Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichic 2 (Wii)

Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2 (Wii)

DBZ: BT2 is an intense and fast paced fighting game that takes place in the world of the Dragon Ball series. With a roster of over 120 playable characters (all of the characters and their alternate forms), each having five moves of their own (most of which are unique to them), and the added RPG element; this game will grow on you quick, assuming you're a Dragon Ball fan.

What really makes the game standout is the production quality put into the game. Every character has their original voice from the series. This really enhances the game for anyone who has watched the series and enjoyed it. Besides the voice production, you have "Adventure Mode", which takes you through the story of DBZ and DBGT without a lot of the filler. They even manage to fit the movies in where they would fit best in the series, despite that some of the movies don't follow the storyline very well. But that's ok, because the movies were neat too.

There are only two issues I find with the "Dragon Adventure" mode. For starters is that the "win" condition doesn't always jive with the storyline. Winning a battle sometimes means being beat in the plotline. It gives you this disconnected feeling at times. I, however, got over it fairly quickly. If you really think about it, if all you did was... lose every battle, well, how could you gain "experience points"? What tells the game that you're ready to move on to the next challenge?

My second complaint (and it's a very small one) is that the story in Dragon Adventure mode doesn't follow the story from the anime. (Of course there are those that bitch how the anime doesn't follow the manga...). It's not entirely that big of a deal-breaker. There are no major changes really; it's just more of the cutting of certain events, where later on you're told what had transpired to some degree. To any person who isn't familiar with DBZ or DBGT, this can be confusing.

Playing this on the Wii gives the control a much different, unique, and more fun experience. It's no longer about mashing buttons, but instead about moving your arms around. Doing the Kamehameha Wave is actually like doing it, minus saying "KA-ME-HA-ME-HA!", but you could always sound it out if you wanted to. Point the cursor at your target, hold down both B and Z, and move your arms back, and then forward. It's tough to pull off, but satisfying when you do. The spirit bomb? Well, after you do an initial move, you act in the same way. Hold down both B and Z, raise your arms above your head and bring them down (or if you want to be a dullard, raise the cursor to the top of the screen and then back down). The neat thing about the spirit bomb is that it does drastically change the landscape. It's completely tits. Really, the best part about acting out the moves is when you have friends over. If you manage to miss, not only did you look like an idiot, well, that's it. You looked like an idiot and everyone has a good laugh.

Some of your more "simple" moves are hard to pull off. Teleporting out of the way of an attack is often hard to do. It requires a great deal of coordination that you achieve more often when you instinctively do it. More or less, when you're about to be hit, you need to either move the cursor down or hit the down arrow, and swing the nunchuck either left or right. The timing is hard to pull off. What balances this out is that many of the other moves are easy to pull off. This is great for both the casual and hardcore gamer.

If you ever have any questions on how to perform a certain move, hit the "+" button, go to the skills list and have a peek! You no longer have to try and figure out how to do a certain move (like with most fighting games I have ever played); you are explicitly told how to do them.

While I'm mentioning the fighting, it's interesting to see what happens when you launch an assault move, or a blast move the same time as your opponent. When this occurs and you both are battling over who does the damage. With the blast, the beams are fighting against each other; with the assault, the two fighters are going at it, which is quite reminiscent of what you see in all of the DB series. To win these, move the joystick on the nunchuck in a circular motion. The faster you do it, the more likely you'll win.

This added RPG element I talked about earlier is a unique one to the fighting style of games for me. You can win, buy, and collect "Z items", which enhance your stats. The blue Z items are the ones you can power up. Every battle you go into earns you experience. Once a Z item receives enough experience, it moves up to the next level. Attack +1 will become Attack +2, and so on, all the way up to +15. There are orange Z items that you cannot power up, but have a varying degree of what they do. Some will simply increase your stats, some will enable you to do cool things, some will be a combination of the two, and some will constantly affect your opponent. Green and purple Z items are items that you use "fusion" to fuse together. This unlocks more characters for you to fight with in the in the various battle modes. It also unlocks orange Z items.

The downside to the RPG element is that once in a while you find yourself doing a grind just to get your guys up a little closer to your next opponents level. The grinding can be minimal, if you choose to keep it that way.

The only annoying part to fusion is that King Kai will always say, "Oh yeah! It's fusion baby!". However, I've always found King Kai to be incredibly annoying, so it's no surprise that the repetition of the same phrase uttered by the same annoying voice would get on my nerves.

The various different modes I'm going to touch on briefly here. You have tournament mode, which of course, is like the world tournament. You do not get to see the other fights, but you do compete for prize money, which can be used to buy more Z Items. There's a ladder mode, with multiple ladders, each with their own difficulties. There's a training mode that you can use to master how to do certain moves, and in that, there's also a free for all deal where you can practice your moves. You can set the CPU's difficulty, or even have the CPU stay stationary.

There are two other aspects that I'd like to touch upon here. One is that you can create your own character. This is used to upload other peoples characters to your game. There's also the "Dragon Library", which will give you all of the information that you'd ever need for the DB universe.

For those that aren't into the Dragon Ball universe, all I have to say is that you would probably still enjoy the game very much. There is a lot to do and master in this fighting game, which is eons and eons apart from those old fighting games where you had to mash buttons very quickly in order to pull something off. You can, now do fluid movements and have them out as they're supposed to be. It's an in depth fighting game, one that I'm sure a lot of us have been waiting for quite some time.

If you are Dragon Ball fans, well, I'm sure you have your own judgment about the game already, and it seems that half of you don't like it (mainly because the controls are a little more tricky to master - boo hoo, cry more), and the other half love it.

I can safely say that I would recommend this game to any person who is an avid fan of the fighting genre, and it has the bonus of the RPG element to those that do like RPG's and fighting games.