I can hardly believe it myself. Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi continues. A series that defined my youth
Did you wonder in the early two-thousands who those people were who actually bought a new Dragon Ball game every year? I was. Ever since the release of Dragon Ball Z: Budokai in 2002, Bandai Namco basically put out a new brawler every year, in which Son Goku and his fellow muscle mounts would take on their arch-villains over and over.
And even though no new stories were being created in this universe at the time, I couldn”t get enough of them. Those fat years then cumulated in Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3 – a game that, for many fans, is still considered the gold standard.
16 years ago now. In that time, there have also been new Dragon Ball games, but now Bandai is returning to its successful series. Via a short teaser, a new part was recently revealed:
Why is this special?
For most, this will be just another game in the long list of Dragon Ball soft adaptations, but for me there is something magical about the announcement. I truly spent years of my life in the Budokai titles. Every year, every month, every day I sat in front of the console and played my hands to death just to win every Beam Struggle.
This enthusiasm for Dragon Ball never waned, but after Tenkaichi 3 I never again devoted myself to the series as excessively as I did with the Budokai games. That may be due to my age, but somehow they always lacked that certain something. Even if they turned out as grandiose as Dragon Ball FighterZ or most recently Kakarot. But what Tenkaichi offered never existed in this form again after that.
These games were known for depicting Dragon Ball in a totality that it was almost absurd. 161 playable characters and transformations existed in this game. One hundred and sixty-one … At release! There were no DLCs back then. And each had a variety of techniques or outfits – even the damage model could differ from outfit to outfit. The attention to detail was grotesque.
If the new Tenkaichi is going to live up to that legacy, the roster would actually have to outdo anything that”s come before it, since Dragon Ball Super has introduced loads of new characters and some 44,000 new Super Sayajin variants since then.
Will this work? Let”s see. But I never thought I”d get another nostalgia blast like this after 16 years. Crazy world.
