To the great joy of fans, a new Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi game was announced yesterday at the end of the Dragon Ball FighterZ World Tour Finals. Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 4 will be the first new game in the sub-franchise in 16 years, since the 2007 release of the much beloved Budokai Tenkaichi 3.
The trailer showed little aside from improved graphics and Goku transforming into his Super Saiyan Blue form, so it seems that the game will include content from Dragon Ball Super. Whether it will contain characters from other spin-off material like Dragon Ball Heroes remains to be seen. Still, Dragon Ball fans across the internet can hardly contain their excitement.
Why do so many people care? The Budokai Tenkaichi games are 3D arena fighters that allowed many Dragon Ball Z fans to recreate the series’ epic battles from the comfort of their own home. Featuring a wide selection of characters from all of Dragon Ball’s history alongside an abundance of single-player content, many fans still hold them as the gold standard for Dragon Ball games.
Are they an absolutely unbalanced mess? Of course, but who cares when you can have Kid Goku fight Super Saiyan 4 Gogeta to the death complete with beam clashes and mid-battle transformations? Budokai Tenkaichi 3 in particular is a labor of love, with so many hidden details that only hardcore fans would get that it borders on ridiculous. One of the characters has an attack that only damages evil characters in-universe, and the dev team went in and coded individual damage values for each of the 161 characters if they are hit by the attack. It’s excessive and unnecessary, but more importantly, it’s cool as hell.
Dragon Ball FighterZ players also had something to celebrate, with the announcement of the game’s rollback netcode beta coming to Steam alongside one final balance patch before EVO. This should hopefully make playing online a much more consistent experience, and said balance patch may finally put an end to the reign of terror that Lab Coat 21 has held over the game since last year.