Dragon Ball Xenoverse Ranking: C
Being a long-time Dragon Ball Z fan, I really wanted to like this game. The character creation essentially allows every DBZ fan to live his childhood dream of flying around being one of Earth’s greatest warriors. The visuals are nice and the voice acting – with some of the voice actors from the show – is superb. The game’s story/premise is a creative way to spin existing, well-known DBZ events in a new, fresh way.
And that’s about all I have to say on the positive end. Negatively, this game has atrocious and unfair gameplay. Here is a non-exhaustive list of features the computer AI has that you don’t:
The game is an exercise in frustration where in later fights where you’re facing multiple opponents, they just gang up on you and chain-attack you until you die and you can’t do anything about it. There are missions where you fight multiple Super Saiyans and all they do is juggle you with ultimate beam attacks.
It gets worse. There are ESCORT MISSIONS. You fail the mission if the inept ally AI dies, and oh yes the inept ally AI will die and you can do jack-all about it. There is a huge over-heaping of RNG in the game as well, where you need to grind for hours praying to RNG for drops – and get this: for a specific drop (the Dragon Balls), the chance goes DOWN the more Dragon Balls you have. And if all of this weren’t bad enough, as of this writing there has already been one round of nerfs. It’s like these developers are trying to put everything people hate about gaming into one package.
I grinded up to max level (if you’re curious, my allocation is 100 HP, 100 Basic, 37 Strike) only because I felt like I needed to “finish” a game I spent money on. Don’t make the same mistake I did.
Being a long-time Dragon Ball Z fan, I really wanted to like this game. The character creation essentially allows every DBZ fan to live his childhood dream of flying around being one of Earth’s greatest warriors. The visuals are nice and the voice acting – with some of the voice actors from the show – is superb. The game’s story/premise is a creative way to spin existing, well-known DBZ events in a new, fresh way.
And that’s about all I have to say on the positive end. Negatively, this game has atrocious and unfair gameplay. Here is a non-exhaustive list of features the computer AI has that you don’t:
- If the computer blocks, even if you attack from behind, the attack is blocked and the opponent takes no damage. If you block and the computer hits you in the back, you take full damage.
- Saiyans that go Super Saiyan stay in that form infinitely, which essentially means infinite Ki to spam ultimate attacks (and, yes, the computer does that liberally). Players that go Super Saiyan revert when Ki runs out.
- Many bosses get Super Armor, making them immune to flinching. Players can only get limited Super Armor in limited ways.
The game is an exercise in frustration where in later fights where you’re facing multiple opponents, they just gang up on you and chain-attack you until you die and you can’t do anything about it. There are missions where you fight multiple Super Saiyans and all they do is juggle you with ultimate beam attacks.
It gets worse. There are ESCORT MISSIONS. You fail the mission if the inept ally AI dies, and oh yes the inept ally AI will die and you can do jack-all about it. There is a huge over-heaping of RNG in the game as well, where you need to grind for hours praying to RNG for drops – and get this: for a specific drop (the Dragon Balls), the chance goes DOWN the more Dragon Balls you have. And if all of this weren’t bad enough, as of this writing there has already been one round of nerfs. It’s like these developers are trying to put everything people hate about gaming into one package.
I grinded up to max level (if you’re curious, my allocation is 100 HP, 100 Basic, 37 Strike) only because I felt like I needed to “finish” a game I spent money on. Don’t make the same mistake I did.