Reviewed: November 26, 2006
Reviewed by: Daniel Sayre

Publisher
Atari

Developer
Spike

Released: November 7, 2006
Genre: Fighting
Players: 2
ESRB: Teen

9
8
9
10
9.6

Supported Features

Developed by Spike, a company best know for the Fire Pro Wrestling series, Tenchiki hits you with the entirety of the Dragon Ball Z experience and doesn't let up until you've been broken and defeated by concentrated doses of pure entertainment.

The fighter palette you are free to select from is quite possibly one of the largest in videogame history. There are around seventy-one distinct characters, but almost all of those have (at least) one other form, many with three to four leaving you with a total number of fighters numbering in the hundreds.

In a change from Tenkaichi 1, but returning from the Budokai series, is the ability to transform into a more powerful form during the fight. This can be both a blessing and a curse however. You have to have a certain number of Blast Stocks built up for the transformation to take place. They gradually build during the fight. However, the enemy can do quite a bit of damage before you have enough built up to trigger the transformation. The fact the blast stocks also power some of your attacks adds another layer of strategy to the game I'm glad to see return.

Just where will you be using these techniques and fighting abilities you ask? Well Tenkaichi has quite the wide variety of places to test your skills. The main draw of the single player is undoubtedly the Dragon Adventure section. Here you fight through practically the entire Dragon Ball Z saga and outfit your character with items that gain experience and in turn level up your character.

Now I say practically because there are a few things missing from the overall story. The main saga's (Saiyan, Frieze, Cell, and Buu) are there, as well as the Bebi Saga, Super 17 Saga, and Shadow Dragon Saga from Dragon Ball GT. However two of the Dragon Ball Z movies are left out, those being "The World's Strongest" and "Bio-Broly." The game also doesn't feature "Plan to Eradicate the Saiyans" but its place in the lore is quite nebulous to begin with (starting life as a VHS accompaniment to an NES game.)

Even with those omissions, the game story is still quite long. They are even three "What If" tales, presumably to replace three missing movies. However the stories don't follow exactly the narrative as presented in the anime. The main enemies usually lose two of their minions, having to do with a single minion or in some cases none at all. Dragon Adventure is still fun to play through but unless you follow the show, you'll be lost in some places as entire sections are glossed over or skipped entirely.

If the Dragon Ball Z story isn't your thing, there is both a tournament mode and ranking mode. The tournament allows you to participate in the World Tournament, as well as the Cell Games and the World Martial Arts Big Tournament where you can win both money and other items. The ranking mode is a little different. You fight through fifteen different columns (much like the old Mortal Kombat stage setup) to both increase your fighting level and get bonus capsules to use in further increasing your abilities.

There are also the standard dueling modes between two players, the computer against itself and anything in between. Rounding out the experience is a song station to listen to the all music in the game and a built in “Dragon Library” encyclopedia for the game that outlines the major storylines and playable characters. The only negligible errors I found were a couple translation errors, adding a word where it wasn’t needed and omitting another.

The stages also seem to have much more breakable scenery, be they buildings or boulders. They also look marginally better then in the past. They also appear quite expansive, but a blue "energy wall" surrounds the battlefields, which you often wind up hitting after one or two powerful hits that make the arenas seem pretty claustrophobic.

Everything about the graphics isn't stellar though. We lose a couple of the alternate character skins (Nail for Piccolo in particular) and the game is home to quite a few instances of model and texture recycling. While not really a detriment to the gameplay, it usually is to the story.

For example, the Namek overworld map serves are every alien world in the game, so the alien map you fly over is Namek during the Namek saga regardless of the timeframe (or place) the actual event is occurring. Bardock shouldn't be flying over Bulma's Spaceship, yet he is. Another example is the cityscape; it never changes. Earth before Raditz arrives looks exactly the same as Future Trunks post apocalyptic nightmare Earth.

Future Trunks himself is another anomaly. He is used for all adult Trunks appearances, including during the stories that take place during Dragon Ball GT, sword and all. This was presumably done to avoid having to make another Trunks skin for the GT portions and, after having done 100+, I can kind of see why they opted to simply reuse the model. It's still a disappointment though.

The sound effects during the fight consist mainly of punches kicks and energy blasts, which all accurately carried over from the television show. The music during the opening is great while most of the other music is simply recycled. The original Japanese voices can also be selected. This is a boon for those that either dislike the American voices or simply want the authentic Japanese experience.

There is also reply value with capsules you can collect to unlock more fighters and both the ranking mode and tournament mode are still there after you complete the Dragon Adventure portion. You’ll also have to collect many capsules to unlock all the available characters.