The Tenkaichi franchise worked on gameplay as much as the Budokai franchise did. Just compare Tenkaichi 1 and Tenkaichi 2 or Tenkaichi 3. Tenkaichi 2 was a big upgrade on the gameplay while Tenkaichi 3 refined a lot of things, and also add a lot of new things to the engine. I don't think it's fair saying that they only added new characters when obviously the gameplay improved quite a lot as well.saiyanvegetable wrote: It's worked because over the last decade it's sold copies to people who for some reason aren't tired of playing the same character with a different skin. It's not as if Xenoverse's gameplay is outright bad, but if they spent more time on it without worrying about extra fluff it could really be special. Whereas Budokai 1-3 focused on improving the gameplay with each title and the culmination of that gave us probably the best DBZ game ever with Budokai 3, the Tenkaichi franchise was more about "wow! You can play as garlic jr and pan and that robot from one time and a saibaman and look! more forms! more characters!" The fanbase ate it up while people like me were left muttering under our breath.
Budokai not only improved the gameplay, they also added tons of characters. And they are not that different from each other.
In the end, both DIMPS and SPIKE worked quite well during the PS2 era. They added fanservice as well as gameplay. In my opinion Spike downgraded their engine on the PS3 era, specially with Ultimate tenkaichi. DIMPS tried a somewhat different approach with Xenoverse, but it really needs a lot of work still.
I personally prefer the Tenkaichi 3D fighting to the 2D fighting, but I'm not against 2D games at all. Hyperdimension for the SNES was a great 2D DBZ game.
