Ever since the NES, the popularity of the Dragonball/DBZ series has brought a huge amount of games based on the series. Like all games based on TV shows, there have been some craptastic ones (DBZ budokai 1 and 2, for example), as well as some great ones (the card-based RPG on the SNES was quite good). Since DBZ: Shin Budokai was based on the DBZ budokai games on the PS2 and gamecube, I didn’t expect much of it. Actually, after playing DBZ Budokai 2, I didn’t even want to get close to DBZ B3. Then I heard some good stuff on DBZ: SB, so I decided I might as well try it out. And boy was I happy I did.

The game’s story is taken from one of the many DBZ movies. I find the beginning of the story mode (called dragon road) to be a bit stupid. It starts up about like this: “Goku: Hey Gohan, let’s go camping. Gohan: Okay, let’s fight just for the heck of it before!” Then Krillin comes to join Gohan and Goku. “Goku: Hey, Krillin, we’re going camping, wanna fight for no real reason? Krillin: Okay.” The beginning is like that for about half of the first chapter. After that the story picks up a bit (or at least it tries to…), when Pikkon comes to warn Goku that something weird it going on in heaven. Then enemies from the many sagas in the DBZ series and movies such as Frieza, Cell, Broly and Cooler come back to life and start fighting the Z warriors. Something about some guy called Jamemba who is letting out some weird evil energy which revives evil people and makes them near invincible. Then the last 4 chapters are just battles against the bad guys with no real purpose. Sometimes you also get control of the bad guys and fight the good ones. The story is actually not very impressive, and gives me no desire to watch the movie it’s based on.

Okay, so the story isn’t really good. But story isn’t all that important in fighting games anyways. Now on to the graphics. The game uses cel-shading, and the PSP seems to handle it really well. Acually, after looking at DBZ Budokai 3 (since I didn’t play that one) screenshots, they look almost identical. There are some minor differences because of the PSP screen which is smaller than a TV, but still, graphically it’s almost like playing the PS2 games. The characters look just like they do in the anime, so it’s a plus for fans of the series. Finally, the backgrounds look very well detailed. All in all the graphics here are really good, there isn’t much bad that can be said about them, other than the characters look slightly pixilated from close-up.

So now that pretty much everything technical has been talked about, it’s time to go to the gameplay. So basically it’s a fighting game that works like every other fighting game out there: You hit the opponent until his life bar (or in this case, bars) gets down to zero. This can be done by using a wide variety of attacks and combos. The controls are simple. X makes you guard, Square makes you do an attack, Triangle is a different attack and O are energy attacks. L charges your special bar and R performs aura burst, which modifies your next attack. During battle, each character starts with a number of life bars. In story mode it’s different for you and the opponent most of the time, while it’s always the same in arcade mode. The maximum number of life bars is 7. Although that may seem like a lot, most normal chains take off almost half a bar.

Attacks are conducted in chains, which require you to press a different combination of buttons. For example, pressing the Square button 4 times will do a different attack than pressing Square twice followed by triangle twice. Minor problem here is that most characters have the same button combinations for chains, so there’s not much variety here. There are also throw attacks which can be done up close when you press Square and X, which can go through blocks. Than there are energy attacks, which all require some of your special bar: 1 for special attacks, 5 for super attacks and less than 1 for small beams. They can’t be included in chains. Pressing the O button alone will shoot a small energy beam, pressing it a few times in a row will shoot more small energy beams. Pressing it with left or right will execute a special attack, which are somewhat unique to each character, other than some of the characters that all use Kamehameha for O+right. Finally, the last kind of attacks is super attacks. To execute them you must press O and Up. Those do a massive amount of damage, but tend to be hard to land.