Dragon Ball Z: Budokai HD Collection review

Dragon Ball Z: Budokai HD Collection is composed of Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 1 and Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 3; remastered in full HD with new achievement support. Even though Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 2 has been omitted from this collection, the 2-in-1 pack is still definitely a love-letter to all the DBZ fans out there.

Budokai, the first in the series, allows you to play in four fighting modes: Story, Duel, World Match and Legend of Hercule. Story mode lets you select and play with 23 characters from the Dragon Ball Z universe. Budokai 3 however makes you see how far the series has come. With better graphics, 42 characters to fight with, more playable modes, and a longer story mode, this game is probably the game you would stick with when you do play.

Story mode of Budokai consists of 3D cut scenes from the series more closely resembling the anime show. Unfortunately, the story only leads up to the Cell Saga. Once a saga is finished, additional content is unlocked like the bonus “what if” episodes, that show what would have happened if the villain won.

Skills can be acquired by finishing levels in story mode or they can be bought from a skill shop with money earned from combat. This allows for customization of any of the available characters to modify a character to suit your play style.

Story mode of Budokai 3 consists of an open-ended map – which you explore to hunt for Dragon Balls and encounter random enemies.

Doing tasks in the world map also levels up your characters and allows you to find new items and unlock moves you can use in battle.

The story of Budokai 3 stretches to the end of the Dragon Ball GT saga and can be played with 11 different characters, each telling the story from their perspective, and this addition adds quite a few hours of game play to the game.

When a character has leveled up, a skill point is awarded to the character to invest in an attribute such as Health, Ki and Attack. Certain choices made in the Dragon Ball Universe can even allow you to fight different enemies, for example: Cooler, Freeza’s brother, instead of Freeza himself on the planet Namek.

Combat in the Budokai universe still happens in 2.5D and still operates like the first games did on PS2. In some cases, especially Budokai, it is unfortunate as the controls feel stiff and it is hard to pull off combos and have attacks flow into each other.

Pulling off combos or special abilities are made even harder and frustrating as combos are executed by pressing a specific sequence of keys, and it is impossible to remember every single move in the list, especially when it involves a myriad of button patterns.

On the other hand, Budokai 3 has many improvements to the combat, as well as the controls. Special abilities can be triggered at any time, instead of breaking your thumbs as you mash button combinations. The controls of Budokai and Budokai 3 are very similar, which makes it extremely easy to jump between the two games.

The graphics of Budokai, even with the remastered HD graphics, don’t look great and it really shows how the game has aged. Luckily, Budokai 3 makes up for that with crisp graphics and smooth gameplay. Occasionally, you will find some minor graphical issues, especially with some of the textures, but it is something that can easily be ignored.

The soundtracks of both games are entirely new, with the original Japanese voice acting available for everyone who used to watch the series in Japanese.

The Dragon Ball Z: Budokai HD Collection is a good choice for anyone who has not been exposed to the series before, as well as any veteran fan of the DBZ series. With multiples modes to play, crisper graphics and trophy support, it is really worth the while to play these games once more.