Dragon Ball Xenoverse is the latest in a line of over a hundred video games based on Akira Toriyama’s enduring manga and wildly popular anime adaptation, Dragon Ball Z. With the best and most true-to-the-anime visuals of any DBZ title to date, and a story that messes with the established DBZ story, you could be forgiven for wondering if developer Dimps might have finally cracked the code on making a really good Dragon Ball Z game. But right from the moment the game begins, something feels amiss and that sensation never really goes away.
The first thing that happens when you begin the game is that you are dropped into the classic Super Saiyan Goku vs. Frieza fight from the show. Which is awesome. The game then does absolutely nothing to help you – it doesn’t tell you what the controls are, how to fight, how to control the camera. What this means is that your first impression of the game is of an unwieldy, confusing fighter with an awful camera system. If the game moved on from there, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad but it doesn’t. You go through two more fights without any instruction whatsoever before finally arriving in a high-tech looking city where you meet Time Patrol Trunks, a version of the time-travelling teen from a Korean Dragon Ball MMO that nobody played.
Trunks can see that something (or someone) is messing with the established DBZ timeline, creating paradoxes and new timelines full of grim new futures. He uses the Dragon Balls to summon Shenron and wishes for a warrior to help him restore the broken timelines to their former glory. Only after you get through all of this does the game finally decide to give you a tutorial on how to actually play it properly. If you’re cluey, you probably figured out how it all works well before reaching this point. It’s an incredibly weird design choice and is a pretty player-hostile way to open your game. Beware, though – some tutorial menus will only open once so if you accidently skip them or fail into internalise their deep wisdom before pressing A, there may be no way to bring them back up and you’ll just have to figure it out on your own. Another weird design choice.
It’s at this point that Dragon Ball Xenoverse’s coolest new feature is introduced. You are allowed to build a custom character. You’re allowed to select from different races like Human, Saiyan, Namekian, Majin and Frieza Race (somehow, after nearly twenty five years, they still don’t have a name for whatever the hell Frieza is so the game just calls them Frieza Race. I laughed at that for a good ten minutes while creating my character.)
The creation process is simple – each race has specific pros and cons and you have a surprisingly wide range of cosmetic options to choose from. I created a surprisingly tall, grey-skinned Majin female who dressed in red, white and blue. You can then take your character into various important fights from Dragon Ball Z continuity and beat the hell out of anyone who opposes you to ensure the fight ends the way it did in the show. This is another area that bugged me – the main quest tries to set itself apart from other DBZ games by assuring you it will not be adhering strictly to the story before promptly forcing you to adhere strictly to the story. There are lots of different ways these timeline-altering brawls begin (Raditz escapes Goku’s grab and Piccolo’s Makensosoppo attack kills Goku alone, Captain Ginyu successfully switches bodies with Vegeta) but they all end the same way they did in the show.
The fighting itself straddles the line between maddeningly clunky and a perfect representation of the show’s eye-popping, rapid-fire battles. You can deliver a light attack by pressing X and a heavy attack by pressing Y. Holding Y charges a more powerful punch. Pressing B fires of a single ball of Ki energy, holding it fires of a stream of them. All of your combos are tied the X and Y buttons and none of them really require any skill beyond “mash whatever you like.” A deep and technical fighting system this is not. As has become the norm in DBZ games, you’ve also got a three-tier stamina bar that must be filled before you can unleash more powerful attacks. You can fire off large attacks by simply holding the R-trigger and A, B, X or Y, which will use one of your stamina bars. Super attacks use all three stamina bars and are performed by holding both the L-and-R-triggers down together and hitting one of the face buttons. I couldn’t help but feel like I should have to work a lot harder than pressing three buttons together to fire off a devastating super move.
Moving about feels incredibly sluggish at first until you realise that holding down the L-trigger makes you fly really fast. It can still be really hard to get a bead on your opponent however, but the game does have a targeting system so that you can lock onto them with ease and focus them down. This does come at the price of your frequently bumping into environmental objects that are outside your field of view. At one point, I was so busy chasing down Nappa that I ran into a mountain. A whole mountain. The camera then started trying to get behind me, making the screen flash crazily as it popped in and out from behind me.
Once you actually get to grips with the controls and wrangle the argumentative camera into doing what you want, it’s actually possible to have a fight that looks and feels very much like the anime. The sound effects have all been pulled from the show and whipping around your enemy, delivering a flurry of brutal punches and teleporting behind them as they ready a super move is extremely cool and you feel as powerful as the crazy characters on the screen. I just wish the developer had put some more work into the combat mechanics and created a fighting system with a bit more depth because, though you can certainly fight people in this game, I still don’t know that you could call it a fighting game per se.
I want to go back to the character creation for a moment, though. One of the reasons the game gets you to create a character is because, in addition to all the superpowered beatdowns going on, there’s a bit of an MMO thing going here too. Between fights, you’re dropped into the future city hub world. It functions as a store area so you can buy new moves or cosmetic items for your character and as a lobby for players that are looking for group. Partying up means you can jump into 2v2 or 3v3 fights online rather than duking it out by yourself against the AI. The shift in gears between this area and the fighting arenas is pronounced. When you’re in a fight, the game hands you all the phenomenal cosmic power that goes with being a Dragon Ball Z character. You are a force of nature. Then you get dropped back into the hub world and your abilities are limited to “jump feebly” and “run slowly”. I felt so constricted in the hub area that I ended up wanting to spend as little time there as possible.
The bulk of your time in the hub world will be spent upgrading your character. The customisation options on offer are surprisingly broad – you can use points from levelling up to fine-tune your character’s fighting ability. If you rely on hand-to-hand, drop points into strength and max health. If you’re more of a distance player then make sure your stamina and Ki attacks are properly buffed. You’ve also got lots of slots available for different moves, which can be unlocked through the course of the game or bought with in-game currency in the hub. It really does allow you to inject some extra personality and style into your character. It’s the game’s best feature and I’d like to see more of it in future DBZ games.
It’s worth taking a moment to talk about the graphics on offer here. Dimps have done an amazing job on the visuals. Everything looks and feels just like the anime, the characters move and emote just as they do on the show and in the manga and look like cartoons come to life. Attacks and special powers look amazing and the catastrophic results are often extremely pretty to watch. Dimps have still gone with the stylistic decision found in earlier DBZ titles to have the cel-shaded look begin and end with character models, so backgrounds and environments feel a little drab as a consequence but they’re rarely what you’re looking at anyway.
Fans of Dragon Ball Z are going to snatch up Dragon Ball Xenoverse and they’ll more than likely have a great time with it. It’s everything you love about the show in video game form. For die-hard fighting game fans looking for depth and a rewarding technical combo system, you’ll still want to look elsewhere.
Review Score: 5.0 out of 10
Highlights: Lovely visuals; character creation system is great
Lowlights: Bland combo mechanics; not very intuitive
Developer: Dimps
Publisher: Bandai Namco
Released: 26/2/2015
Platform: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC
Reviewed on Xbox One
———-
