Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

Atlus continues its trend of bringing interesting titles out of Japan to the rest of the world with 3D Dot Game Heroes, a PlayStation 3 exclusive title we learned last November was headed to the US for May 11th, 2010. We now know that this game will be released in Europe during May, 2010. While they’ve narrowed it to a month instead of an exact date, that is close enough for government work.

The screen shots might seem confusing, but what you’re seeing is a 3D version of blocky, pixelated, 8-bit-style adventure games. To be even more specific, it’s a very strong homage to Zelda. This alone is a surprising thing to see amidst a generation of HD, realistic games, but it gets better from there.

Apparently there is a feature where you can design your own blocky little hero and share it by copying it out to a flash drive. SiliconEra talks about its features in the Japanese version here and while you might see something that looks like, I don’t know, Link floating around on the internet, you could easily see blocky versions of almost any other character you want.

To get an idea of how the game works, GamerSyde has a video covering the first ten minutes of the game over here, along with a second video of dungeons themselves. Look around pretty early on in the demo and you’ll see a very familiar looking spider monster and a well, Final Fantasy-sized sword. GamerSyde also has a gallery of some screen shots.

All it needs is a great sense of humor about it all that is well localized by Atlus to be a complete package. We’ll have to see once previews come out as the year wears on.