Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkachi makes an okay rental, but it's not a good buy.
The most important part of any game. Unfortunately this is an area where Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi really falters. The game play is repetitive and gets boring after about an hour of play. The game can be kind of fun while you're going through the Z Battle Gates and Ultimate Battle in your attempts to unlock everything in the game. It's always an incentive to unlock new characters and features. However, once you have done this, the game loses it's replay value. Without anything to unlock, you don't feel much incentive to play anymore. The game play just isn't fun enough to play the game just for the sake of fun. Another problem with the game play is that there's no difference in how each character plays. They're fighting styles are identical, adding to the repetitiveness of the game play, there's just no variety. Also, they chose to leave out in-game transformations, which really takes away from the fun factor. Without anything left to unlock, it gets really boring, really fast.
Graphics: 3/10
The stages in Tenkaichi look just as you'd expect. The colors are bright and vibrant and the detail is impressive. However, the character models aren't impressive at all. In fact some of the characters look deformed. Others are either larger, or are much smaller than they should be. Clearly Spike didn't compare their models to the looks of the characters from the anime itself. It looks as if they went solely on memory. Then there's the small unimpressive special attacks. In DBZ: Budokai 1-3, the special moves where bright and colorful, and had well done mini-cutscenes followed by a huge energy attack with an exciting explosion. In Tenkaichi, the specials are small and rather dull looking. In fact the specials in this game don't look much better than the regular attacks. Spike made beautiful stages, but dropped the ball on the rest of the game's graphics.
Sound: 2/10
There's no excuse for the audio glitches in this game. Even with the vocals set in English mode, many phrases are still made in Japanese. Clearly this game was rushed and little effort was put into properly translating the game into English. The special moves sound effects are as unimpressive as their looks. Most of the attacks which should make the loudest explosion barely make a sound at all. Many times when the characters are speaking, what they're saying is being drowned out by the music, making if difficult or even impossible to hear what they're saying. There should have been more effort to make the audio better, it is an important part of the gaming experience.
Overall: 3/10
Overall Tenkaichi would make an okay rental, but it's just not fun enough to justify paying $50 for it. Clearly this game was rushed. Full of glitches, unimpressive character models and specials, and no effort to make the characters unique, it feels incomplete. Budokai 3 was a great experience, with fun, varied game play, impressive graphics, and perfect audio. Unfortunately Tenkaichi lacks everything that made Budokai 3 great. For the next game in the series, I would prefer to see Budokai 4 rather than Tenkaichi 2. Here's to hoping Atari will go back to Dimps for the next one.