#this is taking me back to when i did cel shading exclusively.. i miss it tbh

[lutarimon]

two… count em… TWO! overlay comms for two lovely people on grundos cafe :3 i had SO much fun with these in particular.

[xb-squaredx]

Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 Review: The Darkest Timeline

There are….a LOT of Dragon Ball games out there, so many that they start to blur together. The latest flavor of the month, the Xenoverse series, does admittedly have an interesting premise though. Players are inducted into the Time Patrol, an organization that works to correct any inconsistencies in the universe’s timeline and ensure events work out as they were originally intended. For our purposes, that means making sure the classic fights of the Dragon Ball series end as they originally did. I can’t speak much for the first Xenoverse game, but I DID play the second one, and while it has a strong premise, multiple issues present in the gameplay and overall story serve to bog the game down, making for a flawed, bloated experience.

Just as in the first game, the big draw here is creating your own custom characters and inserting them into the Dragon Ball universe and I definitely see the appeal. Players have five races to choose from, each with their own ups and downs. Saiyans are great attackers, and can later gain a Super Saiyan transformation to bolster their offense, for one. Humans are balanced overall, while Namekians rely more on greater health and defense, as do the Majin class, with Frieza’s race generally lacking in stamina but doing well elsewhere. Each race also gains some exclusive perks with certain major questlines in the game, usually leading to their own unique powerup, though most of these quests are exercises in frustration. Sparing with Vegeta to unlock your Super Saiyan form is fine, as is rising up the ranks of the Frieza force, but the other races aren’t so lucky, their challenges being tedious, with Namekians getting the worst mission of them all: constantly having to find Dragon Balls while fending off attacks from Frieza’s forces. Majin’s will also find that their exclusive transformation, the Pure Form, is pretty lackluster. Other than that, the races play similarly enough that players should be able to just pick their favorite…that said, the fact that each character is treated as its own save file and you’d have to start from absolute scratch in the game to play as the other races…I didn’t exactly get to play around with them all and stuck with my initial choice for the bulk of the game.

The game itself is a pretty standard affair when it comes to the many Dragon Ball games out there. Everything from Ki blasts to Instant Transmission is included here, with a combat system that’s simple, but flexible enough to result in some fun bouts that feels true to the source material. Slamming foes across the wide-open stages, then teleporting behind them to nail them with a Kamehameha never gets old…at least when it works. The game’s systems feel a little finicky at times, with enemies randomly popping out of combo strings or your teleported strike not quite lining up. The camera getting stuck in certain structures can also be a hassle, but generally you can fly away and reorient yourself fairly well.

I enjoyed the wide- array of abilities players can acquire through the game, some as rewards for completing quests and some learned right from characters in the series. Want to learn Krillin’s Destructo Disk or Vegeta’s Final Flash? Track them down and you can certainly do so. From blast-style special moves to melee-oriented moves, there are even the rare buff or debuff moves to mess around with, coupled with flashy Ultimate moves to finish foes off…if you can line it up correctly anyway. Personally speaking, a great many moves in the game…aren’t all that great, or are either too specialized or impractical to use all that regularly. The stronger moves tend to have a LOT of prep time, flashy animations that play before the attack that give opponents ample time to flee, even if you do your best to combo into the moves and hit a downed opponent. While the combat is certainly fun, there are some real glaring issues when it comes to the game’s overall balance.

At the start of the game, enemies are pretty laid-back about getting smacked around, and you’ll often barely be in any danger, but the difficulty ramps up quite quickly and after a point computers start to blatantly cheat and exploit their advantages for all they’re worth in lieu of providing something more fair. If you happen to use the guard breaking attack to drain their stamina, for example, you’ll find it recharges for CPUs FAR faster than it ever would for a player, and seeing as stamina is used to teleport out of combos, this means that even if you play the game optimally, the computer won’t let you get too much damage off. Some later-game optional quests even have them automatically dodge special attacks and blatantly use input-reading to react to actions the player hasn’t even performed yet. Coupled with missions in which multiple enemies will gang up on you at a time, the game gets actively less fun to play the further you go. While there certainly are a lot of missions, from the story missions to side-quest analogues in Parallel Quests, raid-bosses in Expert Missions as well as multiplayer sparring, I lost interest in the game rather quickly and found a lot of the extra content simply wasn’t worth the frustration.

It’s a shame, because the game has some strong moments and fun nods to the series that nearly won me back over to the side of enjoying the game. It was just fun to learn from Krillin, to run around the hub world of Con Con City and learn emotes from other in-game characters that cosplayed as Yamcha or Tien. Some story beats were cool, bringing back characters I hadn’t seen in a long time and in many ways, Xenoverse 2 feels like it’s trying to be a “greatest hits” of the Dragon Ball universe…but it still falls short.

With a set-up around fixing inconsistencies in the Dragon Ball timeline, the game has some great opportunities for some “What if?!” style stories. Unfortunately, the game always drops you in RIGHT before history has a chance to be altered, and said alterations are usually either “villain gets a sudden powerup!” or “a movie villain shows up suddenly!” What good ideas there are, like you and Goku tag teaming against Frieza and Cooler on a dying Namek or both Nappa and Vegeta deciding to go Great Ape IMMEDIATELY upon fighting the Z Warriors is drowned out by the same tired scenarios every single Dragon Ball game seems intent on recreating. It’s gotten tiring to start a game like this fighting Raditz, then Vegeta and Nappa, then the Ginyu Force, then Frieza, and so on and so on. Despite characters from Dragon Ball GT being included in the game as well, the main story does next to nothing with them, being relegated to side-quests. It’s a plot filled with missed opportunities. There are some parallel quests that attempt to shake things up, but you have to wade through an awful lot of mediocre ones to find them.

On the whole Xenoverse isn’t too bad on presentation, the cel-shading making the characters look about as good as any other Dragon Ball game (even if FighterZ looks much better in my eyes), with a decent rock-filled soundtrack and most of the iconic voice cast being retained, but there are still some rough spots. Many environments don’t look all that impressive, for one, and while the voice work is generally OK, there are many small issues. The opening cinematic, for one, has atrocious lip-synching, to the point that it’s nonexistent, alongside voice direction that doesn’t reflect the mood of the scene. Bardock is meant to yell Frieza’s voice in rage, but merely says it with grumbling annoyance. Sometimes spoken lines don’t match up with the lines in the text boxes, and at times emphasis is placed on the wrong parts of sentences. They’re small flaws, but they begin to add up over time and really distracted me. On top of that, various voice lines get cut off by the transition to cutscenes if you defeat enemies fast enough, and yet at times the game will leave the enemy with a sliver of health and force the dialogue to play out with no rhyme or reason …and I’m not sure which one is a bigger annoyance. Lastly, for the Nintendo Switch version that I played, the bulk of the game runs at 30 FPS, though one-on-one matches get a bump up to 60 FPS. It didn’t really bother me much, but it’s something I figured I should mention.

On the subject of that, the Switch version comes with unique motion control options for performing special and ultimate attacks with the Joy Cons. In a fast-paced game like this though, I choose to ignore them entirely. I also pretty much ignored all possible local or multiplayer modes, so I have no real opinion on them. I’m fairly certain the game is better with friends at the helm of allies, as opposed to the at times brainless AI though.

I haven’t played many Dragon Ball games in the last few years due to fatigue. Many of the games kept trying to reinvent the wheel, while simultaneously barely doing anything to differentiate themselves from each other. While Xenoverse has a lot going for it, the appeal of a created-character in the Dragon Ball universe is a strong one, I find the combat to be a bit too limited and the AI too cheap to really enjoy or recommend. And while the game allows you to duke it out with other players, it’s not quite a fighting game and I think you could do better with games that already exist or will be available soon.

I don’t hate Xenoverse 2 by any stretch, and I did have fun while playing a good deal of it, but it’s a series that’s not for me in the end. In a game with such a strong premise and having so many elements it could have pulled from other games, it feels a bit half-baked. Lacking in creativity and excelling in a lot of fluff and frustration, Xenoverse 2 is a game that should have aimed higher and seems instead content with minor tweaks to the first game, instead of taking the time to really iron out the kinks and make something special.

Until next time,

-B