Dragonball has been around for over 30 years now and has had a considerable number of video games. In the last decade its been mainly beat-em-ups, but there is a problem.

The series ended around 15 years ago and when you’re making new games, you tend to want new characters. This led to what I consider scraping the bottom of the barrel for new characters ( it’s a bad sign when one of the cover characters and thus selling points is Japanese exclusive OVA villain number 15). When it came to making an online game (which never came out in the West)  they solved that problem by making some all new characters to interact with, oh and making  your own character based on some races in the franchise.

Dragonball Xenoverse

Xenoverse took those characters and the character creation concept to make a sort of beat-em- up rpg mix in which you create your own character and fight through the timeline of the Dragonball franchise (making right what others made wrong), gaining new moves from the franchise and outfits, growing stronger as you progress.

The races include humans, Sayians (which I’m forever annoyed doesn’t show their tails, which would make them at least look different from humans) Namekians and Majins. If you don’t know any of these names, you’re not a Dragonball fan and this game is definitely for fans only.

Making a female Sayian go Super Sayian and then unleashing a Frieza’s planet-destroying attack on the cast of Dragonball GT may be fun for fans of the series, but if you never saw it, chances are that it won’t mean anything to you.

The combat is rather simplistic. I played it with a keyboard and mouse (because I didn’t have the game console to play it) and though I felt it would be better with a controller, I was able to complete it, though mainly by abusing Super Sayian. Oh yes it’s fine for you to spam unlimited ultimate attacks, problem is when fighting against  a computer controlled one, that’s almost all they do, which gets very annoying when you’re fighting multiple ones at once. Not helped by CPU controlled allies being idiotic, which gets even more annoying when you’re up against a timer.

Fighting with other players online was preferable to the Zero IQ computers (though chances are servers are down by the time you read this  –  expect that to happen with older games that have online multiplayer) but then again my strategy was just to power up, go Super Sayain and spam Golden Frieza’s Death Beam.

As I mentioned, this game is clearly for Dragonball fans and if you are one, you will enjoy being able to make your own character and taking part in historic battles, but if you’re not… well this game is not for you.

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