The History of Dragon Ball Z: Budokai
By 2002 the Dragon Ball game line had been quiet for five years, since Dragon Ball: Final Bout in 1997. Bandai's return was planned from 2000 for the PlayStation 2 and built by Dimps, a young studio that would define the franchise's games for a generation. The game they made was a fighting game with an unusual center of gravity: a story mode of fully 3D cutscenes recreating the anime, from Raditz's arrival through the Cell Games, wrapped around 2.5D battles for 23 fighters. It reached the West first, in Europe on November 2, 2002 and in North America on December 3, and Japan last, on February 13, 2003, under the plain title Dragon Ball Z, the Budokai name being the international addition.
The production has an editor's ghost in it. Bandai producer Daisuke Uchiyama's early build was sent to Kazuhiko Torishima, the editor who had launched the manga, and the verdict forced a rebuild: graphics resources were largely discarded and remade until the game passed the eye of the man the staff called Dr. Mashirito. Torishima then made the prediction the sales team needed, telling Uchiyama, who had an order target of 180,000 copies for Japan, that the game would sell 500,000. Japan delivered about 550,000 to 570,000, and the world delivered far more: more than 3.5 million shipped on PlayStation 2 by mid 2003, with about two million sold in the United States alone. A GameCube port followed in late 2003 with improved cel shading, and the three game Budokai line went on to roughly ten million copies combined. It was also a dubbing landmark: the first Dragon Ball game dubbed by Funimation's cast, the voices America now treats as default.
Its afterlife carries the franchise's strangest footnote. The score was by Kenji Yamamoto, the games composer whose music was withdrawn from Dragon Ball Kai in 2011 after Toei acknowledged third party infringement. The 2012 Budokai HD Collection, which pairs this game with Budokai 3, replaced his music for that reason, so the game as now sold does not sound the way three and a half million buyers remember. The fighting shelf of this Library tells the 16 bit story, the Super Butoden games America never got. Budokai is the sequel to that story: the moment the games came back, in 3D, at blockbuster scale, and never really left again.