In the last few months a bunch of HD remakes have come out, specifically series’ like Devil May Cry HD, Silent Hill HD, and also Metal Gear Solid HD, just to name a few. One that did not get a lot of attention, but is still worth your time, is the Dragon Ball Z Budokai HD collection. Even though the game only has two of the three Budokai games in it, the one that I would like to mention is Dragon Ball Z Budokai 3.
Budokai 3 is the first Dragon Ball Z game where all of the shows (Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, and Dragon Ball GT) were placed into one game. The game also introduces a new combat system called Dragon Rush Mode, which powers up the character, consuming a large amount of Ki (the game’s equivalent of energy) that allows you to: one, knock your enemy into a quicktime event where you fill a bar and whoever fills it up fastest wins. This allows you to do your special move or take significantly less damage if you’re on the receiving end. The second quicktime event is where you and the enemy battle by guessing which button you are going to press and the winner gets to do their secondary special attack.
This new combat system added more of a competitiveness with friends and added something fresh to each fight, since a lot of it is based on randoms. The HD collection adds some nice visual buffs to both games in the set, but more so in Budokai 3. The overall skin textures are cleaned up nicely along with the cutscenes during final attacks. The maps also got touched up in making many of the arenas brighter and more colorful. In Dragon Universe, when flying around the visuals stand out more and are less pixelated compared to the PlayStation 2 version. The only major thing that effects this collection badly is that due to licensing issues the original music was removed and replaced with a lower tempo copy. Also there was censorship added in the character Broly on his final attack.
Overall the Dragon Ball Z Budokai HD collection is an amazing collection that creates a template for games in the Dragon Ball Z genre to follow. If you have lost faith in the Dragon Ball Z fighting game series, then this HD collection might remind you of why you loved the series in the first place.
