Dragon Ball Z was an overblown and tedious anime where nothing much happened for weeks on end. Don’t take our word for it, check out the new-world oracle Wikipedia, which says, "Filler is used to pad out the series; featuring long shots of the characters faces and standoffs lasting an entire episode". Over ten years after the series has finished and people still want more? Apparently so, and that’s why, in the long line of Dragon Ball Z beat-’em-ups, we have another.

It’s the first and won’t be the last on PS3. If you’ve played Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3 you should know the drill. It’s a very good-looking game with clean-cut cel shading and not much else. The main game is split up into four sagas much like the TV show. They’re set on different planets and are loosely strung together with some sort of ambition to a story. Unless you know the series, don’t go expecting to know what the hell is going on. Each fight is split up with triggered dramatic scenes that imbue the characters with extra powers such as increased strength or defence. Each fight has around 15 unskippable scenes to unlock by replaying. You’ll only see around three or so per bout. Recoome’s are campy and fun, but you’ll quickly tire of Vegeta talking about Goku powering up his fingers.

However, this will all be good news to Dragon Ball Z fans who’ll lap this up like stray cat in a dairy. The problem is that even though there’s a wide variety of characters, from the towering Nappa to the Goku’s shortarsed son Gohan, they all have the same basic move set. Everyone has a fireball, an uppercut, and the same punch and kick combos. They’re all assigned to the same buttons for every character. There’s only so many times you can smash an opponent up through the heavens before seeing the same cut-scene again gets dull. You can charge up your attacks using the Ki meter to unleash bigger and fatter fireballs. But again this suffers from the character clone problem as it’s only the cut-scenes that make the characters unique.

There’s online play and some tutorials, but when compared to Budokai Tenkaichi 3 its measly roster of 21 characters doesn’t match up to its predecessor’s 160, not to mention the game modes that have been lost. This is a fans-only game, everyone else should wait for Soul Calibur IV.

Henrietta Rowlatt