Dragon Ball Z: Budokai (Gamecube) - Part 7 [Unlocking Extra Characters]

A playthrough I did not even plan! Holy crap!

The inspiration for this comes from RookerVision's recent side by side video of Dragon Ball Z Budokai, in which it was remarked upon how the game's interlacing issues (or combing artefacts) made the picture different or worse than its PlayStation 2 counterpart.

   • Dragon Ball Z Budokai | Graphics Compariso...  

I am no expert on these things, so please take everything I say with a grain of salt: It turns out Dragon Ball Z Budokai is one of only a handful of Gamecube titles that has a native resolution of 640x224. You could probably force 240p through Swiss on this one but, fact of the matter is, this would only make the aliasing issues present on Budokai that much more pronounced. In actuality, this is a field-rendered game, meaning it only should be played in 480i if possible. On an old-school CRT Television, 480i looks absolutely striking, but thrown straight through a digital display and sadly it looks a touch muddier, as it does in RookerVision's video sadly.

I suggested that maybe Rookervision's video capture gear was to blame for the problem, and decided to show how nice the image quality can look when put through hardware that knows what to do with it. For a few years now I have owned a Micomsoft Framemeister XRGB-Mini, arguably the best deinterlacing solution on the market, and this video series here has been recorded using just that, with RGB SCART at 480i, the auto scaler set to "Video" and image mode changed to "Natural". My video output is HDMI @1080p60 which is fed into an Elgato HD60s. All subsequent editing and encoding were completed on Vegas Pro 14 and Handbrake respectively where I cropped the overscan and rendered the video at 4K for bitrate reasons on the likes of Youtube/Vimeo. Unfortunately 1080p is rarely preserved properly on web video, despite the dramatic leaps in quality that H.264/5 has made over the best five to ten years or so.

The Framemeister uses motion-adaptive deinterlacing and is very adept in removing combing artefacts without losing much picture integrity however there are minor hiccups and glitches as with anything. Solid colour has noticeable macroblocking and the input lag is around 1-2 frames (roughly 20-30ms on most content). In my experience, the biggest issue has been with resolution transitions although there is some room to alleviate this like adjusting sync modes and adding HDMI splitters into the chain. Only a couple "problem" games exist and they're largely limited to fifth generation hardware (e.g. Chrono Cross on PSX).

Anyway, enough technical babble, lets talk Dragon Ball. My experience with the original Dragon Ball Z Budokai is admittedly limited. As a kid, I was upset by how short of an experience it was, and further disappointed that it lacked the Buu Saga. I spent many hours playing its sequel Budokai 3 however which had bucket-loads of content, fully realising the potential of the series' RPG mechanics and granting the combat the speed that was expected of a Dragon Ball game. That said, for a 2002 release, it is impressive how close Budokai matches the look and feel of Dragon Ball Z, the show, besides solidifying it's developer, Dimps, as a go-to for fighting games. Dimps would later be contracted to work on similar fighters for both Saint Seiya and Yu Yu Hakusho but their excellent 2D fighter Rumble Fish proved they could handle a Street Fighter-esque game, and certainly, Capcom agreed with that some years later...

All in all, Dragon Ball Z: Budokai is alot of fun to play. The tournament mode is still where the replay value is at and, if you have a couple of willing friends, it is a blast to have at multiplayer parties, even to this day.