Dragonball Z Shin Budokai 2 Longplay (2024) PSP 4K HD
1Dragonball Z Shin Budokai 2 Longplay (2024) PSP 4K HD
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Miller The Official Gaming
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*****
What IGN says
We won't lie to you - we stopped watching Dragon Ball Z a long time ago. We're talking years ago, now. Apparently we're in the minority though, judging by the influx of Dragon Ball Z titles that have been pouring out of Japan like so much rice wine. Shin Budokai 2 returns to the fighting arenas and open landmasses of the first, and the PSP experience is surprisingly enjoyable, but pretty derivative.
To be honest, Shin Budokai 2 is hardly a true sequel - there is a new story to play through, simply titled 'Another Road', which pits Trunks against the nefarious Dabura, the pink, horned freak with giant ears and a dastardly goatee, and eventually Majin Buu. The story branches out based on which foe you defeat and what choices you make along the way - which cities you save and how well you perform.
At its core, combat is the focus of the game. Adventuring is just a means to an end - games like this live and die by their fighting engine. Happily, Budokai 2 takes the first game's move-sets and ups the responsiveness and flexibility. Basically, each character has a base set of moves, and these can be customised on the Boosters screen. By customising and increasing your powers, you're a little less likely to have your backside handed to you in battle - as we found after clearing the first few stages.
In terms of combat in the game, there are 50 new moves to be unlocked this time around, which might just be enough new potential for combos to make investment worthwhile for owners of the original. Also new to the game is the Z-Trial mode, where you can take part in time trials, challenge modes and survival modes. By working your way through these, you can accumulate a bit of scratch and buy new costumes, upgrades, stages and all that jazz.
There are nine Booster slots, so you can have up to nine of them in place at any one time. Of course, you only start off with five - you must unlock the rest at the Booster Shop, by choosing 'Unlock Slot'.
There are three kinds of Boosters, each ranked from one to nine in terms of strength - Normal, Power-Up and Ultimate varieties. Basically, they work like playing cards - each has a listed ability, displays what area of your status is affected by equipping it and each is numbered out of the total number of Booster cards you can collect. Still with me there? Good.
Combat is actually a lot of fun - the buttery framerate, generally set at 60 frames per second, helps immensely. While the environments and arenas are generally geometrically simple, the cel shading is well done. It suffers from the PSP's lower resolution, highlighting a lot of jaggies, but the character models and movements are excellent and the game generally retains a lot of the charm of the show. The overworld of Namek, on the other hand, is ugly and blocky. Again, this was probably a trade-off for the framerate, but it's still pretty dated looking.
However, despite the somewhat simplistic graphics, the camera system is much improved. The camera view has been pushed back farther and zooms and swings a little more logically. Rarely if ever did we ever mess up an attack because we couldn't get the right default angle for the camera during a heated moment.
While traversing the main overworld, from encounter to encounter, the on-screen indicators and interface is a little clunky - they take up a good portion of screen real estate. Thankfully, these can be toggled on or off by tapping Triangle.
There's a lot of loading between cutscenes and encounters. Sometimes you'll only have a couple lines of dialogue between each load screen, too. This starts to wear a little thin after a while. It's not necessarily the game's fault - the PSP is a loading and caching nightmare - and to the game's credit, you can bash any of the face buttons for a different punch or kick sound effect. Blessed pointless distractions.
There are now 24 playable characters (including transformations and alternates), up from 18 in the previous game. This is pure fan service - we kind of don't appreciate the subtle differences between all the different future and alternate forms - but that's okay. We're guessing true fans will eat it up.
One of our main sticking points is the lack of consistent production values. Cutscenes are little more than two still character shots and a text box. The story is glossed over and simplified to the point where something as significant as a whole town being obliterated is reduced to one bland sentence. Show me, don't tell me. Give us an image, a bit of drama!