It’s time for a new (and the final, if you believe Atari) Dragonball Z game for the Playstation 2.

So what’s up and what’s it about.

First, it’s a new Budokai game, even if it isn’t titled as such.

The fighting elements and characters will take the best from the three Budokai games and the two Shin-Budokai games and jumble them all up, but that isn’t quite all.

The battle system is apparently taken from Burst Limit.  It’ll use the newer fighting engine from Burst Limit, along with some new stuff such as: Ki attacks from the sky (I’m guessing this is some sort of move you activate and you get some animation of your character flying around shooting blasts), or diving into your opponent and smashing the crap out of them.

The game will have over 40 characters, plus all the varied forms characters can take.

The story elements and drama scenes will apparently be taken from the five different Budokai games using new visual effects.

The game will also feature ‘Dragon Missions’.  Racing missions and other ‘action scenes’ will be done via the Dragon Missions.  They could be time attack races like Snake Road, gathering items, or other actions you need to perform (CATCH BUBBLES!).

It appears the game was developed by Namco/Bandai (anyone else guessing this is code for Dimps?) specifically to be the final and ultimate Playstation 2 DBZ game.

No news on if the American release will have Japanese audio, but I can confirm that new audio was recorded (which is only interesting in that it means there is most definitely new stuff in the game, since DBZ games often just reuse audio from past games).

At the very least it looks like DBZ’s (very likely) PS2 swan song is gonna give us a game that will make alot of people happy:  people who wanted PS2 versions of Shin-Budokai (since that’ll be represented), people who want a PS2 version of Burst Limit (elements of the fighting system), people who want more story in their DBZ game, and people who just want one final Budokai game (even if they aren’t calling it that).

Even I’ll admit I’m looking forward to it after finding all this out, and the Budokai series and me stopped getting along five minutes into game 2.

Release date is not exact yet despite some stores having preorders up, but it will likely be November for the USA and December for Europe.