Introduction

Let's Play Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi

Ultimate Tenkaichi was supposed to be the best Dragon Ball Z game. You could make your own saiyan, it was super pretty... and you could make your own saiyan. Plus, it would carry that tested and true Tenkaichi gameplay that fans were so fond of, with some refinements! At least, that's how it was imagined by consumers, I think. In reality, Ultimate Tenkaichi suffered most in one key area: it wasn't a very good fighting game. Most battles against other players were either pre-determined by your loadout, or if you were equally matched, random chance. On top of that, all the playable characters are almost entirely interchangeable. The nuances of the original Tenkaichi combat system are gone, and for what I feel is the first time: every fighter does feel copy-pasted. An immense effort was put into trying to make the game more cinematic, at the cost of anything resembling fair or interesting game mechanics.

And then Dragonball Xenoverse came out and made everything better.

About this Let's Play in particular:

I'm going to be playing through the game's much-discussed Hero Mode, with a balanced fighter. This way you'll get to see the most moves and most, uh, variety in strategy, theoretically. The only problem being that this game is woefully, painfully uninteresting on anything but a visual level. So, I'm just, going to cram the videos full of random jabbering about the characters we'll be facing and their place in the DBZ universe. I don't normally go this route, but what the hell, it'll be a fun time.

What about the Story Mode?

I genuinely like the story of Dragon Ball Z, but it's been told better elsewhere, in many other games! It would do a massive disservice to both you and the license to drag you through the game's slogging Story Mode, when the much more hilarious and interesting Hero Mode is sitting right next to it.

Videos

Thank you for watching!