Dragon Ball XenoVerse

see deal Dragon Ball Xenoverse - Xbox One $29.99 on Gamestop

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As much as I wanted to love the combat, I couldn’t. Every different combination of face buttons and resulting varying animations led to the same outcome: punching your opponent and making them fly far away from you. The strategy behind these fights never gets very deep, and I settled into a repetitive but effective pattern of punching and kicking a villain across the map, then charging up to get enough Ki to use an ultimate attack. (Annoyingly, those miss half the time—even when an enemy stands directly in front of you as your worthless beams pass through their body). Defense is in the same boat: when an enemy starts to get a combo going, dodging isn’t worth the stamina cost and blocking requires almost psychic-like reflexes to pull off, meaning I never really used them. Instead, I helplessly took the assaults, then returned the favor until someone’s health invariably ran out.

With combat a lackluster affair, the most enticing part of XenoVerse is the ability to create your own fighter. From Saiyans to Namekians, there’s a wide range of races to choose from, each with unique stats and fighting styles. Everything from their gender, size, shape, and voice is customizable. I settled on Muu, a mute female Majin known for her high defensive capabilities, fast speed, and slow stamina recovery. The story she starred in is straightforward but at least somewhat original; I’m happy it was more than a shameless rehash of the anime (though it felt like one at first). It was awkward to hear characters like Trunks and Goku refer to Muu as the gender-neutral “they” or, bafflingly, even as “he” during the in-game scenes, and the cheesy dialogue and terrible voice acting certainly didn’t help matters – but I’ll take that over playing as the series’ overused protagonists any day.

With character creation comes leveling up and stat allotment – an odd choice for a fighting game all about aliens with world-destroying energy beam powers and masculinity complexes to feature such heavy role-playing influence, but it’s cool to see a character I invested time in grow and ultimately become more powerful. The pacing of character progression in XenoVerse is great, as new powers and skills are unlocked gradually – and there are a lot of them. Crafting a skill set of hard-to-acquire special moves that worked with my fighter was half the fun.

Despite enjoying the RPG elements of tailoring Muu’s stats, equipment, and moves, taking a health potion after having the tar beaten out of me just doesn’t feel right for the Dragon Ball Z universe. XenoVerse would have been far better off eliminating items altogether and just making combat a more balanced experience, because many fights are completely unfair. One early story mission put me up against 20 enemies, demanding that I keep two NPCs alive the whole time. This wouldn’t have been so bad if my allies weren’t completely worthless, but as it is, it became a race to see if I could destroy all 20 opponents on my own before they took out the teammates I was forced to babysit. Another mission late in the game spiked in difficulty so severely that I was forced to grind – a boring and arduous process – for several hours before I leveled my character enough that I even had a chance to proceed.

In fact, after a while most missions became a frustrating tease. Just after expending most of my health potions to down a difficult enemy, a cutscene would play and the fight would resume with the majority of my opponent’s health restored. I’d lose, have to back out to the hub world, trek to the item shop to buy more potions, and repeat the process. Loading

Fortunately, distractions from the 30-hour single-player campaign aren’t hard to come by in XenoVerse. I found more joy teaming up with other players to take on unique missions called Parallel Quests that rewarded me with money, experience, and new moves and powers. Those rewards often make them more valuable than story missions. Stages feel cramped and static, but Parallel Quests often feature multiple levels to give them some variety. Unfortunately, the competitive multiplayer battles are the shallowest of XenoVerse’s modes. Quick and dirty, they’re over in minutes, meaning I spent more time getting the tedious matchmaking to find a game than I did actually playing.