“From the Past Friday” is a weekly column in which we trot out some hilarity from our collective fandom past. Sometimes it’s funny marketing materials, sometimes it’s name spelling curiosities, and sometimes it might just be a neat little trinket we still have kicking around all these decades later.

Earlier this month in our Patreon Discord chat, a conversation about Chi-Chi becoming playable in Sparking! ZERO‘s latest “NEO” DLC update resurfaced some specific memories of her on the menu screen in “Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2” (the international release of Dragon Ball Z: Sparking! NEO) saying a fairly questionable line. Long-time supporter TechnoSyndro noted that they always wondered what the Japanese voice actress was saying there…

…so we took it upon ourselves to find out!

This particular half-generation of games actually is a bit of a blind-spot to me when it comes to the localized releases. Having been such a fan of “Budokai 3” before it and wishing I could play it in Japanese, and then hearing that the Sparking! games were going to lose their newly-synthezied Shunsuke Kikuchi compositions in favor of recycled replacement music for their “Budokai Tenkaichi” incarnations (at least for the first game; the second and third received entirely bespoke replacement scores), I chose to forgo them entirely by instead picking up an actual Japanese PlayStation 2 and importing the Japanese versions of the games. People talk about “Lost Courage” like it’s this incredible mystical tent pole of their entire existence, and all I can do is shrug! (On the flip-side: I had “Solid State Scouter” and I didn’t need to buy a separate music pack to get it!)

That’s all to say: while I have English dubbed Lunch’s “Well hello!” from “Budokai 3” permanently etched in my soul, the Chi-Chi line in question was new to me. Let’s set the stage here:

On the audio menu screen of “Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2,” when selecting the audio option to change the characters’ spoken language between English and Japanese, English dubbed Chi-Chi says (and is also written out on the screen): “You can switch to the original Japanese voices. But that wouldn’t do you much good!”

It’s “funny,” but it’s also… strangely antagonistic? It’s the usual punch-up scripting that was always happening in the English dub (and, sadly, something we still can’t seem to escape today with Dragon Ball video game localization), but there’s something a little “extra” about it.

So with that in mind, let’s cruise through the entire “Budokai Tenkaichi” series and see what they all say… in English and in Japanese!

Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 1

The first game keeps things pretty basic:

English dubbed Bulma (Tiffany Vollmer) says:

You can set the voices to Japanese.

Japanese Bulma (Hiromi Tsuru) says:

ボイスを日本語に設定できるわよ。

---

Boisu o nihongo ni settei dekiru wa yo.

---

You can set the voices to Japanese.

The Japanese dialogue is pretty straight-forward, with the only quirk just being that よ particle at the end to emphasize things. The English dialogue is more or less right in line with that. What’s perhaps only really notable here is that the dialogue is not about switching between languages, but specifically that you can change it to Japanese.

Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2

So here’s the big one:

English dubbed Chi-Chi (Cynthia Cranz) says:

You can switch to the original Japanese voices. But that wouldn’t do you much good!

Japanese Chi-Chi (Naoko Watanabe) says:

ボイスを日本語に設定できるだ。

---

Boisu o nihongo ni settei dekiru da.

---

You can set the voices to Japanese.

So right off the bat, we can see that the added line of “But that wouldn’t do you much good!” doesn’t exist, in any form at all, in the original Japanese — it solely exists as flourish in the dubbed dialogue.

Chi-Chi’s line in Japanese is effectively the same as Bulma’s was for the first game, just with her own little dialect spin on it with the だ at the end.

Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3

The third game brings things back around to just being matter-of-fact:

English dubbed Dende (Laura Bailey) says:

You can change the dialogue to English or Japanese.

Japanese Dende (Hiro Yuuki) says:

英語と日本語のボイスを切り替えることができますよ

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Eigo to nihongo no boisu o kirikaeru koto ga dekimasu yo.

---

You can switch between English and Japanese voices.

Dende speaks politely in Japanese, but the real notable fact here is that we finally acknowledge that this menu option isn’t just about switching to the Japanese voices, but switching back and forth between the available English and Japanese voices — not really a big deal, but much more accurately descriptive of its function.

The Japanese Versions of the Games

There isn’t much to report here: the Japanese versions of the games (which, unlike the “Budokai” games from Dimps before them, released in Japan first) do not have selectable English voices, so this menu option simply doesn’t exist.

The Other PS2 Games

We could go down a whole rabbit hole of every single other Dragon Ball video game with a bilingual release to compare dialogue, but we’ll wrap things up with a peek at just the other relevant PlayStation 2 entries.

Dragon Ball Z 3 released internationally as “Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 3” in 2004 and was a massive success by all metrics. Coming off that American launch with a fairly decadent “Limited Edition” (complete with a box, bonus DVD, mini-manga, and chibi figure), the game received a “Greatest Hits” re-issue in December 2005 (so just a couple months after the release of the first “Budokai Tenkaichi”), and though it had a bit of a botched rollout where the correct version wasn’t included, once fans did get the correct version, they were able to select and switch between the English and Japanese voices for the game. Since by this point the “finished” Japanese edition had already released, and there was no reason for the Japanese voice actor to record something about switching languages, this option simply has no voiced line in the American “Greatest Hits” edition.

Releasing after Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, we conclude in 2008 with Dragon Ball Z: Infinite World for the PlayStation 2. There isn’t much to say about this one — the menus are not voiced, so there is no dialogue to compare! Like the Japanese versions of the Sparking! games, Infinite World‘s Japanese version likewise does not include selectable English voices to swap to, so this menu option simply doesn’t exist.

And just in case anyone tries to slide these in: Dragon Ball Z: Sagas obviously does not have language options as a western-only game, Dragon Ball Z 2 V doesn’t have language options as a Japanese-only game (and a special prize/mail-in game at that!), and the PS2 version of Battle Stadium D.O.N. likewise doesn’t have any language options as a Japanese-only game.

What Do We Do With This Cursed Knowledge?

The Chi-Chi line from “Budokai Tenkaichi 2” is funny in a vacuum, a little aggro if you think too long and hard about it, and is thankfully the only example of this kind of thing from that era of ga-

That was the mid-aughts, and here we are today in 2026 where Dragon Ball still seems to be one of those franchises that can’t escape its past treatment when it comes to the English language. Although the modern video games almost all ship globally with both English and Japanese voices these days, there is no separate subtitle track corresponding to the Japanese dialogue — instead, there remains a single subtitle track which mirrors just the (punched-up) English dubbed dialogue.

It’s not in a good place, and hasn’t been for a while.

And it’s not just the video games (even if that’s the main topic here) — it’s the actual show itself, too. The counterargument so often is that Kai and Super were “better” and are “fine” now, so “stop complaining”… but that’s also not the case. We are long overdue for a revisited, larger fandom conversation about the actual state of accuracy and legacy cruft that FUNimation’s English dub and its modern successors still inflict upon this franchise, and what the current batch of re-writers are perpetuating, intentionally or otherwise.

Unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible to be taken seriously when raising this concern due to: (1) talking about translation accuracy related to a children’s cartoon; (2) trying to explain the “death by a thousand cuts” reasoning when any given single example can be easily (and/or even rightfully) dismissed as insignificant; (3) just how long we’ve been having that same discussion already anyway, and how tiring it is from all ends; (4) a significant portion of the English dub fanbase liking and preferring the punch-up scripts; (5) the amount of damage machine- and AI-translations have done to the perception of “accurate” and “faithful” localizations; and (last but certainly not least) (6) all of this being overshadowed by the modern outrage machine and bad faith actors — those who desperately want to tell you about that one line in Dragon Maid and who have co-opted the language of legitimate complaints and concerns about English translation in anime and manga.

Dragon Ball was already fun, and it was already funny. We didn’t need people rewriting it in 1996, and we don’t need people rewriting it in 2026.