Seeing as honesty is allegedly the best policy (although it's not like that's ever mattered a great deal anyway), I'll start as I mean to go on and tell you right now that I never have been and never will be a fan of the Dragon Ball Z show on TV, as for the most part I find it almost unbearably tedious. Its myriad of excellent ideas and jaw-dropping fight scenes are hindered by the fact that the show's plot and the aforementioned fights are 99.9% of the time so insanely poorly spaced out that by the time a fight does occur, I really just don't care any more. I once watched a whole episode with a friend who was a Dragon Ball Z fan bordering on the obsessive, spending thirty minutes on the edge of his seat and keeping his eyes firmly glued to the television… while I sat there next to him bored out of my skull, because for the entire half hour not one thing happened. There was no plot development, no fights… nothing. Two characters just stood - or hovered, as the case may be, I can't remember - for thirty minutes, growling and scowling at each other. For thirty minutes. Thirty. Minutes. Then the episode ended and the preview revealed even more amounts of stationary growling/scowling tedium… although according to my friend, the next episode was a rollercoaster ride of insane fighting, plot revelations and drama, which I find quite hard to believe. Personally, I've just never found the show as a whole entertaining enough to hold my interest, even if the fights that eventually occur are more than vaguely exciting.

However, despite my low opinion of the show, the Dragon Ball franchise remains one of the most popular global phenomena of the past decade and any games based on the show are going to sell by the boatload, as I imagine is the case with Dragon Ball Z: Shin Budokai for the PSP, the latest in the long-running Budokai series of DBZ 3D fighting games that has, up until now, remained solely on the PlayStation 2 and Gamecube home consoles, each game enjoying varying degrees of success, praise or detestation as aspects of the gameplay have been either improved upon or cocked up over the years. At its core, Shin Budokai is a fairly basic one-on-one 3D fighting game; you have two buttons for melee attacks, a button for energy projectile attacks and a button for blocking. However, while it's perfectly feasible to simply hammer away at the melee attacks and fire off the odd energy attack to defeat your opponents in the earlier fights, the opponent AI soon starts pulling its socks up and giving you a serious fight, resulting in the necessity on your part to take the time to master the trademark DBZ fighting techniques that are present within the game.

These not-so-bog-standard techniques and gameplay aspects comprise the bulk of what makes Shin Budokai, for the most part, an entertaining game to play. For starters, in addition to your life energy meter you also have your ki energy meter. Your ki energy meter automatically, albeit slowly, refills itself over the course of a fight, or you can charge it faster manually by holding down the L button; however, while doing this you remain immobile and completely vulnerable to your opponent's attacks. Your ki energy meter is where you draw all the energy for your, um, energy attacks, which increase in power as your ki energy meter increases. The higher power energy attacks are truly devastating if they hit, although a well timed dodge can render them completely ineffective, while an ever better timed block can return the projectile hurtling straight back to the sender, with disastrous results. The ki energy meter also fuels each character's repeatedly-teleporting-behind-your-opponent-and-punching-them-in-the-back-of-the-head thing that frequently occurs on the TV show, which, if timed correctly, can be pulled off a few times (say, four or five) in quick succession and proves to be a suitably devastating and thoroughly satisfying technique to witness, provided you're not the unfortunate sod on the receiving end of it. Additionally, other true-to-DBZ gameplay aspects present in Shin Budokai include being able to take the fight high up into the air at will, along with the unlockable ability for certain characters to transform into different versions of themselves, including going "Super Saiyan" (which boils down to becoming exceptionally strong and fast, for those of you who don't speak DBZ).

There are several modes of play available in Shin Budokai, some of which are standard to most fighting games, some of which aren't. Not being entirely sure what weird shenanigans a DBZ fighting game would be throwing into the mix and thus confusing me with, training mode was actually the first one I dived into. It basically allows you to pick a character along with a sparring partner and lets you simply suss out the basics of the gameplay. You can tweak attributes like the amount of health and ki energy that both you and your opponent start off with, as well as which environment you spar in. Once you start, you can determine how your opponent will behave as you're delivering a flurry of punches and kicks at light speed to their unfortunate face. You can have them simply stand there and do absolutely nothing at all (handy if you want to experiment with button combos) or simply guard (not a lot of use to anyone in any way, shape or form if I'm to be completely honest). There's a practice session where you can try out the button combos you've learned against someone who actually fights back, although you don't damage each other whilst doing this. And lastly there's a match session, where attacks damage each other and the fight plays out like a normal game match would, according to the round number and time limit specifications you chose before starting the training session. In the practice and match variations of the training mode, the option is there to alter the ferocity of your opponent - weak, average, strong, very strong or Z. Also available in the training mode is a list of button commands for each character, which details the button presses required for combos and special moves.

The main modes of play are Dragon Road mode and Arcade mode, the latter of which is essentially no different from the arcade mode found in every other fighting game ever made; you pick a fighter before embarking on the subsequent succession of one-on-one brawls - the specifics such as opponent difficulty and the length and number of rounds can once again be altered to your personal preferences - until you reach the end. Dragon Road mode on the other hand acts as Shin Budokai's story mode, loosely following the plot of the DBZ movie, Fusion Reborn. It basically amounts to even more fighting, only in between each and every bout there is one or more lacklustre story scenes. They're really quite atrocious; nothing more than talking head scenes; drawings of the characters exchanging some of the worst and frankly unnecessary dialogue (via text only, I might add) I've ever experienced in a videogame. The fact that there's absolutely no spoken dialogue whatsoever left me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, hearing the characters speak might have enhanced the story somewhat. However, the thought of actually listening to these hardened super-heroes and killing machines talking about things like going camping and God knows what other mundane "feats" nearly made my brain haemorrhage on numerous occasions.

Thankfully, the story scenes can be all be skipped with a swift tap of the start button, leaving you to get on with the gameplay itself. And there's a lot of it in Dragon Road mode; maybe a little too much, as at times I found it a bit too drawn out for my liking. However, for fans of the source material it's well worth playing through, as doing so unlocks new characters on top of the dozen or so that are available right from the start, as well as alternate forms for the characters and new items that can be bought in the shop in the options menu. Nothing of any value, mind you, as Shin Budokai's shop sells… stamps. Yeah, stamps. Pretty cool, huh? Each DBZ player can customise their own stamps, which can be traded with other players whenever they participate in the game's ad-hoc versus fights. Now call me shallow and/or nothing more than a shameless conveyer of stereotypes if you so desire, but I really don't think that the majority of the millions upon millions of DBZ fans out there are going to be all that interested in stamp collecting to be honest, even if there are literally tons of different characters, items, backgrounds and the like with which to customise your… *yawn*… unique stamps. Frankly, the whole fiasco makes me cringe at the thought that a game from Atari entitled something along the lines of Anatoly Karpov's Pro Stamp Collector might be just around the corner.

The breakneck and consistently fun gameplay in Shin Budokai is backed up by a somewhat lacklustre level of presentation. The game would have benefited from some DBZ cut-scenes to convey key parts of the story, as opposed to solely relying on the talking heads. Also, the in-game music and sound leaves a little to be desired. There's nothing wrong with the overall quality, but the repeated grunts and other noises of the DBZ fighters coupled with the mediocre guitar riffs that accompany them do begin to grate after a while. Oddly enough, the option to turn the speech in the game to the Japanese versions of the characters voices is present, although turning this on (at least in my eyes… or ears, if you want to get technical) proved this option to be nowhere near as cool as it sounded on paper. I'll leave it at that. However, despite the low level of sound and storytelling presentation throughout Shin Budokai, there's no denying that the in-game visuals are never short of impressive. The cel-shaded characters are gorgeously animated throughout and all utilise a pleasingly bright colour palette, as do the environments, which while never particularly detailed, are expansive, lush and vibrant. Lastly, and maybe most impressive of all, considering the overall velocity that the game maintains along with the quality, amount and frequency of the visual effects being flung around on-screen, the game refuses to let its framerate dip.

Shin Budokai has the distinction of being the first ever 3D fighter released for Sony's handheld, so some might say that not only does it have a certain amount to live up to in regards to delivering the Dragon Ball Z experience, but also in that ideally it should at least give 3D fighter fans something sufficiently entertaining and attention-holding until the likes of Tekken: Dark Resurrection or portable iterations of Virtua Fighter or - God forbid - Soul Calibur arrive on the scene (don't laugh, you never know what corporate meetings are going on as you're reading this). Shin Budokai abides in both areas and while hardcore aficionados of the aforementioned Tekken will likely find a deeper 3D fighting experience than they would here once Dark Resurrection hits stores this summer, Dragon Ball Z: Shin Budokai delivers an extremely fast-paced, easily accessible fighting game that any Dragon Ball Z fans will get a real kick out of playing, even if the missed opportunities to flesh the game out with a higher level of presentation, a few more gameplay modes and a better incentive to play through the story mode (you know, better than stamp collecting) have dragged down what would otherwise be an excellent 3D fighting game.

Reviewed by Mark Reece for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).