After over a decade of poorly realized Dragon Ball Z fighting games, Atari and little-known developer DIMPS surprised many people in 2002 when it released Dragon Ball Z: Budokai for the PlayStation 2. Amazingly, it wasn't half bad. Atari churned out a sequel a year later, and though it made some improvements to the graphics, the single-player game wasn't nearly as compelling and the package suffered for it. Now, a full year after it appeared on the PlayStation 2, Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 2 has arrived for the GameCube. A few modest improvements have been made in porting Budokai 2 to the GameCube, but the game just feels late, and a little irrelevant.
A month after Budokai 3 hits the PS2, its significantly inferior predecessor arrives on the GameCube.
Like the original, Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 2 is a simple, straightforward fighting game that values accessibility over depth. The crown jewel of the original was a fun, fast-paced story mode that reenacted many of the most memorable moments from DBZ, and the absence of such a mode in Budokai 2 is its biggest flaw. In place of Budokai's story mode, Budokai 2 features the new dragon world mode, which is essentially a board game where you control a team of Dragon Ball Z heroes as they move around on a series of maps while fighting bad guys and collecting dragon balls. The story for the dragon world mode takes some liberties with the Dragon Ball Z continuity by fashioning a tale that has many of the series' different villains teaming up to collect the dragon balls. Unfortunately, after a few levels the overlying story just sort of derails. The fundamental problem with the dragon world mode is that there's really no point to it. Your sole objective, on most maps, is to find the bad guys and fight them; however, the board game format doesn't bring a lot of strategy to the table. Also, in most cases you have to fight the same enemy several times before he is permanently vanquished, which just isn't any fun.
Unfortunately, if you want to get the most out of Budokai 2's multiplayer game, you really need to play through the dragon world mode, as it's the only way to unlock many of the game's characters and stages. Beyond the dragon world mode, Budokai 2 offers a duel mode (where you can fight against the CPU or another player in a one-off match), a single-player, ladder-style world tournament mode, and a training mode. Whether you're already familiar with Budokai or not, the training mode is worth going through, as it explains the mechanics that are new to Budokai 2 and explains those that make the series different from other 3D fighters.
