There’s an intriguing story telling method put to… obscure use in Burst Limit. It appears that a plethora of dramatic cut scenes have been sledge hammered into the game that are intended to automatically stitch together as the game progresses. Ideally, after a few hectic bouts against the invading Saiyans, a story unique to that particular fight is intended to unfold. Now, I think it works, but the inherently bewildering nature of the Ball makes it kinda hard to tell. If the story fell into coherent place, it probably wouldn’t feel very ‘DragonBall’, so it’s best to simply enjoy the pigeon English of the translation and return to swimming happily in the murky pools of confusion that incubate the DBZ franchise.

Booosh!

Burst Limit ultimately misses the high standard set by Budokai, and serves more as a testing ground to see how the series might fare on modern consoles. As an inaugural seventh gen episode, it finds its charm in visual grandeur but falls short of blowing our minds with the kind of superhuman fighting action we’d hoped for. There’ve been a lot of DBZ games on the PS2, which provided a vast gaming university for the creators to find their programming feet, and it seems a slight step backward had to be taken as they acclimatise to the new consoles.

Chances are any minute now something will explode or one of the characters will shout something. I watched an episode of Dragonball Z once, see?

If Namco Bandai can recapture the programming prowess they’d clearly unlocked with the Budokai series on the PS2, we’ll be in for some brilliantly confusing and alluring DragonBall Z games in the near future. Regrettably, this isn’t quite one of them, but buying Burst Limit out of anime-obsessed compulsion won’t be the worst decision you could make this week.