Dragon Ball Z was one of the defining shows of my childhood. I’ve been a fan of the entire Dragon Ball anime series for as long as I can remember. I also have good memories of playing the games when I was young too. I remember popping Dragon Ball Z: Budokai into my PS2 back when I was 11 or 12. I loved that game. I also played the half-life mod Earth Special Forces an embarrassing amount. It’s been a long time since I’ve played anything Dragon Ball related, but when I heard about this game, I figured it’s been long enough and I should see what they’re up to.
Story
This game, like most other Dragon Ball games, has you revisit scenes from the manga and anime series. The twist this time around, is that the classic scenes are being tampered with by evil forces. Someone is changing the flow of time, killing off characters that should be alive, and keeping characters alive that should be dead. It’s up to you and Trunks to correct these changes in time, and to uncover the causes behind them.
If you’re not already a fan of the Dragon Ball series, this game is going to be a rough ride for you. No clear back story or information is given on any of the scenes or the characters, and it’s assumed that you know everything about Dragon Ball already. If you happen to not know anything about Dragon Ball, you’re going to be very confused as to what is going on.
Beyond the Dragon Ball scenes, there isn’t really a decent plot to the game. It’s all just summarized as “bad people doing bad things because they want to destroy and or take over the world.” The game itself, if not for the frustratingly difficult combat, feels really short as well. It’s surprising that even then it feels very drawn out. It keeps doing the Billy Mays “but wait there’s more” approach to battles.
The plot in Xenoverse is an extremely uninteresting part of the game, but if you’re not looking for a groundbreaking plot and just something to tie the battles together, it does the job just fine.
Gameplay
Xenoverse first and foremost is a fighting game. You have your light and strong attacks, ki blasts, and other specials you can do. Battles take place in a decently sized map, that allows you to fly into the air and smack your enemies across the field. While they’re based off locations in Dragon Ball, some of them do feel boring to fight in. It would be nice to see some more stuff going on in the levels. The fighting system does leave a bit to be desired as fighting games go. Most matches you’ll play will devolve into doing the same motions over and over. There’s no predicting what the enemy is going to do, it’s just keep mashing a couple buttons and then wait for them to hit you a couple times and repeat. Also the AI doesn’t know how to deal with the ki blast circle strafe. The bane of every boss in 90s video games makes an appearance in this game. I started doing it when my health was low, and I was never punished for it, at least not until the end when the final boss has a teleport attack which wrecked my strategy. Also many enemies, after about the halfway point through the game gain this “get off me” move, where anyone close to them takes damage. They usually activate it after you’ve hit them a couple times, so that’s another reason to just stay back and chuck your ki blasts. But don’t shoot any beam attacks from far away because they never hit but I loved the destructo disc because you can’t block it, and it tracks the enemies.
You can have two other allies to fight along side you and help you in your battles, online buddies or offline AI, but sometimes the AI is very.. unhelpful in this game. I think it might be that they don’t want to take the fun away from you if they’re not targeted by the enemy, but it sucks when you have little life and the AI is just chilling and not helping. You can heal your life with items in your slots, but you can only have one of each item equipped at a time. I don’t really agree it being so that you can only have one large health potion when you own 5, because it just makes it that more difficult. Actually, the game does have a nasty difficulty to it. It’s very unforgiving.
There’s a light MMO aspect to the game in the main hub location TokiToki. Here you can meet all kinds of people running around, ask them to go on coop battles with you, and fight against them. You can also go to shops to buy armor, special attacks, items, and accessories. I’m playing this on PS4 where you need PS Plus to have online functionality. I didn’t have many friends that played Xenoverse, so I didn’t bother with buying an entire PS+ subscription just for this game, so I never got to see the online aspects. It does offer you a free 2 day pass however. For offline mode, TokiToki city instead is populated with these motionless bots to not make it feel so empty.
Because of the mmo aspect in Xenoverse, you can customize your character. While it is nice to see a Japanese developed title with character customization, it is a bit lacking when compared to other games’ creation systems. I do like the races you can choose from, but I wish that there were a couple more options for customization, like for facial hair. It’s not too big of an issue though.
Once you create your first character, to make another you have to either delete them and start anew, or you go all the way through the game to unlock the other slots. You can also reset your character while keeping your story progress if you collect the seven dragon balls, I think, but good luck with that. The dragon balls are collected by defeating other time patrollers in the Parallel Quests. People have figured out the best places to find Patrollers, like this one where there’s a chance they’ll spawn after defeating Tien, Yamcha, and Krillin. Your biggest foe in this quest for the dragon balls is going to be the Random Number Generator. Basically, this algorithm randomly decides if you get a time patroller, if that time patroller drops a dragonball, and the number of the dragon ball awarded. I should make it clear that after 15+ hours of playing, I never got the last dragon ball. The way someone described it was that by the time you get 6 dragon balls, when you defeat a time patroller while trying to get the 7th, you have a 6/7 chance of getting nothing. It was really disappointing not being able to. I must’ve played the same parallel quest more than 60 times praying to the algorithm gods to have pity on me.
While navigating around TokiToki city, you can see some of the characters from the show milling about. As you go through the story, more and more of them are unlocked around town and for use in parallel quests. Some of them can take you up as an apprentice and teach you their unique specials as well. One issue I kept running into though is that I can never find someone when I want to. Each time you restart the game their locations in TokiToki are shuffled around, so I can never find the same person twice. For a long time I thought they just disappeared if you said no to becoming their apprentice, but no, they just swap around to different places.
And TokiToki in general, while pretty, is annoying at times without a fast travel system. You move fairly slow, especially for a series that has instant transmissions and flying, and while it isn’t that large of a location, it’s still grueling when you just want to ‘get’ somewhere. Especially when playing offline and there’s no reason to walk around besides going to different shops and doing parallel quests.
The fighting feels fine in a button mashing sense, the parallel quests are ok for something else to do, and the MMO-ness to characters makes it more interesting by having to level up abilities and characters. However the customization is a bit boring when compared to other games, the city would be better if you could move faster, and the dragon balls would be better if it were a bit more kind in giving them. I enjoyed the gameplay, but if it wasn’t Dragon Ball related, I most likely wouldn’t have been so kind.
Graphics & Sound
Dragon Ball Xenoverse is the first Dragon Ball game to be released on the new generation of consoles. I played it on PS4, and the graphics look pretty good. The style is the classic cel-shaded look to give a feel of an animated show, which I personally don’t mind. I know some people that really dislike this look in games, but I never found it to be too bad. But besides some aliasing issues, it looks clean and polished and definitely has the atmosphere of Dragon Ball. It’s not going to blow you away and win awards with its graphics, though.
The voice acting is very… anime. I didn’t mind it too much, but there were a lot of times that the voices pulled me out of the game experience. The subtitles as well. There’s many strange grammatical errors and misspelled words. I suppose it’s because it’s Japanese that some lines sound weird, because it’s directly translated, but I would think that the English localizers could’ve caught some of the grammar slip ups and spelling errors. Like ‘rue’ the day being spelled ‘rule’. The grammatical train wreck of “Will go do the Time Patrol?” is pretty bad as well. Also, I got an award for defeating multiple enemies with supers in one level, called “Adept Exhibitionist.” I suppose my character at the time could’ve been confused for one of those, so I’ll give it a pass.
Conclusion
If you’re a fan of Dragon Ball, you’ll be able to get past the nagging flaws like I did and have an enjoyable experience. If you aren’t however, you will be let down by the assuming story, the repetitive and sometimes annoying combat, and the bad design choices. After all is said and done for the fans as well, there isn’t too much replayability to keep you around. The fighting system quickly devolves into going through the same motions over and over, and there aren’t any good side quests to keep your interest. Barring DLC, there wouldn’t be much to do in the game after you’ve finished the main plot. However, I didn’t have PS Plus to play online, and maybe that’s the shining gem which will keep you entertained after the story is over. As I see it though, it’s a fun Dragon Ball game which annoyed me at times, but one that I enjoyed my time with.
6/10
