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You don't have to spend all your time in Dragon Adventure. There's ranked matches Mortal Kombat style, climbing up the tower for greater and greater challenges, with a sweet reward waiting at the end. There are also a series of tournaments to prove yourself the best fighter in the DBZ universe, at least among the characters you've managed to unlock. It'll even help you earn more cash for a z item shopping spree. Naturally, there's one on one fighting, either against a buddy, or the computer, or let two AIs fight it out just to see if your pimped out Radditz could really take down Broly in a fair fight. The AI in the game is actually pretty talented, and can pull some tactics that make it seem almost human. Passwords allow you to trade your custom characters with friends or anyone around the internet. There's also a practice mode to test your skills, but only having the option to set the AI makes it pretty limited.
There's a tutorial mode to instruct you on all the skills you need to be a Z fighter, but like much of the rest of the interface, it's handled in the most awkward way possible. This time you have to listen to Vegeta's spiel, choose your mission, wait for the loading screen, read through several pages of text explanations, and now try to do the tasks given to you. It does tell you when you've done something right, but without a check off list it's hard to tell if you've really gotten the skills down. Then there's more text explanations and another loading screen, leaving you back to hearing Vegeta babble on again. Budokai 3's tutor was hardly perfect, but it was better than this.
Presentation is as good as you can expect from the PS2 where cell-shaded graphics bring the characters looking near to their anime counterparts, including damage sustained when a battle isn't going their way. The locations are all bright and colorful, some with destroyed variants when you take your fighting too far. The areas are considerably larger than the first game, though they could stand to be a bit bigger still. Too often I was dashing to avoid an attack, only to smash head first into the grid-like barrier. Purists will be happy about the inclusion of a Japanese language track, which is rather impressive considering the sheer amount of voice acting involved.
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. The crazy number of characters combined with the frantic fighting engine results in the ultimate Dragon Ball Z experience. So it's a shame you have to endure endless loading screens, unskippable text messages, poor item management, and other tedium to get there.
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