#I like fu a lot in xenoverse less in dragon ball heroes

[bruttomisandro]

It's so obvious that Glorio and Arinsu are Mira and Towa's retconned new version

[kinogane]

Meditations on Playing as Earthlings in Dragon Ball Xenoverse, Part 1

As a battle shounen series especially amenable to fans making their own original characters, I found it a bit surprising that, best I can tell, the first Dragon Ball game that let you create your own character was the Asia-only MMO Dragon Ball Online launched in 2010. Besides being the precursor to the Xenoverse games in some ways - it introduced female Majin, Mira, Towa, and Fu - it’s also the first game that has to deal with a fairly minor Dragon Ball-specific issue: do you let people play as Earthlings?

Broadly speaking, a significant portion of MMO players are largely content to play as human or human-like characters. A 2019 analysis of World of Warcraft character data found that humans were the second-most common race, and only narrowly less common than the most common race. Humans are over two times more common than the other races in Guild Wars 2. And while I don’t think there’s any comparable data for the Xenoverse games (or Dragon Ball Online, for that matter), this is what I saw not long after I joined a multiplayer lobby:

If we accept the framing of “video games as escapism”, this isn’t that surprising. Sure, for some people the whole point is to do fantastical shit and be fantastical beings that you can’t be in real life for any number of reasons, but for others, the whole point of “escaping” into another world is to still be yourself and see a facsimile of yourself exist in that world. Through your avatar, you may adopt certain facets of the world, but core to the draw is that, at least in some identifiable way, the person running around and doing all the neat shit is you.

So naturally, you’d think, people will want to play as themselves, Earthlings are a thing in Dragon Ball, so a Dragon Ball game is going to let you play as Earthlings, right? Well, yeah, but also, no, absolutely not, do you know anything about Dragon Ball?

There’s two wrinkles to this line of thinking that are relevant to Dragon Ball in particular. First, there’s the fact that Earthlings in the Dragon Ball series proper are almost universally punch lines. The most prominent Earthling heroes, specifically Krillin, Tien, and Yamcha, more or less exist as holdovers from previous eras, because given the worldbuilding and narrative trajectory of Dragon Ball, they are effectively incapable of staying relevant as action protagonists. If they manage to be in the spotlight for any amount of time without getting punted back into irrelevancy, it borders on being anomalous.

The only notable exception is Bulma, since she’s always served an entirely different narrative function, and even then, it’s a narrative function that is usually only relevant for the introduction and conclusion of an arc at most. It would probably be interesting to see what kind of dumb bullshit Bulma runs into and has to deal with given her station in life, but you’re basically never going to see that significantly explored in Dragon Ball media, let alone in a Dragon Ball video game where action, especially direct combat, is everything.

(Everything I just wrote also makes pre-crisis Videl all the more fascinating of a presence, but I’ll get back to that.)

Second, and very related, Saiyans exist.

If you knew or were a kid (especially a boy) who was really into Dragon Ball, there was a good chance they wanted to be a Saiyan, because going Super Saiyan and having spiky hair and power literally glowing around you and yelling really loud and being super strong and throwing big ol’ freaking energy blasts was, like, the coolest thing ever. It is the quintessential Dragon Ball power fantasy, for a series that for a while (and arguably still is) centrally obsessed with power. For a lot of people, that is Dragon Ball. Saiyans and everything surrounding them are Dragon Ball.

Combine that with the fact that Saiyans are almost visually indistinguishable from Earthlings (as a holdover from Goku being retroactively made a Saiyan) and the primary visual difference (a tail) being completely optional and at this point completely irrelevant, and really, why would anyone make their character an Earthling? There’s effectively no downside to making a Saiyan instead: you still look like an Earthling, you get access to the Saiyan set of powers, and you don’t lose access to anything even remotely comparable.

Dragon Ball Online’s answer to this issue was to not allow players to create Saiyan characters. You can only pick between human, Namekian, and Majin races. However, as a human, after reaching a high enough level and wishing on the Dragon Balls, you can actually gain the ability to turn Super Saiyan, because hey, as it turns out, you’re a direct descendent of both Goku and Vegeta so you totally had Saiyan blood in you all this time, you just couldn’t tap into it until now, WHADDYA KNOW.

In Dragon Ball Heroes, your avatar can be a Saiyan (and is a Saiyan by default), but cannot be an Earthling - the only thing even slightly comparable is being an android a la 17, 18, and Cell, and they’re only comparable if you accept describing Android 18 and Krillin as both Earthlings. It’s technically true, but in the context of power as defined in Dragon Ball, it doesn’t particularly feel accurate.

You can create a character in Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi, but they must be a male Saiyan. That’s the start and end of it. You can change their abilities and design, but they must be a male Saiyan.

Dragon Ball Fusions lets you create an Earthling, and in fact, the default stand-in, Tekka, is an Earthling himself. Additionally, given that different races have access to different abilities, there are actual reasons you would want to play as an Earthling rather than a Saiyan. But this is at least slightly undercut by the game’s primary power-up mechanic, Fusion, being race-agnostic, which flattens the gameplay experience from race to race, and the ability for Saiyan avatars to access Super Saiyan at Level 88, the level at which Earthling counterparts instead learn... a stronger Kamehameha.

To summarize, when it comes to Dragon Ball games with character creation, one game doesn’t really offer anything all that comparable in exchange for playing as an Earthling and giving up the ability to go Super Saiyan, one game makes all Earthlings effectively sleeper Saiyans, and two games don’t even let you play as Earthlings at all. So what do we make of the Xenoverse games?

(continued)