There is a Dragon Ball Z 2
The name Dragon Ball Z 2 had been floating around on message boards and Japanese sites for a few months back in 2003, thoroughly confusing fans. One could even find it on such fine retailer sites as Amazon Japan! If such reputable sites were mentioning and offering such an item, there must be a new series, right?!
At the time, the name “Dragon Ball Z 2” was actually that of a PlayStation 2 video game, but we have to go a decade prior to find the first “Dragon Ball Z 2″…!
The original “Dragon Ball Z 2” is actually the 1991 Nintendo Famicom video game, Dragon Ball Z II: The Violent God, Freeza!! (ドラゴンボールZ II 激神フリーザ!!). The direct sequel to the prior year’s debut “Z”-branded video game Dragon Ball Z: Assault! The Saiyans (also on the Nintendo Famicom), The Violent God, Freeza!! takes the player from just after the defeat of Nappa and Vegeta on Earth all the way through the battle with Freeza on Planet Namek. Battles in the game are played out through a series of card selections, and a particularly memorable mini game has the player choosing numbers while Goku trains with the gravity machine on his spaceship en route to Namek.
A second “Dragon Ball Z 2” video game came in 1994 with the release of the series’ second arcade fighting game, Dragon Ball Z 2: Super Battle (ドラゴンボールZ2 SUPER BATTLE). This game was a fairly standard 2D, sprite-based, traditional fighting game with Street Fighter-esque controls. Despite it and its predecessor being incredibly detailed, attractive, well-playing games, they surprisingly never received a home release, with the Super Butōden series instead reigning on the Super Famicom.
This brings us back around again to the 2000s! While most international (non-Japanese) fans of the era are likely intimately familiar with the Budokai series of fighting games developed by Dimps on the PlayStation 2 (with a couple appearances on the Nintendo Gamecube)… these games aren’t actually called “Budokai” in Japan: they are just branded as a series under the “Dragon Ball Z” name!
As such, Dragon Ball Z 2 is simply the original Japanese title of Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 2.
Interestingly enough, when Dimps and Bandai (the Japanese developer and distributor) would move on to the PSP continuation of the series, they adopted the American Budokai naming convention with the Shin Budokai series, even in Japan!