For a long time Dragon Ball game fanatic, the original Dragon Ball Xenoverse felt like a breath of fresh air. Yes, fighting the Saiyans, Frieza, Cell and Buu were still the main course but there were other trappings around it. You were your own character! Unlike Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi from 2011, it was actually really well done! You could be a Buu, or a Namekian or even a member of Frieza’s race if you wanted to be! While there was still work to be done, the original Xenoverse was the first Dragon Ball game in a long time that didn’t simply feel like it was going through the motions.
Unfortunately, Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 isn’t quite the same breath of fresh air. I mean, how could it be? It has the number 2 in the title, which typically means ‘more of the same’. At times, this game doesn’t even feel like a sequel. It feels more like what the ideal version of the original Xenoverse should have been. There’s nothing wrong with that, the original Xenoverse was a fun game, but not reaching out even farther prevents Xenoverse 2 from being the first great Dragon Ball video game.
The game is played very much like the original. Combos are basic one-or-two button affairs and super moves are just pressing a combination of two buttons. If the player is looking for a fighting game with the mechanics of Street Fighter, they should look elsewhere. This title, like the Tenkaichi games back on the Playstation 2, is something I’d consider a Dragon Ball simulator as opposed to an actual fighting game. The player flies around, hits some stuff, throws some beams, teleports behind folks (like all other things, with the press of a button) and transforms. It’s simple, not very complex fun.
That same simplicity also holds it back a little bit. I spent over 20 hours with the game and towards the end, it was getting too formulaic for me. There’s only so many times that I can jam on square and triangle, knock somebody away and throw a beam at them before I’ve had enough. I wasn’t looking at this game for its depth of mechanics, so it’s not really a big deal.
If you’re going into Xenoverse 2 hoping to see more diverse alternate histories to the original Dragon Ball Z storyline, save your money. It’s generally more of the same from the previous game. The villains from the original game - Towa and Mira - are still going through time and creating disturbances to the original Dragon Ball story. This mostly results in foes being powered up - like suddenly Cell is purple and way stronger than he is supposed to be.
The main gimmick Towa and Mira go to now is bringing in movie villains - being billed at as from parallel universes since these characters are not canon. So instead of just Super Saiyan Goku fighting Frieza, you also get his brother Cooler by his side. There are some neat tie-ins to the original Xenoverse if you happen to have your old save lying around, but about 90% of the game’s main story feels like more of the same from the last title. Really, to pull a phrase from Kingdom Hearts, it feels like it could be called Xenoverse: Final Mix.
The main story might be lacking, but the trappings around it are not. Xenoverse 2 retains the hybrid MMO and Fighting game style from the original title and expands on it a bit. In the new hub Conton City, which is much bigger than the original’s Toki-Toki city, there is much to do and see. For starters, there are two options. You can play in an online version of the city to make it more MMO like - other created characters are running around and you can use basic quick typing phrases in public chat to try to get a team together - or you can play in an offline version. This has no impact on the number of quests that are available and outside of being able to recruit a party among strangers, there are no differences. While the gimmick of being able to see other player characters run around in a game I mostly played solo is neat, I generally stuck to the offline mode because it felt like while in online mode certain NPCs took forever to pop in.
Speaking of, load time the loading times are pretty poor. While the game runs very smoothly, 60 FPS I believe, the time between the missions you go on lasts forever as a long, white LOADING screen pops up. It’s not enough to make you want to drop the game in favor of something a little snappier, but it is definitely noticeable.
Everything non-story in the game can be done with actual humans if the player so desires, even in the offline lobby. I prefer to play solo in this sort of game, but from what I did play with others online the game did seem competent. I had some issues finding players to fight against at times, but when I did play it seemed to go totally fine. Only for some strategies on expert missions - more on those later - did I really feel there was a need for humans over AI partners.
Back on Conton City though, the main new gimmick of this game to separate it from the original would have to be the race factions. In an MMO, the player’s avatar frequently does quests for different factions in order to unlock new items and stuff specific to that group of people. While there is no reputation to grind in Xenoverse 2, the idea is much the same. This is being done for the perks.If you do everything to completion, you can unlock the hidden ending to the game, but that isn’t made apparent until you complete at least one. The missions that the character goes through for these factions range in quality, but I actually spent the majority of my time with Xenoverse messing with the different faction options.
The human faction is the one to go to if you want an excuse to do the game’s many different parallel quests. The faction leader, Hercule or Mr. Satan if you’re feeling nasty, gives tutorial-like quests. Land a combo of 35 or more hits, do x number of parallel quests - parallel quests are a returning feature from the original game, think of it as random battles among the game’s cast. The Saiyan faction is just training with Vegeta. It’s pretty basic. When you’re a Saiyan, you turn Super Saiyan through this training route, but the Saiyan faction is definitely the least exciting of the main lot. My personal favorite of the factions, the Frieza race, has more of a narrative to it than the others. You work your way up through Frieza’s ranks - starting with either Zarbon or Dodoria - and eventually become Frieza’s right-hand man. The next event in the Frieza campaign unlocks seemingly randomly, but it never seemed to be a chore.
The other two factions are where the dip in quality comes from. The Namekians are the most annoying faction in the game by a fair amount. I would even put the annoyance they generate up there with infamously annoying video game personalities like Navi from Ocarina of Time. Every three or so missions you do in the game world - whether they be parallel quests, story missions or other faction quests - the player gets a notification saying that Guru’s house is under attack. The player then rushes over to Guru’s house, does a mission - collect the dragon balls - and protects the place for a short amount of time. You rinse and repeat until Nail lets you see Guru. Then you get to do those quests again until you see Guru again. The rewards for seeing Guru are worth it, definitely, but the constant notification of “GURU’S HOUSE IS UNDER ATTACK” is awful. Once all the rewards were earned from the Namekians, I simply let Guru’s house fall to attacks. After every mission I was still warned that his house was being attacked (or sometimes that it was more dangerous now)...so I generally assume the planet Namek in my game looks like an Animal Crossing village that was abandoned for years at a time right now.
The final faction, the Buu faction, is the most passive of the lot. The player feeds Buu food and then he reproduces. The little Buus go out and gives the player items if they are fed. Rinse and repeat until you have six (nine if the player is a Buu) little Majins running around causing havoc. Food is not purchasable - it’s gathered from running around the overworld, talking to NPCs and doing little quests. After beating the game normally - no hidden ending of course since the Buu faction was not done - I had maybe one or two Buus birthed. So more food had to be hunted down. Truthfully, it did not take more than a couple of hours to grab the food needed to fill out Buu, but that couple of hours was spent flying around the same parts of the world looking for the same bits of food. It felt like wasted play time.
Overall, the factions are a solid addition to the game. It helps the world feel more alive and definitely contributes to the value of the product given how short the main story is. It makes race choice seem even more relevant than in the original title and you’re never really wanting for more things to do.
Adding to the game’s MMO-like nature is the inclusion of expert level quests. Think of these like raids or dungeons from your typical MMO. One big, strong enemy challenges your group of six players to a fight. These fights often have more complicated mechanics to them - players have to stop each other from being mind controlled, players have to kill lesser bad guys in order to give everybody more time to kill the big bad guy - and are a great addition to the fairly standard ‘beat up these guys’ quests you typically go on. Really, I’d love to see all the various side missions and online mechanics of this title implemented into a more mechanically intense fighting game to see how they’d hang.
Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 is a very enjoyable game. It takes what the original did and expands upon it. Notice the key word. "Expands." If it were billed as an expansion - Burning Crusade to Xenoverse’s vanilla - I would say that this is about as great a value package as one can expect. As a stand alone game, even with all the fun side content added, this does not feel like a $60 sequel. It’s a decent step-up from the original and should a third Xenoverse title be made and they actually try something a little different with the story, it should be the best Dragon Ball game ever made.
For now, this title is a very good anime-licensed video game.
3.5 out of 5.
