Dragon Ball Z: Shin Budokai (2006)

I avoided this one for years because I thought what was the point of a fighting game I could only play single player and that was a lesser version of what I could play on console? I wish I continued to avoid this game because it honestly made me mad. I'll start with the good: character models and environments look really good. I was impressed since it's on the PSP. I like that the story mode isn't just retelling the same story from the show. We already got that 3 times in a row, glad they went in a different direction. Now with the bad: I HATED dragon road. It really exposed parts of the game I didn't like that I probably would not have minded if I weren't trying to get Z rank on all of the dragon road fights. This game does not explain itself at all (probably doesn't help that I don't have the instruction manual). I do not understand the criteria of what effects your rank in dragon road, which made it annoying to clear with high ranks. Next up, the entire battle system is revamped and everyone is giving new movesets. I appreciate the effort in theory, but in practice, I don't like the changes they made. Why is there no in-game tutorial to teach new mechanics or even a guide for basic combos or how to combo strings into special moves? The gameplay is very offense oriented. Chip damage and red health is ridiculous when you block moves. You could block most moves, then if your opponent catches you off guard once, you can potentially be left with one bar left. Another thing I hate is the awful balancing. Characters with high Ki already had an advantage, but they introduced aura bursts to give them another tool to widen the gap between strong characters and weak characters. Janemba is crazy overpowered with their high damage, long range, high ki, and how fast their ult is. Fighting them so often in dragon road was miserable, particularly with gotenks's stubby normals. Another thing I didn't like was the roster size. Going from 30-40+ in budokai 3 to about 18 is hard to get used to. It's cool that they introduced Janemba and Pikkon to the series though because I liked Pikkon as a kid. Finally, the localization was pretty awful. I don't know if this was an issue exclusive to the English translation, but they did a poor job with the dialogue in the game. Spelling and grammar mistakes everywhere, story got old pretty quick, issues with dialogue not making sense given the content, and showing the wrong characters speaking. It's quite possibly the worst localization I've ever seen in a game where it's blatantly obvious that little proofreading was done. Overall, I probably would've liked the game just fine if they didn't grade the fights in dragon road, but since they did, I was pretty miserable. I only did dragon road, but that was enough to unlock all of the characters, so I'm considering this game done.