The best Dragon ball game ever made... It's. It's over nine thousand!
Anyway, to the review.
I understand that making a game of something this rare and unique must be very difficult. Making a game that tries to mimic the high speed fights seen in Dragon ball and to make the player have full control over it, is probably one of the most challenging things a game developer can imagine. Countless Dragon ball games has been made, but few have managed to mimic the saga. I would say Budokai tenkaichi 2 is the best game so far. The graphics are pretty nice, the models are gorgeous and animation is flawless. The environments also look very good. Everything looks good except for the special effects, explosions for example. You could simply say that Tenkaichi 2 lacks the amount of special effects needed to make the perfect DBZ battle. The game needs more havoc, screen shaking, scarred environments, debris, craters and dust clouds. But, this is still one of the best looking games for PS2 today in my opinion. The menus are very cute and well done. One thing that could use some polish are the cutscenes which are to few and definitely not perfect. The lack of the original Japanese music present in the Japanese version of the game is very disappointing. The American music ain't that bad, but it can not be compared to the beautifully composed Japanese music. The sound effects are there and they are doing their job pretty well, the voice acting is as always very well done but I miss the hilarious and cool quotes from Budokai 3.
The overall gameplay and fighting mechanics are new, fresh and very entertaining to both learn and use. Tons of new moves, characters and features has been added since the first game. You can now make several different combos, instantly move behind your enemies, sweep your opponents of their feet and bash them in the somach with a gut wrenching punch. A huge list of new special moves has been added and most of them both look and sound very cool. The in-game transformations and de-transformation feature can create some really cool special-move-combos.
If you are skilled enough you can reign your enemies with one awesome chain of moves and finish them of with the ultimate blast! The fighting can be furious and fights can last a very long time. Tenkaichi 2 let's you use up to five characters in a battle which you can switch between during a fight, this is a awesome new feature. Makes fights last even longer and watching Piccolo, Goku, Vegeta, Gohan and Trunks fight against an ultra overpowered Brolly is very cool. Truly one step closer to a more epic Dragon ball feeling. The controls are amazingly arcurate and smooth, after the tutorial you should have no trouble with the controls. They respond perfectly and pulling of nice combos is very easy.
The AI in this game can be quite anoying, on the lower to medium difficulty the AI is ok, but on the harder ones it gets ridiculous. The AI keeps spamming special moves and dodges everything you do. Some levels in the story mode are almost impossible to beat if you don't use the same tactics as the AI. Which is rather boring.
Budokai Tenkaichi 2 packs a story mode, a free battle mode, a challenge mode, a practice mode and a tournament mode. The story mode takes you through almost the entire Dragon ball Z and Dragon ball GT animes. It also let's you play through all Dragon ball Z movies except the bio Brolly movie. This can take up to 20 hours to complete and if you are planning on beating the game on all difficultys than you are up for quite a challenge. Including the story mode, challenge mode and tournament mode I would say the overall time you will play this is somewhere around 100 hours. Tons of stuff to unlock and theres even an entire encyclopedia for people new to Dragon ball. This is truly the best Dragon ball game ever made.
Amazing visuals, tons of characters, great fighting mechanics and smooth controls, good sound and one step closer to perfection.
A very unique fighting game and the best Dragon ball game ever made.