For all the proclamations of drastic improvements the first Xbox 360 and PS3 outing of the DragonBall Z series supposedly has, I’d dare to suggest what fans are really looking forward to is seeing Goku and friends in high def. And on that purely superficial note, they won’t be disappointed.

Biff bash bosh. Also: Lava.

What’s not really made clear by the stunning visuals is what ‘Burst Limit’ actually means. It’s a matter of supreme indifference, really, and yet I found my thoughts constantly drifting back to that mildly perplexing dilemma during the many cinematic cut scenes. To be fair, the title is hardly the most confusing aspect to the DragonBall Z canon, since even the most manga-centric gamers out there only have a cursory understanding of the most popular book in the world (which, statistics lovers, has outsold the bible). And wallowing in the Technicolor confusion of DragonBall is all part of the experience, so we’ll press on and try not to think any more about the spurious meaning of a ‘Burst Limit’.

What’s important is the combat, followed at a respectful distance by the anime-esque storyline. In previous outings, such as the superb Budokai Tenkaichi strain of the hugely prolific series, the fighting action has been blisteringly hot and impressively expansive (environmentally speaking), so it’s something of a surprise to find that Burst Limit is rather restrained in this respect. The battles take place in an arena far more closely related to Virtua Fighter, or the recent Bleach title on the Wii, than the aerobatic steeple chases Dragonballers are used to.

When you take into account the ease with which these characters are able to bend time and space, it does help put their hairstyles into perspective.

If anything, the current gen consoles ought to promise a far greater range for the DBZ team to punch the Saiyan’s alien faces to custard, so presumably the reined in fighting distance was a conscious decision by the dev team at Namco Bandai. If you’d have asked me, before playing Burst Limit, if the high flying antics were a particular asset to the DBZ games, I’d probably have said they weren’t. Now they’re gone (or, to be fair, curtailed) the value of taking to the skies and bolting through the atmosphere on cloud-stepping shoes after a disappearing adversary added a great deal of dynamism to the action that no other game boasted.