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There have been a lot of Dragon Ball Z games over the years, and the latest crop have had a quality that went beyond just shilling for the license. Budokai 3 had a deep combat system with a load of chains, tactics, and mind tricks to play on your opponent. Super DBZ was all about positioning with some Street Fighter style fury. Yet none of these games had really captured the feeling of being an unstoppable saiyan, hurling energy blasts while soaring through the air in order to save the world, and probably end up blowing it up in the process. Until BT2.
The first Tenkaichi was a lot of zooming through the air, free as a ki-powered martial arts master, but it was a little shallow when it came to fighting mechanics. The sequel takes a number of cues from Budokai 3, along with some ideas of its own, to fix that. Various punching and kicking chains are your bread and butter combos, being able to charge up both to stun, guard break, or send enemies hurling into a mountain. Once they're lying flat, you can power up, and unleash one of five special moves of varying intensity (appropriately suited to each character), from a homing attack to a world-destroying spirit bomb.
A quick thinking opponent can avoid all of these though, by striking fast enough to flub your move, dragon dashing away at high speeds to dodge the blast, or launching a big blast of their own to trigger a beam battle. Of course, simple energy blasts can be tossed around at will, and even charged up for an extra punch. These can be deflected though, even right back to their source. There's blocking, dashing, side-stepping, and teleporting for keeping you out of trouble, but this is a game that favors the aggressor, so turtle masters beware. If your name isn't Master Roshi, you're going to need to hit fast and hard to survive.
Once you're in the middle of a earth-shaking melee, teleporting to avoid a hard sweep and following it up with a massive energy blast, this game is gold.
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There's even in-game transformations this time around, but its going to be a long while before you can make free use of that (and even longer for fusions). Nearly everything in the game is unlocked through the story mode, Dragon Adventure, which covers the entire DBZ saga from the arrival of the saiyans right through GT. While it's fantastic to relive some of the best fights from the anime, the developers made some odd choices bringing this to life.
Like in Budokai 3, most of the time you'll fly around a map of Earth or Namek to choose story or optional encounters. The problem is some of these side events are nothing more than a character giving a bit of obvious advice, which you'll have to endure two loading screens to get. Three if there's a fight involved, and since there's no way to manually save, if you win here but lose the story event, you'll have to do this one all over again. The story itself is a bit odd. Some truly minor fights have been fleshed out to stick in more battles, while others are quickly glossed over, and too many times you'll kick the enemy to the moon, and the cut-scene following has your character lying near dead on the ground. The determination to cover everything results in plodding pace as well. Did we really need a half dozen fights from the Tree of Might storyline? I had forgotten the thing had ever existed.
While the fighting engine is excellent, there's some bad design choices in getting to those battles. Just starting up the game there's a half dozen company logos to pass by, hit continue, choose Dragon Adventure, skip the intro, skip by Goku's rant by rapidly tapping the X button, choose your saga, choose your mission, another Goku rant, choose difficulty, skip the story recap, and now to your first loading screen. Then you have to equip your Z items. Characters don't level in this game, which is wise considering the size of the Tenkaichi cast. Instead, experience is gained on what items they equip. Only for every item you'll have to scroll through a huge long list to hunt it down, making sure to confirm your selection when you're through. Worse is if you equipped an item you don't have access to. Say you gave Yamcha a pretty good item for a single fight, and want to give it to Goku now that Yammy has dropped out of the story. First, you'll have to exit Dragon Adventure, go to the Z items option on the main menu, unequip it from Yamcha, put it on Goku, and endure all the usual garbage again to pop back to where you were in Dragon Adventure. It's a big waste of time.
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