Daimo-Rukiri wrote: ↑Wed Sep 11, 2019 10:00 am
As fighting games? Their awful.
If you're just playing the story mode their okay but combat is meh.
Even their story modes are bad. Budokai 1 had the best presentation, but considering that was the start of the 3D Z games, that only means it was downhill from there.
Ever since I left the Sonic fandom, I've learned to never look at a licensed game/franchise solely from the perspective of a fan because what's acceptable for a franchise may actually be pisspoor for video games in general.
And that's the case for Budokai 1, overwhelmingly. I played Budokai 1 a while back, and then I returned it because it was one of the most barebones and uninteresting fighting games I'd ever played. When I say "a while back", I mean I bought it on Amazon in 2015. Then I pawned it the next year for about fifty cents. I derived no enjoyment from that game besides the Rock the Dragon intros, and to this day I have no interest in going back.
If I were a Dragon Ball Z fan in 2002, that would've been my shit. I remember seeing screens for that game in some old magazines and thinking "This looks awesome!" even though the reviews kept complaining about how there was no jump button. Just being able to turn Super Saiyan in a video game was enough to sell me on the concept. Thing is, I had also played games like Soul Calibur, Virtua Fighter, and Street Fighter 2 & 3 (Super Turbo and I don't even remember which version of SF3; probably Third Strike if the sprite work is anything to go off). Since I was a snotnosed kid, I didn't know any better and would've played Budokai just as much as any of them.
As a snotnosed adult, I can honestly say that Dragon Ball Z: Budokai is borderline shovelware compared to any of those other fighting games. Budokai 3's pretty good from a general perspective and fantastic from a DBZ fan's perspective. But there's no reason to return to Budokai 1 except for the nostalgia factor. I have nostalgia for Sonic 2006 since it was my first 7th gen game, but I'm not going to condone experiencing it except in the same vein as experiencing
The Room or
Ride To Hell: Retribution. I have nostalgia for an obscure PS1 game called "Fighting Force 2", and there's absolutely no reason to play it whatsoever. It's fine to have nostalgia for bad games.
Budokai 3, Infinite World, and YouTube exist, rendering Budokai 1 completely obsolete.
Budokai Tenkaichi/Sparking! is a game that was finding its root and I remember buying it over Budokai Tenkaichi 3/Sparking! Meteor because I saw it first. I still have never bought BT3 because the price for a PS2 copy was asinine. But I ought to just to have it.
I sunk hundreds of hours into BT2 and couldn't even bother to complete half of the story mode for BT1. It's not quite as big of a leap in quality as Legacy of Goku 1 to 2, but the whole feel of the game definitely improved. As a result, unless you like playing a slower, jankier game with fewer characters and fewer moves between those characters, there's not much reason to play BT1.
Even critically, Budokai Tenkaichi 2 got good scores. Just in the past month,
I learned X-Play even gave it a 4/5, and I recall they spent the 2000s trashing everything related to Dragon Ball Z. I watched so much of that show back then and never knew they reviewed BT2. Just that Dragon Ball Z was basically shorthand for "bad anime games" on the show. If even
they considered it a good game, it's probably worth something.
I mean, it's not like you're missing out on any important story details or losing the opportunity to play as a certain character.