Dragonball Z Ultimate tenkaichi

 Spoiler

The game is extremely accurate to the storyline. Though the voice for freiza is extremely glitchy (switches between original and the most recent revamp of the series). Your fight starts with bardock vs frieza, and everything imbetween. The "big" boss fights are irritating as f`uck. My beset advice is when they are about to swing at you try to move twice in one direction, opposite of your previous dodges direction.

The games very gimmicky with lots of cut scenes, you could say it's more dedicated to the story than the gameplay. You really only have a few combos to pull out but as you progress in the story you get different moves. This is my first time going through the story and from my understanding they give you moves that associate with the actual scenes of the anime. Such as the death of jeice is pay by play a move you can do to any character, or goku's kaiken rush that defeats nappa. I'm not sure if you can update the skills, say the next play through, but I notice none of my new skills arent unlocked.

The dragonballs are extremely easy to get, everytime you win a battle you can get a dragonball imbetween. A feature I do like is that one of the dragonballs ends up being in the worlds martial arts tournement so you have to win in order to get one. Also regarding the martial arts tournement, you can access it anytime when you're going through the map, and the actual people playing in the tournement comment on how the battle is progressing. Such as you're fighting bardock and frieza goes "oh wow wasn't expecting that!", followed by piccolo going "Oh wow what power" or something.

Regarding the rock paper scissors thing, it works like this. You hit the punch button 4 times, if the hits land you push square or triangle (ps3, 50% chance) and you'll be able to do that whole ping pong segment which does a considerable amount of damage. Now you upgrade KI, which is the smaller circle that's on the left, this allows you to do dodges, and if you press any button fast enough retaliate towards the "ping pong" combo. But you can counter the counter until someone goofs up. Now on a seperate ki bar, which is refer to as the spirit meter, it goes up, and it has dashes of how much you need to perform a skill. The fastest way to do this is to press the x button twice in order to go into a dragon rush strategy. You fly towards them or fly away and shoot ki blasts, you press left or right and if the opponent clicks the same direction then they can retailiate, if they don't you gain a considerable amount of "spirit". For me it takes about 2 success' to do an attack. THe other method is doing the ping pong thing about 4 times, the rush however only does about meh, 4k out of 50k, ping pong rush does like 8k, the blasts you do normally do 10-15k damage. Now when you do the special moves, such as kama or gattling gun, it actually hurts the stage pretty bad, and the damage stacks. Even vollying blasts leaves craters all over the land. So in my experience, if I do 4 gattling cannons I can see the magma from the earths core. The animations are also different from your position.

As for countering it's a lot more strategy because, depending on the enemy's ki gauge determins what you can do. If you have 1/4 of it filled you can perform a block (blocks 25% of the damage), 60% is an evade, which you have to hit 3 bars timely in order to dodge or lose 25% more damage than usual. 80% allows you to retaliate and do that whole blast vs blast button smashing thing, which does 5k damage to the opponent. So when you use up your spirit energy you have to be cautios of how much ki energy the opponent has, and if you get them locked in a ping pong rush it depletes most if not all of it.

Another feature that I love is the pallet, see, instead of having 8 seperate characters, they have multiple pallets that you rotate with R2. Each pallet has 4 transformations or fusions. So you can immediately transform into the character if you have enough Ki. Which reminds me, once your ki is full and you push up on the diagonal buttons, it puts you into a rage mode. Kind of like budokai 3 in preparation of a super move, but instead this one only focus's on adding about 40% more to your damage, and it hurts.

One worry I had about this game is computers typically win in chance games, but I was down on 20k against racoome, and I still came back by being able to do a few super moves. And yes there are ultimate moves, but you can't spam them, you have to be in the red in order to use it. Also you can direct the ping pong rush in any direction so experiment a little.

There is no experience bars, and I havent discovered any money as of yet, I haven't really unlocked anything, I used the dragonballs and unlocked a stage, the other option being a piccolo costume. All and all, this games very cinematic, with a new type of style, but being able to create a crater and putting a lot of chance into the game kind of gives you more a satisfying rush once you accomplish something. But the best feature I like is the battles last at least 6-10 minutes depending on your success' and it can turn around at anytime. If you're a dbz fan, it's a must have, if you were meh about the show, you'd be meh about this, cus it's litterally just playing the show, although this experience only up until the frieza saga of the storyline.

Lots of info about the game up there with a few spoilers, but that summarizes a days worth of experience for me.

Sounds like fun. Sounds like it has a lot of ki and spirit control you need to watch, learning to be conservative while also using it when the times right.