Raging Blast takes full advantage of all of these things, offering over 70 characters (including transformations) – not as many as Tenkaichi 3's 150, but among them are never-before-seen additions designed by developer Spike in collaboration with artists involved with the manga and anime. We spotted a Super Saiyan Level 3 version of Broley, who's never appeared in the animation or the movies. You can collect costumes for all of them during the Story mode – a small QTE prompt will occasionally appear on the screen, and meeting it grants you access to a new outfit.
The main addition to the Budokai Tenkaichi formula this time around is environmental damage. The game's 10 stages are huge in scale, vertically as well as horizontally, and throwing your opponent into mountains, towers, buildings and anything else that might fall over causes it to collapse. You can properly tear a stage up with a Super Saiyan special attack, and they're big enough to support all the destruction you can throw at them. We saw a volcano stage full of magma waterfalls and teetering cliffs of igneous rock to fall onto/into/through.
The basics of the fighting system itself seem largely unchanged – it's still all about making full use of three-dimensional space and intercepting attacks – with the small addition of the Super Rising special attack system, which sends characters soaring upward through the entirety of the stage. It looks absolutely gorgeous, particularly the special attack cutaways. Playing one of the Battle Frames from the story mode, the camera direction made it look just like a smoother, HD version of the anime scene itself. The game runs at a consistent 60fps in comparison to previous titles' 30, and it's really noticeable in the smoothness of the action and facial animation. Characters' faces consistently change, even in the midst of battle – the general attention to detail adds an impressive level of polish to the game.
For fans, guilty and otherwise, the most exciting thing about Raging Blast is the new Dragon Ball Collection story mode. It's framed as a sequence of more than a hundred of the most famous fights from the series, all with the original script and voice acting worked in. But the outcomes aren't necessarily pre-determined – a huge selection of 'what-if' scenarios is also included, so you can see How Things Might Have Been had pivotal battles gone the other way or play through scenes that have never been imagined before.
Another pleasing detail is the inclusion of full Japanese and English voice acting in all versions of the game, which is great if Goku's voice makes you want to punch things. Raging Blast is out at the beginning of November – November 10 in the US, with a European release unlikely to be far off that.