Makes no effort in maturing the franchise. the game insists on giving every menu option a needless dragonball theme to it, and ends up explaining in detail every menu option through annoying unskippable voice overs. even when the name of the option is extremely self explanatory there's a voice over explaining exactly what "duel" means. the character select screen divides the numerous characters into different unspecified groups you have to cycle through, and some of the main character's transformed states end up being in an entirely different group and locked off from the original characters in game transformation ability. some of the character's alternate costumes are lacking in originality(compared to their default costume) and whats worse is that the game simply labels the different costumes by number requiring the player to guess, memorize, or look up online, if he wants to select a specific costume. the ability to "customize" characters rarely exceeds boosting individual attributes of the character, like speed or health. furthermore the large list of items used to modify these attributes offer no useful explanation as to what the attributes actually effect. The menu dosn't categorize the items sufficiently, leaving the player to scroll through endless lists searching for a specific item. AI is extremely bland and uncooperative to the fact that someone might want to have fun. An example of this is when you're hidden from view and the opponent is facing away from you it magically knows to teleport out of the way of an attack that's impossible to see coming. what's worse is even afterwords the opponent still sits there looking around like nothing just happened. the franchise famous "power struggles" are degraded into an overly simplistic minigame of who can move the analog sticks around faster, the highest difficulty will make it nearly impossible to attack an opponant head on due to the near certainty of the AI winning the power struggle. worst of all is the implementation of giant characters. special attacks can either be energy based(balls or beams of energy shot at the opponent) or rush based(the character collides with the opponent and hits them a few times). Giant characters are automatically immune to almost all rush attacks leaving some characters, which rely solely on rush attacks, seriously handicapped. this problem is made worse in that several characters can't make giants recoil with standard attacks and thus are completely open to being pounded on with little to no defense against it.… Collapse

This is the single greatest fighting game I have ever played ever. I found myself playing it for hours without end...its was just awesome.

Better than all the DBZ games i played!

Easily the best of all the DBZ games. Before this I thought Budokai 3 was the top, but could have been better...Tenkaichi was ok but no transformations which took away alot. This one brings back the transformations in game and does it in style, it's very easy to choose exactly which form you want, be your character saijan, cell, frieza, etc. The whole fighting system has been reworked and isn't nearly as clunky as before. Combos are a breeze to pull off, specials are better and add alot of strategy to a fight. Character selection is insane, I haven't seen a single character left out from any of the sagas. The story mode is the same, I'm only at the begining of the cell saga and am 30% complete. It even covers the dbz movies such as the tree of might, deadzone, cooler...it's really got it all! My only gripe is the AI, not that it's bad. Sometimes it will decide to do the same move over and over again which is iritating, and other times the computer will just decide it isnt going to let you win and utterly annihilate you. Nothing bad with the game, the difficulty can just be a bit outragous at times. If you are a DBZ fan and wish the games could be better, this is the one to buy.… Expand

Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2 is one of the best fighters out there, and one of the best Dragon Ball Z games, with a INCREDIBLY large amount of playable characters, awesome controls, awesome graphics, and amazing sound, an awesome story mode, and highly replayable tournament modes, and great versus modes, this game is a must play for fighter and Dragon Ball Z fans.

As a stagnating franchise and as an unimportant " new " episode to the video game family, Budokai Tenkaichi 2 is completely stupid still, the sequel is a nice part worth having, but not this .