3 reasons why I'm not buying the Dragon Ball Z Budokai HD Collection!

After years and years of DBZ fans all over the world asking for it,Namco Bandai have finally given in to demands and have announced the Dragon Ball Z Budokai HD Collection for release on the PS3 and 360 this upcoming winter.You'd think like everyone else,I'd be excited as all hell for it,right? Well,not really.It's not the fact that I own most of the Budokai games (even the POS that is Burst Limit) in case you're wondering but a few other things.

Am I being an ungrateful bastard for complaining about this? Well,maybe but I never asked for a HD Collection to begin with so I don't think that matters.In any case,here are a few reasons why I'm not getting the Budokai HD Collection (besides the fact I already own the games).

Reason 1:Where's Budokai 2?

When a publisher decides to remaster a series of games from a certain console generation,it's common to include as many games as possible;usually 3 games are adapted if the games come from the PS2/Xbox/GC generation.However,that's not the case here as for some bizarre reason,Budokai 2 is completely skipped over and only 1 & 3 are remastered.

Now I don't know what the majority of DBZ fans think of Budokai 2 but I'm sure that the game does have its fans so why not include it? Is it because the game didn't really have a story? If that's the case,then why is Raging Blast 2 still being sold,since that has no story to speak of? For whatever reason,we're simply not getting Budokai 2,which would be fine if they included another game as compensation like Shin Budokai or Infinite World but we're not getting those games either.

Reason 2:Possibly no Kenji Yamamoto music!

For those of you not in the know,Kenji Yamamoto (not to be confused with the Metroid composer of the same name) was the man who composed the music for many DBZ games over the years,including the Budokai games,created various insert songs in the anime and eventually composed the score for Dragon Ball Kai.However in early 2011,Yamamoto was sacked by Toei due to claims of copyright infringment (basically some of the songs he made sounded very much like songs from Avatar and Terminator:Salvation,among others).

Becuase of this,Toei has tried to eliminate all traces of Yamamoto from their Dragon Ball products such as replacing as his DBKai score with the original DBZ score by Shunsuke Kikuchi and replacing the music in newer copies of Dragon Ball Raging Blast 2 with music from Budokai Tenkaichi 2 (strange considering Yamamoto possibly composed BT2's music).

What does this have to do with the HD Collection? Well,it's very likely that Namco Bandai is going to replace Yamamoto's score with new music.In fact there's already hints to this seeing as the announcement trailer had music that wasn't in any of the Budokai games.Like a lot of you DBZ fans,I grew up with the Budokai games and I really enjoy their songs so to see them replaced with something else is well,really damn annoying.Yes,the new songs may be good but I'd rather not have the music replaced to begin with.

Reason 3:There's only one good game on the entire collection!

I'll be very honest here and say that Budokai 1 is an absolute chore to play through.Sure,the story is pretty well done but everything else isn't that interesting.In fact everything was improved by a thousand in Budokai 3 so why include a game that people are only going to play for novelty value?

It would've made much more sense to include other well-loved DBZ games like Budokai Tenkaichi 3 and Super DBZ instead of Budokai 1 and just call the collection DBZ Mega Awesome Variety Collection SSJ5 Edition.Or something infinitely less retarded than what I just suggested.

So basically,Namco Bandai are giving us 2 PS2 games,only one of which is good by the way,with replaced music and no online play (I forgot to mention that too) for $60 when we could get those 2 games,in addition to the rest of the PS2 games,for far less with their original score intact and still have some money left over for other games.Thanks Bandai but you're going to need to do a lot better if you want to snatch my money.Now if you'll excuse me,I'm going to go listen to more EVA music for the rest of the afternoon and wait for Bandai to port Naruto:Ultimate Ninja Storm 1 to the 360 just to see what all the fuss is about.Good day and thanks for reading :)