Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Z released last year, and despite an initial string of setback preventing online play from being enjoyable, the game was actually pretty solid. While the game did have some gameplay issues, its follow up, Xenoverse fixes some of these things. The result is a game that is all the better for it.
Xenoverse adds a twist to the formula in Battle of Z by actually allowing players to make their own custom created characters to play in a new story. Players can pick from one of five races including Saiyans, Humans, Majin, Namekians, and Freeza’s race, which strangely wasn’t given a name. Each race has strengths and weaknesses. Depending on the race, males and females can have their own advantages and disadvantages. The story actually a smaller scaled version of the Korean-only MMO, Dragon Ball Online. It actually functions as more of a prequel though. Your character becomes the newest member of the Time Patrol, a group that Trunk and the Kaioshin of Time run in order to fix errors in the time-line of the series. As you work through missions you discover that an evil group of people are the ones responsible. In the meantime, you are thrown in abridged versions of key story points. You can also undertake extra side missions to grind money or experience. You can even play these missions online. The various characters can also become your mentor. They will teach you their skills in order to customize your move-set further. Of course if you want to just battle as an iconic character in VS. mode, there’s that option.
No matter which mode you play with, the game will let you fight battles up to 3 on 3 fights. After assembling a team, you can choose various costumes to fight in. Battles can take place in the air, underwater, or on land. Combat is simplified to make performing actions easier. Skills are mapped to shortcuts accessible through holding the right trigger and pressing a face button. Standard attacks are light, heavy and ki blasts. To access super attacks, players just need to hold down both trigger buttons and press a face button. It’s a simple system to work with, but the placement for ascending and descending are in weird places, making some movement awkward. And while locking on an enemy makes it easier to track and attack them, sometimes when you are in a combo and miss, you will continue to attack air instead, futilely. They should have made the tracking tighter to prevent that. Despite these small issues, the game is plenty fun, especially when online with friends.
The online is another issue that the game has. The game will kick you back to the title screen if you are disconnected. This is assuming you can even get connected in the first place, as the servers are down quite often as of this writing. While I can imagine these problems will eventually be fixed, for now it’s really annoying. You can’t give gifts or Zenny to other players, so towards the endgame, Zenny becomes useless. And despite the fact that it looks like there are several available slots for other custom made characters, there is no way in the beginning to make new ones. You need to complete the story mode first, which is annoying. Players don’t have the luxury of experimentation without sacrificing progress, which is a terrible oversight. The music is decent, and the voice casts from both the Japanese and Funimation dubs are present. It’s a fun game, but hopefully updates can fix some of these issues. Fans will be able enjoy this game despite those shortcomings, so if you like the series, give it a shot.
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