Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichic 3 (Wii)

Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3 (Wii)

The last time I had rated a DBZ game, I had reviewed it favorably. It was a very fun and intense experience with just a host of goodies. It did mostly everything right. What helepd that along was how easy it was to pick up the controls and do something.

I was really really surprised when I had started playing the latest offering. I went in expecting much of the same, but with added polish and hopefully a few more goodies. I think what will sum up this article the best is that I played this game for 20 minutes and then continued to turn my Wii off in disgust.

So what could have possibly drove me to that point? What great and unspeakable offense could they have committed to make me depressed about purchasing any more ventures from Atari? Ah, well, they revamped the controls and took out all polish they had.

They removed the ability to lock onto a target.

This makes it far more difficult to get to your target to do some serious hand to hand combat, where all they had to do was assign a button to lock and unlock onto a target. Unlocking from a target wasn't really easy or instinctive to do, and there were a few cases where you wanted to do it more for the free roaming to try and find a few possible powerups

In this version the moves lock on automatically to some extent. Well, you had that in BT2 as well. However, if they were going to remove the auto locking feature, they should have made most of the moves lock on automatically...

Reassigning Button Mapping

Most of the buttons are mapped differently. Perhaps I was just too accustomed to how BT2 was (even though I hadn't played it in a good five months), but I could not even get a good feel of the controls after 20 minutes. This is where they really went wrong. The controls should be easy to pick up. They should feel right. Yet they should also take a lifetime to master. BT2 mostly had this right. I don't know if they could have perfected it due to how the Wii remote and nunchuk are just physically laid out.

I would have been happy if I could have remapped the controls. Nothing just feels right. Why do I have to use the d-pad to do anything significant? I go from mashing the A button, and then have to move my thumb up to the d-pad so I can not only charge up my ki gauge, but also do some powerful moves? Uh what? I forget what the exact buttons were for BT2, but I rarely had to move my thumb to the d-pad to do anything significant. I could do a host of moves while keep my hands placed on my controllers the same way at all times for most anything. This isn't the case here.

I just want to take more time to point out that this is the department that BT2 got it right. If you wanted to do some really awesome combos, you had master the controls. However, it wasn't necessary to master said controls to beat the game in any mode on any difficulty. You could still do all the big moves (which looked really awesome by the way) and feel proud that you did something. Further more, the controls were fluid to the point that you instinctively did certain actions without realizing it. You don't really get that feeling here. You sort of kind of can do it, but it's far less noticable.

Cursor, where art thou?

The cursor is one of those things that really could go either way. It made sense in BT2 because of the way you did things. Knowing where it was at and how to move it also helped you to know how to move things. It needed some polishing for sure, but it was a very useful tool. It also helped you to focus on the screen at times when you just felt lost.

In BT3, it's entirely missing. I don't know if that's good or bad. It feels bad because I was getting lost a lot and couldn't find the center of the screen to get more focused. And still, some moves do require you to wiggle and waggle the remote certain ways to pull them off. Leaving the cursor in could probably aid some people into finding out what they're doing wrong when said moves don't work so they can refine their skills.

But it's not absolutely necessary. It's one of those nitpicky things. It certainly is useful, but not useful to a point where it could be considered detrimental if it's not in.

There was two changes I did like. I liked not having to fly all over a map to get from point A to point B for my next fight. I could just start the next fight pretty much whenever I wanted. It brings you to the action more quickly. That is a considerable improvement. The other change I liked was that some of the graphics were updated. Nothing major, but the Wii can handle a lot more, so at least they tried to take some advantage of that.

Completely revamping the way you control your character fundamentally changes how you play the game. Such changes can go either way, making the game incredibly more fun, or making the game incredibly frustrating. Obviously the goal is to not frustrate your players. Trust me, I felt frustrated. Imagine playing a racing game where you had to use actual buttons, not a joystick of some sort, to do your turning. The longer you held in said buttons means you want to turn more sharply. Sure, it can be done, but wouldn't that be frustrating to do? This is the same idea. Don't change what has proven to work.

I imagine there is probably a host of other things I would like and not like about the game. Sadly, I will never get to see experience them due to the controls being gimped. I play my games to have fun. If I can not have fun because the controls are horrible, why should I waste my time? I can't recommend this game to anyone. It had the potential to be fun, but it's clearly not.