EvenDragon BallGames Battle Hour 2024 doesn’t have playable copies ofBudokai Tenkaichi 3, which is likely due to how infamously expensive PS2 copies are nowadays.
As I’m sure all of you waiting for the new Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero and Daima trailer are well aware of, Dragon Ball Games Battle Hour 2024 is currently happening right now in Los Angeles. As you’d expect from an event celebrating Dragon Ball games, there are a ton of playable titles for fans to get their hands on - except for one glaring omission.
As you may see from the photo posted by the official Dragon Ball Games Battle Hour Twitter, the full list of Dragon Ball games at the event is pretty impressive, with games ranging from the first Budokai all the way up toXenoVerse 2andFighterZ. While almost every Dragon Ball game is there, fans quickly noticed that Budokai Tenkaichi 3, one of the most beloved entries in the whole series and especially popular withSparking: Zeroon the horizon, isn’t there.
Although it’s possible that it was just an oversight, it does stand out considering copies of the first two games in the series are there. This has caused fans to speculate why it’s missing from the roster, and there’s a theory that holds a lot of ground -the infamously expensive price of Budokai Tenkaichi 3 on PS2.
There are a few other games missing from the list like Dragon Ball Fusions and Dragon Ball: The Breakers, but they’re not particularly expensive so it’s not really clear why they’ve been missed.
As pointed out by Twitter user AreCreeps, Dragon Ball Games Battle Hour 2024 is using actual consoles and disks for each game, rather than running them through emulators. With Budokai Tenkaichi 3 not being there, it seems that the organisers might not have been able to find copies of the game for an acceptable price,which makes sense considering that they sometimes go for close to $200 on eBay.
There is the slightly cheaper Wii version of the game out there, but as it’s generally seen as the worst way to play BT3, it’s likely that it was decided to just leave off the playable list of games altogether rather than make people play on that console. It’s also possible that it was simply missed out, but the high price of PS2 copies of the game does make it seem likely it was just too expensive to have multiple consoles running it.
