The commitment to play through the entire Budokai Tenkaichi series was always a little bit absurd. Tenkaichi 3 is the game to play, so going through the first two has felt like working my way through paperwork, a gross formality before I get to the real shit that I've now completely run out of patience for. I love Dragon Ball, but Budokai Tenkaichi 2 is too damn much Dragon Ball.

Now I know that's a bold statement to make after establishing I played this game to get to Tenkaichi 3, which is known for its gargantuan roster, but Budokai Tenkaichi 2 never manages to strike a good balance between quantity and quality, and that's ultimately what boiled down to me disliking it enough to drop it. Take the story mode - where I spent the bulk of my time - which is so comprehensive it's downright excessive, covering almost every single fight present in the anime.

This results in stretches of repeat fights against the same opponents with variety coming in the form of what characters are available to you. A little context for the uninitiated: Dragon Ball is lousy with battles against incredible foes that our heroes are often ill-equipped to defeat until another more powerful warrior arrives on the scene to save the day (Goku, usually.) Tenkaichi 2 in its slavish commitment to faithfully recreate these battles represents this uneven power dynamic by constantly shifting the enemy AI between fights based on who they're going up against. This makes sense in theory but in practice it means the difficulty balance is all over the place, with some brutal opponents suddenly forgetting how to guard or use specials all-of-a-sudden. Goku showed up, don't know how to punch anymore!

The breaking point for me was playing through the two chapters covering the Cooler movies, which in true commitment to form are complete garbage. The Return of Cooler has you fight Meta-Cooler seven god damn times in a row - technically more as the last fight has you go up against five Meta-Coolers with halved health bars. I'm an ardent fan, being able to experience every single battle in the grand overarching story of Dragon Ball should appeal to me, but sometimes less is more.

On the positive end of things, the computer is generally more aggressive than it was in the previous Tenkaichi game, which helps makes battles more engaging and much more difficult to cheese. Combat also feels much more robust, and iconic attacks from the anime and manga are well-represented. There's some great roster selections, too. Yajirobe is surprisingly fun to play as (I love how he twirls his sword around to fly), and even Garlic Jr. and Lord Slug are here. Slug gang, rise up!

Unfortunately, it's also not enough to save Tenkaichi 2 from devolving into pure tedium, and after dying to the final Meta-Cooler in that set of five, I realized I wasn't having any fun and was just bored.

I don't like abandoning or shelving games and I try not to do it too often, but I don't want to be on my death bed thinking about what could've been had I not wasted 40 or 50 hours beating Tenkaichi 2. I think a lot of people will say that 2's advantage over 3 is its story mode, but I suspect trimming the fat and making it far more succinct will help me enjoy Tenkaichi 3 even more, especially if it builds and improves upon 2's already solid combat.

A vast improvement over Tenkaichi 1, the sequel is far more deserving of your time. Once more we're presented with a behind-the-character camera view and a fully mobile set of fighters that can fly around an arena as we fight, but this time the ambition is far more realised. There's a huge roster of playable characters covering a vast swathe of Dragon Ball, Z, GT and the movies, there's a lot more work done to make fighters distinct from each other, and signature attacks are far better represented. In a wonderful new twist you can now bring a team of up to 5 fighters to a round, all of which can be freely switched between during combat, and many characters can now transform between different forms during a bout as well, so the Dragon Ball feeling is wonderfully captured. However, one mark against the game is a far too overlong campaign mode that takes accuracy a little too seriously at the expense of actually having fun.