It is finally time for Budokai Tenkaichi fans to graduate from mods and move on to a whole new game that will fully fulfill their needs.
After more than a decade of community mods, Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi has reached a new level of excitement as a new entry in the series is announced. This is totally beyond anything fans were looking forward to.
The first Budokai Tenkaichi was released on the PS2 in 2005, followed by two sequels on the PS2 and Wii in 2006 and 2007. These were 3D, arena-based fighting games with massive stages to brawl on and even bigger rosters to choose from. It wasn’t difficult to pit Goku against obscure characters like Spopovich in these games.
Dragon Ball fans loved the Budokai Tenkaichi series for its massive rosters and gloriously unbalanced battles, while Budokai Tenkaichi series received mostly mediocre reviews. It is true that the BT series has seen a few spin-offs, and the arena brawling style lives on in games like Xenoverse 2, but no other game provides the same feeling of smashing all your DBZ action figures against one another.
For most of the past decade, series fans have subsisted on mods for Budokai Tenkaichi 3. Typically, console games aren’t known for their modability, but this PS2 game has dozens – if not hundreds – of hacks that add everything from Dragon Ball Super characters to utterly bizarre crossovers with SpongeBob SquarePants.
Since Budokai Tenkaichi 3 has been mod-based for so long, series fans have depended on mods. Despite the fact that console games aren’t typically known for their moddability, there are hundreds of hacks for the PS2 game, adding everything from Dragon Ball Super characters to utterly bizarre crossovers.
While it remains to be seen if Budokai Tenkaichi can meet ten years of expectations – that’s a tall order for any game – for now, fans are simply choosing to live in the moment.
