Not quite there yet... but close enough.
To be completely honest I had written a pretty awful review about this game before, but something told me to give this game a second chance and I have to admit that I was a bit wrong about this game.
It is probably the fighting game with the most motion freedom in it's gameplay. During the gameplay you can move around the game stages in various ways (dive, fly, dash, etc.) The game should be able to make the characters run but I don´t know how that would work. But in essence you can move just pretty much like the fighting characters in the anime. The gameplay is on-lock with the fighting in the anime, no problem with that. Although the controls can take a time to get used to, becuase they get more technical this time around in comparison of the first 3 Budokai games. So the learning curve is a bit steap and you´ll probably won´t use all of the moves but simpler and essential ones will become used instinctively (guard, dodge, ultra speed dodge, etc).
What makes in my opinion the best feature in this game (which should be a returning one in any future DBZ game) is the option to change the game's voice acting to the one in the original Japanese anime series and retain the text in whatever default language the player chooses. This feature is a great acomplishment because the English voice acting sucks... big time.
On the other part, graphics and gameplay are great... the character selction is well done and have included more characters from the movies and the series. The bad thing is that they are trying out choosing each character's upgrade, transformation and / or diferent body as its own seperate character... which is something nice but they took out the in-game transformation feature from the previous games, that made the fighting very intresting. (Maybe they're saving it for later)
Also, their is a new Potara earring / item fusion feature which will allow the player to (in a creative way) form new items, upgrades and other surprises. These Items of course are won playing through the story mode of the game, which this time around includes story arcs that were known by fans of the series and were lacking in previous games (movie arcs, sidestories, etc). One of my mayor complaints is that although they have included two or more new stages in the game, they have still not been able to include the Janeba dimension stage in which we see Goku, Vegeta, Gogeta and Janeba fight (the one that was all yellow background filled with floating huge and small colored balls... kind of like gumballs); hope it's included soon or sometime in the future.
Last, the new camera tracking system can be a pain to get used to in CQC (Close Quater Combat) but is very useful when you get very far away from your opponent and you need to use your long range attacks (ki blasts, ki balls and signature attacks) to go and hit what you want. What really makes this new point of view annoying is when playing a 1P vs 2P match, it couldln't be anymore tedious when the screen splits in half and that doesn´t allow you to see the whole stage you fighting in, but helpful when you need to retreat or attack from a distance because one of the players will not be able to see where in the screen the other one has gone; kind of blows because without that extra manuvering tha fight gets kind of 2D and closed quarter the whole match. The fun fact of the fighting is that the player should be able to use every part of the environment around them (the sky and the ground) to pull off fast movements like attacking / defending from close and long range; but it's only really apreciated in single player or 1P vs COM gameplay modes.
Overall this is a good game for fans of DBZ, but fighting game fans should approach it with caution.
