Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi Review!

Well in yet another attempt to keep the Tenkaichi flagship alive, Spike's last attempt at making a Dragon Ball game full of lightning fast gameplay and overall fan service falls short of being an interactive movie with Dragon Ball characters.

Story

This time around there is a lengthy and fun to experience story similar to Tenkaichi 2's open world map. Each saga lets you fly around the Earth or Namek, searching for objectives with a scouter or sensing technique. It's a pretty immersive experience and makes you feel like you're really living the urgency of finding the bad guys and saving the universe.
     The story mode begins at the Saiyan saga and ends with Buu. However, there are giant "boss fights" that REALLY break up the pacing of the game. They are repetitive, boring, and almost entirely beaten with quick time events. Hardly giving you a sense of achievement for whittling down the bosses health to zero.


     Hero mode is where you can create up to 3 custom Saiyans of different sizes and strengths. Each can learn different super moves and ultimate attacks, changing the way they play only very slightly. In fact this is the only worth while mode of the game. Fans have been demanding a CAW (Create a warrior) option for years. Unfortunately, the clothing, hair, and voices are limited, and the variety of your characters aren't that different, far from how recent Dynasty warriors games have improved. The story has you randomly meeting Z fighters and stopping Omega Shenron from, well doing nothing much really. The story ends without a climax, so playing Hero mode again sees you pointlessly fighting the same people again to reach the same goal, an underpowered super saiyan that saves nobody from anything.

5/10



Gameplay

                                As cool as it looks, you'll see this happen A LOT.

That is.... until you actually ENTER a battle. The gameplay mechanics have recieved an *caugh* overhaul, making the dynamically sprouting attack rushes and cancels of previous fighters, no more than a game of coin flips and context button presses. When facing an opponent from long or short range, a simple button mashing will get the game to play for you, closing the distance and leading to, another cutscene where you must press a random button that eliminates 99% of the strategy from the game. Both fighters seem to only rush towards the same goal, and with a little luck and stat building, you might even win! This is not a game where you can take a normal Yamcha and fight a super saiyan and come out on top due to sheer skill.

3/10



Graphics

                                                  Dodging requires no skill at all

The graphics are actually the nicest part about this game. The developers finally utilize proper, classic DragonBall manga shading, much better than Raging Blast 2 (and Broly no longer has solid green hair). The environments all look like huge sections of the planet (though they aren't). And even the menus and interface were simple and nice to look at.

8/10


Sound

It's a dragonball Z game, but this time.. we get Cha-la Head-Cha-la, the first opening theme song to the Japanese Dragon ball Z dub. It gets played way too often and you'll start to hate it if you already didn't.

We got power is better anyway...

5/10


Replayability

                                MFW this game sucks and has no Hero Mode ending


It really doesn't give me a sense of accomplishment after beating the story and hero modes, and I felt no need to do any Xbox live achievements. This game left me wanting a faster paced fighting game like Raging Blast 2 or the Ps2 era DBZ games.

3/10