![]() ![]() Surprisingly, the game made excellent use of the license, with the crowning achievement being a story mode that reenacted many of Dragon Ball Z's most memorable moments. The action wasn't complex-as it valued accessibility over depth-but the visuals had a sharp, clean look to them. For everyone else, your money is better spent elsewhere.After over a decade of poorly realized Dragon Ball Z fighting games, Atari and little-known developer DIMPS surprised many people in 2002 when they released Dragon Ball Z: Budokai for the PlayStation 2. That, along with the astonishing lack of depth, makes it very clear that this game was designed primarily for one audience: very young grade school boys who think that Dragon Ball Z is awesome and like to re-enact Super Saiyan Goku kicking Frieza's butt over and over again (despite the Teen ESRB rating). The basic gameplay is smooth, responsive, and easy. The visuals are nice and the audio is okay. In spite of all of its flaws, DBZ:B2's surface features make it seem much better than it really is. Besides that, the only form of multiplayer interaction is the basic one-on-one duel match. I guess this is a good reason for the exchange system where you can trade capsules with a friend's save file. You would have to play through the whole game well over thirty times to get them all. So each time you summon Shenron, you get to pick just one capsule out of three. This is because a lot of capsules can only be obtained by summoning Shenron, which in turn only occurs when you complete Dragon World mode after finding all the Dragon Balls. It's nearly impossible to collect more than around 85%, because as you approach that value most of the remaining capsules can only be collected by playing though the entire Dragon World over and over again. Capsules are items which can be equipped on a character in order to bestow special moves or other abilities. Consequently, there are also a lot more capsules to buy and collect. There are a lot more characters in this game than in the original, 29 in all, even though you could represent their entire range of abilities with maybe three or four. The only differences really are that some characters like Buu are faster, or that short characters like Krillin have a tactical advantage on the ground because attacks from taller characters tend to go over their heads. This is almost like having a Street Fighter game with only Ryu, Ken, and Dan, but with ten times as many characters. You can easily recognize some special moves that are shared across almost all characters, although they have different names and graphical effects. Once executed, the game goes into a long, drawn-out animation sequence where nobody can do anything but sit and watch - except for the parts I previously mentioned where you twirl around the sticks and what have you. To make matters even shallower, there are about five or six slightly different button combinations (shared across all characters) that trigger a special move. The main shortcoming of the fighting is that all of the characters are too similar, and there is basically no interaction between special moves. But this fancy presentation doesn't make the real game, the one-on-one fighting, any more fun. This is a lot more interesting than the one-player mode in the original, which was a nothing more than a linear sequence of fights. When your character meets an enemy, battle ensues. Each stage may have one of a number of different objectives, but it really just boils down to moving your characters around on the board in turns. Here you get to play through nine stages, each of which is represented as a pretty game board with cute animated pieces of your friends and enemies. There is also a new Dragon World mode for one player. The other three are a little different, but equally as uninteresting.įighting in Red Ribbon Base. The main problem with this is that it's pretty easy to fill up the meter all the way every time. Depending on the move, after you press the right buttons, you may be able to spin the analog sticks around rapidly in order to fill up a meter (as the animation of the move is being performed), which then will correspond to the amount of damage that will be inflicted. For example, the only noticeable change to the fighting system is the addition of four different player inputs while your character is executing a special move. Most of the new features of the game are cosmetic and trivial. Right away I can tell you that if you played the first one, your opinion of this game will more than likely be the same. In fact, this game has no significant improvement in functional terms over the first one. If there ever was a video game award for "Sequel that was most similar to the original," Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 2 would certainly be a nominee, if not a winner. ![]()
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