Hmm, this seems familiar (100th review)

Budokai has been the fighting series for Dragon Ball Z games for three and a half years. They really have yet to make a really good game to the series. They are all easy, simplistic, and not all that fun at all to begin with and it is only suited for the die hard fans of Dragonball Z.

Gameplay

Here's the deal with this game, the makers of the game weren't creative at all. They made the These are the controls:

Direction Buttons: Movement
X: Gaurd
0: Ki Blast/Special Move
Square: Crash attack
Triangle: Slam Attack

Yep, it's the same for every character, and every character's moves and combos are the same. No this is no Tekken or Virtua Fighter where every character has a huge list of combos. This game has the same combos with every characters, and there are only a few combos to begin with. So there is virtually no skill to the game, making this game not fun at all with literally no feeling of fun.

The gameplay is fast paced, but still with its simplistic controls and easy difficulty, the pace doesn't matter at all.

The modes in the game are as follows:

Story Mode: Go through an adventure using a bunch of different characters. Unfortunately, this mode is marred by constant easy difficulty and extremely long dialogues with no voicovers.

Arcade Mode: Just go through a series of battles.

Z Trial Mode: Battles in which you have to beat your enemies under certain conditions.

Time Attack: Beat your enemies as quick as possible.

Survival Mode: Beat your enemies until you die.

Network Battle: If your friend has a copy of the game you can play a multiplayer match with them, but due to the game not being fun to begin with, the multiplayer isn't any good at all either.

Training Mode: Face enemies that don't attack you back, there is literally no use for this mode, because there really is no skill to the game.

There are 18 characters in the game, and people who are fans of the series may find it amuzing to play as their favorite character, but I really don't even think that fans will find this game to be all that great. However, this would be a good entry level game for the genre of fighting games for the younger audience game due no blood, easy difficulty, and not a whole lot of buttons to remember.

Story

The story is based off on the movie "Rebirth of Fusion," and me not being a Dragonball Z fan, is a movie that I have never. Generally I like to figure out the story in the game and really follow it, but really, this game makes Metal Gear's cutscenes seem short. So honestly, I had no intention to figure out the story in this game. The cutscenes have no voiceovers and are just text, and you just have to read for sometimes five minutes. The cutscenes appear before and after every match, so they are frequent. The matches are so short and easy that you are really hit with more text than actually gameplay, luckily you can press the start button and you can skip these.

Graphics:

The graphics in the game are teriffic and the transition from 2d on the television to 3d on the psp are teriffic. The characters in the game look very much like the characters they are emulating. The graphics are really bright and colorful, and look just about as good as the Playstation 2 versions of the series. The backgrounds could have used some improvement, they aren't 3d really, they look like they are just drawn on paper and smacked on the back of the characters.

Sound

There are no voicovers in the cutscenes of the game, which takes away from the overall sound points, but the in battle sound sounds terrific, and yes, they do have voicovers during battle. They say the general Dragonball Z things like "Kamekameka," during the battle. The sounds of the people hitting each other sounds really well and so does just about every other thing during the battle.