WARNING! This is NOT a budokai game! - the lowdown on budokai tenkaichi
Anyway, onto the game itself.
The gameplay is pretty different indeed from that of budokai 3, in that you're given a free roaming destructible arena that you can move around in at will. Sounds cool doesn't it? Well yeah, it kind of is, but somewhere in the excecution spike messed things up bad. Every few seconds your character will slap into an invisible wall, which really is annoying. You get these massive looking arenas, but can only actually fight in a little enclosed box. On top of that the fighting revolves much more around energy blasts now, and you can win most of your battles by spamming your best attack over and over. The computer AI is pretty stupid, their main tactic to hammer the triangle button over and over, shooting Ki blasts. needless to say, the AI puts up a pretty boring fight. However, if you've got a fellow DBZ fan in the area, the multiplayer mode can be worthwhile, as you'll actually be able to have a REAL battle. these can get pretty intense, making this one of the finest points of the game.
The story mode in tenkaichi focuses on some linear battles with nothing tieing them together, just some boring dialogue spouted between the characters while they stand on the spot. The back of the box boasts some "100-and-something cut scenes" but in reality, the only cut scene in the game is the intro sequence, which unfortunately is a lame CGI video with no personality, unlike the animated intros from the last two budokai games. The game does feature some fairly interesting modes, but you'll be done with it quickly, as all the characters can be unlocked within a few days, and there is no capsule customization feature, meaning there are no capsules to collect, and no real goal to playing the game. While the game features a pretty bulky character rooster, (more than any DBZ game before it) there are no in-game transformations. Wether this is for better or worse is a preference thing, but I feel it brings down the excitement factor of the battles somewhat.
The game's look is pretty nice, though the detail of the characters and smoothness of the animation have dropped considerably from budokai 3 standards, and while the arenas look cool, it feels as if more effort should have gone in to improving the games visual aspects.
On the other hand the game does sound great, with all of the sound effects taken right out of the show. There is the option to switch between the American funimation voices, and the Japanese voices for the hardcore fans, which is a nice touch, But curiously, the Japanese version featured the original music from the show, while the other versions feature music recycled from the previous budokai games. Why they removed this, I don't know, but I feel recycling the same budokai soundtrack AGAIN just feels lazy.
In conclusion, this game is a disappointment. Spike tried too hard to make the perfect dragonball z game, and should have just stuck to the tried and true budokai formula. The result is a bit of a mess, and while it can be enjoyable for DBZ fans, this isn't going to appeal to anybody else the way that budokai 3 did. Dragonball Z games have taken one step forward and two steps backwards.