Dragonball Z finally arrives on the current gen consoles, but is it a kamehameha! Or a kamehamehuh?

When creating games based on already established franchises, there is only so much that you can do with the series before you have to completely reinvent the gameplay in order for things to remain fresh. This is what happened with the Dragonball Z Budokai series. After finally perfecting the fighting system with Dragonball Z Budokai 3, the decision was made to switch developers, create an entirely different fighting system, slap on an extra Japanese word to the end of the title, and the Budokai Tenkaichi series was born. After three iterations of the Tenkaichi series, one would assume the next logical step would be to find a new developer and see what they can do to spice up the franchise, right?

Not quite. You see, despite Dragonball Z Burst Limit being completely devoid of any Japanese words, the fact is that this is basically Dragonball Z Budokai 4. It has the same developer, the same basic fighting system, and the many of the same frustrations that plagued the first two Budokai games.

Being the first of what is sure to blossom into a series of games, Burst Limit takes a couple of steps back from previous DBZ games to focus only on a small aspect of the story. It has to leave room to expand for future sequels after all. The game’s main story mode covers the first three sagas of the Dragonball Z universe, including the Saiyan Saga, the Frieza Saga, and the Cell/Android Saga. While this wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if it meant that the game could focus on the entirety of those three story arcs, the story mode in Burst Limit skips over many important fights and aspects of the Dragonball Z storyline. Characters disappear and reappear without any explanation of what happened to them, backstories explaining the motives of the villains and even the heroes are completely omitted, and entire sections of story are missing from each of the arcs.

The story that is present is told through quick cut scenes that take place before and after every fight. These cut scenes use the in-game engine and are very impressive to watch as they perfectly mimic the high speed action scenes that you would find in the actual anime. The only gripe to be said about these cut scenes is that they reuse the same animations with different characters far too often. You’ll frequently see the same animation of a character getting punched in the stomach, the same fight animations, and the same character entrances throughout all 21 fighters. It’s not a huge problem, but like many other aspects of Burst Limit, it’s disappointing.

On the gameplay side of things, the fighting system is largely the same as it was in the first three Budokai games. You have two melee attack buttons, one button for ranged attacks, a button to block and evade, and several buttons that take care of transformations and other kinds of power ups. While this may have worked for Budokai 3, for some reason it doesn’t work nearly as well here. Much of that is because the combat is much slower than it was in Budokai 3 and definitely way too slow for a Dragonball Z game. You still have the ability to teleport behind your enemy and smash them with a counter attack by pressing block and forward right before your opponent hits you, but that’s about as interesting as things get. You only have two special moves, one ultimate attack, and very limited melee combo options. What this equates to is lots of button mashing or special attack spamming since your ki meter recharges so fast.