What is there left to say about Dragon Ball Z games? The story never changes, so it's no surprise that the only real difference between BT2 and BT3 is that there are even MORE characters this time. Still, from what I've played of it, it's a pretty decent fighting game.
The good: The pointless fights have been removed. If you think that would shorten the game substantially... you would be totally correct. In a grand total of 2 and a half hours of gameplay, I'm on the Majin Buu saga. But, the battles are not over in 30 seconds. Some battles can take upwards of 10 minutes to complete. How is this possible? Using in-battle cutscenes to display prominent features from the show to transition between events. So, instead of having to fight all of Frieza's forms in 8 seperate battles, it's all been condensed down into one long fight (that you get to play AS Frieza in. I guess since it's trying to be accurate to the show, since Frieza practically owned everyone up until Goku showed up, this is pretty much expected). Also, the amount of new characters and new alts are pretty awesome (some characters have been given new alts to match their animated counterparts. Broly's alt for example has minor battle damage and no Slave Crown, but can turn into a regular Super Saiyan instead of a blue-haired Super Saiyan)
The bad: Not a lot of bad, I guess, but it's pretty darn annoying that the AI basically cheats, by always being able to block mid-combo, while you can't do anything to break their guard easily anymore. Also, they seem to have taken down the usefulness of power attacks, making them less accurate and take 3x as long to charge.
The ugly: The new characters are uninspired, to say the least... actually, that's not true. The least you can say about the new characters is that they are CLEARLY scraping the bottom of the barrel with the new additions. There are only a handful of new DBZ characters, all the rest are from Dragon Ball (and Nuova Shenron and GT Goku). The Dragon Ball characters are cool but, they're clearly running out of ideas if one of the new characters, Arale Norimaki, isn't even FROM Dragon Ball (not counting a one episode crossover). Also, they have caused a massive grievance by including Goku's Yardrat armor as an alt, but not Vegeta's pink "Badman" shirt. They created 5 separate Goku characters, but not ONE GT Vegeta. The madness...
If you want to get this game, the choice really comes down to whether or not you want the PS2 or Wii version. Thankfully, Atari has made that decision for you by releasing the PS2 version first, then losing the rights to distribute Dragon Ball Z games several weeks before the Wii version comes out. While I'm sure this won't effect the release of the Wii version... it probably means North Americans won't be seeing Budokai Tenkaichi 4 any time soon.
