Let me give an unbiased, true look on a truly deserving game.
Hyper Dimension features a Story mode, a Tenkaichi Budokai-tournament mode, a versus mode, a practice mode, and an options mode. The Story mode in this game takes you through all the main battles of the DBZ story accompanied with narration and cool scene/character intro animations, that very much add to the presentaton. There are little things in the story mode that add to its presentation in a big way. For one, you don't have to win each battle to continue. In fact some battles are meant for you to lose. And when you do lose a fight that you are supposed to win, the gameover screen with Krillin holding a senzu bean bag appears before you and if you continue then you lose one of your three senzu beans......isn't that awesome?! I mean..... they could've just had a bland "Continue" screen.
The versus mode is self-explanatory: It's very fun mode to play with yourself or with a friend.
The tournament mode consists of an eight-man branch that you can setup anyway you like(choose any of the ten characters, make em' computer controlled or human,etc.). As far as graphics and sound quality is concerned, this game features some of the best of both. The shading usage makes the characters look lifelike and the smooth animations compliment the models nicely. The characters' battlecries, energy attacks,and punches and kicks all sound just like they do on the show- which is quite an accomplishment.
I'll now explain Hyper dimension's core, its unique gameplay. The fighting goes at very fast pace and different variations of energy attacks and special moves are performed using the punch button(Y), the kick button(B), or the ki blast button(A) combined with a certain combination of directions on the d-pad(all moves differ depending on the character). Hyper Dimension's fighting is very fluid as each move leads into another move with smooth animation at a perfect pace. The amount of moves each character has ranges from 10-13 and one of those 10-13 moves is a "devastation attack" which is an enourmous finishing attack able to be performed when your character's Hit Points are below 70(close to death). Speaking of Hit Points, this game features a unique HP and Ki(ki is the power that allows usage of energy attacks)system that combines the two into one. This means that when you pull off an energy attack you use a little bit of your own life to use it and on the same note, you heal yourself when powering up by pressing the "Y" and "B" buttons at the same time. One small, but nice addition to the battle system is the "3D attack" performed by holding dash button("R" or "L") and then "Y" or "B" depending on the character. During this attack, the character dashes into the background and then charges towards his opponent's current position, making it a very useful move to counter an opponent's attack- and it looks really cool too!
Hyper Dimension's stages consist of multiple parts and two different styles of parts: Flying and non-flying. You have to knock your opponent to the different sections of the levels to reach them(kinda like in mortal kombat, but much different(better)). In the flying stages you are free to fly all over the screen and the way you battle changes, forcing you to change your strategy as well. Now, I could keep going on and on about all the other gameplay features this game has to offer an how to to them but, this is a review not an instruction manual. Bottom line: Hyper Dimensions features one of the fastest, most unique, well done fighting systems in any game. It's not only one of, if not the best Dragonball game, it's one of the best fighting games of all time...period.
Note: I want people to know that I am giving this game a perfect score, not because "I Really Love Dragonball z!!", but because it's what it deserves.
(Tsktsk from IGN and Kooopa are and the same)