If one were to conduct a survey of anime fans across the globe asking whether or not people liked the Dragonball series, it’s pretty likely that the results will be fifty-fifty. One group, the diehard “Ehh… it’s okay, I guess…” group, pretty much ignores anything and everything Dragonball-related that’s put out. The other group, whose motto is similar to “OMG!! DBZ r0x0rz teh big one!!11,” will, of course, scoop up anything and everything related to their favorite show—despite the fact that every single product for it to this day has, well, stunk. Dragonball Z: Budokai 3 does nothing to change that; in fact, if anything, it depends on that.

Dragonball Z: Budokai 3 (herein referred to as DBZ for the sake of brevity) begins innocently enough: we see the usual credits in the beginning, followed by a painfully lame anime opening sequence. Nothing new, nothing new. Then the real pain started.

To whoever thought inserting voice-overs into every facet of the game was a good idea, I have but one thing to say: what have I ever done to you to deserve this? Yes, every single part of the game features voices straight from the anime’s voice actors. Every time I booted up the game, Pan shouted in her little annoying voice something similar to “Do you want to start a new game or load a previously saved game?” After selecting “Continue,” Goku treated me to a monologue about each of the dozen or so options in the main menu. The first place I went to, naturally, was the Duel Mode so I could practice honing my mad skillz.

After listening to King Kai tell me in a loud, nasal voice that he wanted a “good, clean fight,” I highlighted the option to pit me against the computer. After listening to King Kai describe the mode I was about to enter, I traveled into the great unknown.

I saw in front of me a few familiar characters: Goku, Kid Gohan, Krillin, and some others, bringing the number of playable characters to an exciting total of eight. Fortunately, like most fighting games, as I played through the story mode I was able to unlock additional players. In fact, by the time I finished this game, I was left with a total of 38 surprisingly diverse characters. Anyway, since it was my first time playing I selected my favorite character from the anime: Tien. After selecting a computer opponent (Raditz), I moved on to the usual stage select screen, which featured voice-overs by a monkey that sounded like it was preoccupied with wiping its butt with its hand and sniffing it. Apparently, even King Kai was too good for the stage select screen, so we get a monkey sniffing its hand and picking its nose. Yay. But I digress…

Battles in DBZ are fairly similar and, at the same time, somewhat complicated. There exists in the battles an underlying depth that took me a couple of days to discover, and until then the battles were excruciatingly annoying. Every character has pretty much the same attacks. Square is punch, Triangle is kick, X is block, and Circle is the “energy button.” If you get to a certain energy level, you can go into what’s called Hyper Mode and perform even more powerful attacks, but more on that in a bit.

Much like the anime that this game is based off of, battles in DBZ boil down to standing around and powering up for some pretty ridiculous amounts of time. Want to transform into a more powerful form? Prepare to stand still and vulnerable while simultaneously charging up and praying that nobody attacks you while you’re completely open. Thankfully, the AI in the game almost always starts charging up as soon as you do, so getting in a little bit of power can be a breeze sometimes.

After charging up for what seems to be an eternity, you’re ready to do some actual attacks (or, if the other player charged up faster than you, lots and lots of defending and running away). The attacks are fairly easy to learn, since nearly every character has the exact same move list. Although there were tons of players at the end of the game, which I have to say was a nice touch, the utter lack of variety between them made each character just a carbon copy of everyone else. Some of them did mix things up a bit—Goku and some others can transform, while others like Kid Gohan simply have less moves than everyone else—but most of the time you can change from one character to another without any thought whatsoever. Also, as mentioned earlier, you can go into a truly terrifying state called Hyper Mode, which lets you dish out some really powerful attacks. Unfortunately, by “really powerful attacks,” I mean attacks that can take somewhere along the lines of thirty seconds to actually do something significant. One such attack, the Dragon Rush, cannot be stopped unless you’re unbelievably lucky. Stopping the attack requires you to correctly guess a random button on your controller. You have three chances to guess the correct button (and each time you get it wrong, the random button changes), and, if you’re as unlucky as I am, you could potentially be killed in one shot by getting all three wrong.

Anyway, after going through a couple of battles, I decided I’d had enough and traveled to the much-hyped Dragon Universe mode, which is basically a sugar-coated way of saying “Story Mode.” After getting another speech by Goku in which he said my choice “Sounds Exciting!” I ventured yet again to meet my fate.

Since Tien is, and always has been, the only character from DBZ that I ever liked, I immediately chose his Z-Story. After one of the most annoying load screens I’ve ever seen, I was treated to a prologue did absolutely nothing to either set up the story or setting (it was, of course, voice acted like every other aspect of the game). After another loading screen, which appeared to happen every five seconds of the Dragon Universe mode, I was put right into the real story.

The first thing I noticed was that instead of having actual anime scenes straight from the show, I was treated to having really angry-looking still images of all the characters. After a bit of button mashing to get through the discussion, I heard a *doink * noise come from somewhere that supposedly represented one of the characters tripping. I subsequently scratched my head and uttered the immaculate phrase, “WTF?!” Strangely enough, most of the story mode does NOT have voice-overs, even though the most obscure areas of the main menu all do. Of course, even though I might be treated to minute after minute of total silence (other than the generic *doink * noise), I at least got to watch and hear a monkey sniff its hand and pick its nose when trying to select a battle arena in Duel Mode.

Fifteen minutes later I beat Tien’s Z-Story, collected lots of Zenie (the game’s currency) and even earned a couple of Z-Levels.

Unfortunately, although I had done all of those things, I had no idea what was going on in the game. Things just randomly happened, and even though I beat some of the opponents rather easily, due to story restrictions I actually lost each and every one of them. No story was ever explained to me aside from the cardboard-cutout-with-random-noise discussions, an even those were mostly just filled with the characters either powering up or insulting each other. Even the more important characters, such as Goku (whose Z-Story took me about two hours to complete), showed no attempt to explain what was happening on screen. Why was I fighting these bad guys? Oh, right… it happened in the show. The problem here is that by taking out key plot points, anyone who doesn't have the series committed to memory will be completely confused and those who do will be disappointed and frustrated.

After finishing all eleven Z-Stories and amassing an extensive collection of Z-Swords for my Z-Fighters, another mode opened up called the Dragon Arena. The purpose of Dragon Arena? Why, to level up characters of course! Even though leveling up characters serves absolutely no purpose since one has to finish the Dragon Universe mode several times in order to unlock it and most of the characters in the arena can’t even be used in the DU mode, I still felt compelled to level. Unfortunately, I was soon hit with another barrier.

Apparently I didn’t have enough Zenie (sort of like Z-Dollars—or for those of you in Europe, Z-Euros) to buy Z-Skills for my Z-Fighters, so I had to enter the frustratingly difficult World Tournament mode, where one can lose a good twenty minutes of work simply by being knocked back by an opponent. Anyway, about ten losses and a broken controller later, I had enough Zenie to buy some equipment and abilities for the fighter I chose to use in the tournament. One hour later, I was sick of it.

I tried to vent my frustration by going back into the oh-so-familiar Dragon Universe mode due to it being easy enough for a three-year-old to play. While trudging through scene after scene of silence, I thought to myself, “Hey, maybe it would be a good idea to watch the show again and be able to understand what’s going on.” After coming back to reality and realizing what I was thinking, I vomited in my own mouth.