Bandai Namco
Publisher: Atari

Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3 delivers an extreme 3D fighting experience, improving upon last year’s game with over 150 playable characters, enhanced fighting techniques, beautifully refined effects and shading techniques, making each character’s effects more realistic, and over 20 battle stages. This is the ultimate chapter in Budokai Tenkaichi series with over 20 new characters that have never been seen in any other DBZ video games such as Nail, King Cold and King Vegeta and battle stages that fans will love.

Reviews

IGN: 8 out of 10
Gamespot: —
GameSpy: 3.5 out of 5
We Love Wii: 9 out of 10

We Love Wii Review

Lets start with the graphics. Though to be honest, theres not a whole lot to say. The actual character models and back grounds don’t look a whole lot different from Tenkaichi 2. Though what does look different is probably the most appreciated. The powering up and the moves just look so much better now. The glow you see off of the beam attacks, and the fluttering of your aura just look spectacular. Now that they got that down, maybe next time they can just work on the character models. Not that they look bad but we can see better. There are some new stages which do look nice, though I was a little disappointed that there weren’t more. It was mostly the same stages with “Evening” or “Night” involved. Which would of been cooler had the stages slowly progressed in time during them as well. But they don’t.

Lets go to sound now. Voice acting great, enough said about that. Like in the previous, you can switch between the English and Japanese voice acting. The attacks sound great, everything sounds great. My one annoyance with the sound? We’re on game 6 of good DBZ fighting games. Sure tenkaichi 1 kind of sucked but we won’t go into that. But the SIXTH game none the less. Where is the original Japanese music?! Is it so hard to just leave that in for us who would like to maybe fight to something better than whatever it is they put into this? I mean, the music isn’t bad, but I’d rather play it to some original Japanese music as well. Thats all I have to say about the sound.

Lets go to controls now. I haven’t tried using a classic controller or the gamecube controller so I’m going to have to go off of what I used , which was the wiimote and nunchuck attachment. I found it to work very well, and it made it much easier to combo and pull off rush moves and beam clashes in my opinion. There is one thing I would like to maybe suggest to atari and other developers next time though. When I am pushing the D-pad, to pick which move I want. Don’t allow me to do anything else, except maybe move. There were a few small occasions, where I’d be holding the D-pad right, I’d see the icon in the corner to do my rush move. It would instruct me to quickly move the nunchuck and wiimote to my sides and then lift them up to power it up. But instead, I’d end up dashing towards my opponent and rightly receive my butt kicking from the NPC or other player. This was very few times but the few times it did happen it was very frustrating. Even so though, doing the moves made me feel like a nerd, but this isn’t an insult. I loved that. I found myself doing the most nerdy thing of all. Actually SAYING the moves while doing them. Pulling my hands down at my sides and going kaaa meee haa me! And I know, this is freaking weird, but It was fun! I know, weird having fun during a game but it felt right.

Now onto game play – beyond the controls. I bought this game, knowing full well that I was going to have to play every single fight over again, which I have done from the Japanese titles, like legend of the super saiyan, all the way to tenkaichi 2. Though I was delightfully surprised when I entered the story mode and.. it was shorter! they added more story mode parts that I hadn’t done, and had removed parts that I’d done about thirty thousand times to begin with. I suppose most people might see this as a minus, but I really liked it more. I Don’t need to fight super buu with Gotenks for the 30th time! I know Yamcha was killed by a saibamen. I don’t need to do this stuff again. So thank you , thank you so much for removing this stuff and just leaving in the important stuff. Another cool thing was instead of making you do ten fights against the villain, they allowed you to play a survival battle as the villain. I found myself playing Frieza instead, fighting Vegeta, then gohan, then piccolo, then vegeta, then goku. And it was so much nicer playing it that way and it felt so much more fun too. The story mode has also been fixed so you can’t just completely thrash it by over powering your characters, which felt nice as well.

After story mode theres the other features. Theres of course duel mode, which is a given if you’ve ever picked up any DBZ fighting title. Then there special missions, like in tenkaichi 2, but they’ve replaced korin with Android 17 and 18 instead working it like Dr. Gero’s lab. Sim dragon is kind of fun, and I enjoyed it even though its a bit bland. It made me get the idea that they might have a sort of career mode sometime soon in a coming DBZ title. The one thing that annoyed me though was the tournaments. I enjoyed the tournaments in tenkaichi 2, as I do in 3. But what annoyed me was the fact that you can’t PICK which tournament you want. You have to enter and exit until you get the tournament to open that you want to play. Then ontop of that, you can’t pick the difficulty, which was really annoying for me. Because to unlock certain things, you need to beat certain tournaments at certain levels. And the yamcha tournament is just downright cruel. He seems to enjoy either putting you with a character you completely suck at, or with a character that you can just whip the tournament with. Then there was the custom characters. What I did enjoy was the fact that once you unlocked a patora, you got to keep it. You could use it on more than one character, meaning you didn’t have to buy multiples just to put the same thing on a different character. What did annoy me though was that they only give you a maximum of 7 points to work with. Which usually means you’re only going to get about 3 patora on your character. A little more would of made fighting with customs a bit more interesting.

Now then, The online play. Now I’d love to comment on the online play. I haven’t exactly gotten to play it to its fullest though. The few fights I’ve done, were so lagged, that I couldn’t even correctly pull off a punch combo, much less any meaningful fighting. And then of course, I’m picking a character that I enjoy playing as, and have worked at making better (Fasha), while the few people I have fought online have picked, come on everyone guess it. SSJ4 Gogeta. And with this I am asking Nintendo, please put a limiter on their servers. Don’t allow Fusion characters, but do put a team battle option, to then allow fusions through the actual use of fusion.

Over all – I enjoyed this game very much. The attacks look so much better, and even though I looked like a nerd playing it, I had fun. If you love DBZ, you’re not even reading this and have already picked it up. But if you have the Wii, and just want some fast paced fighting, you might enjoy this as well.