Gameplay
The game starts by dropping you in the middle of various fights between Goku and the franchise’s main villains – from Freiza to Cell, to Buu – but these are not full fights but a mere sampling of the gameplay you can expect when you get to the meat and bones of the game. It’s a trick that RPGs use regularly (re: start you off with a high leveled, fully-geared character and a strong boss monster before taking everything away and forcing you to fight rats.)
There’s no tutorial yet in this intro, but it’s easy to get a basic idea of the controls since there’s prompts appearing when you push buttons. Long time players of the Budokai Tenkaichi series might be familiar with the control schemes: you have two buttons for attacks, one for ki blast, and another for mobility. Then you have a key for lock-on, one for blocking, and trigger combinations that give you access to special and ultimate attacks.
Content and Customization
Once you get past the series of introductory fights, the game now allows you to create your own character. That’s right, you’re not going to use one of the main characters as your avatar (although you can switch to controlling those characters in the game). There’s a number of races to choose from, including Majin (Buu’s race), Saiyan, Human, and Namek (Piccolo’s Race.) you get to choose gender, body types, colors, and various facial features. The choice in clothes is limited at first, but you can unlock additional items of clothing and accessories while playing the game.
CPU Battles
Many new players got stumped with this at first, as the CPU battles and side missions are not accessed through the menu, but through locations in the hub, similar to the way Monster Hunter games offer missions. If you’re just starting out, all of these hubs will be unavailable (the NPC will state that the service is down at the moment, which probably led to many users thinking that the servers are down.)
In order to get into fights, you need to clear the first few quests first. The CPU battles and the side missions (called parallel quests) are locked until you clear the first few quests that make up the tutorial mission. The tutorial missions are fairly easy and consist of fighting Raditz. He’s naturally stronger than your character at first but you do get cpu-controlled Goku and Piccolo as allies, so you have a fair bit of leeway.
Once you’ve finished the tutorial mission, you can then access the CPU battles (through the Offline Battles NPC.) However, be aware that you’re not going to have access to majority of the roster, as you need to unlock them first (usually by beating them in the main story mode.) The story mode is done by visiting Trunks somewhere in the hub and doing time patrol, which is where you visit various timelines in the series and join the fights in order to correct time distortions (the main story is basically that a mysterious enemy has started fiddling with the timestream, changing crucial points in the series. E.g. Raditz defeating Goku and Piccolo instead of being killed through Goku’s sacrifice)
As mentioned above, there are MMORPG elements. Your character levels over time and can equip not only gear and accessories, but also skills that are either learned through “masters” that are found on the hub, or found randomly while playing. Much of the fun of the game will most likely involve you leveling your character and customizing his/her look and skill loadout.
Porting/Optimization
Since we’re playing the PC version, we know that a big concern among potential players is whether the game is optimized well or ported poorly. After all, the first Naruto and Final Fantasy XIII games on Steam suffered from a poor port job that resulted in inconsistent performance even for people with high end gaming rigs.
Thankfully, it seems like Bandai Namco Games has already learned their lesson and forced the developers to port the game with the PC in mind. Dragonball Xenoverse has all the necessary bells and whistles when it comes to graphics options: 4K support, variable frame rate (you can lock it to 30FPS, 60FPS, or let it run as fast as your hardware can), and the ability to toggle all the post processing effects.
What’s even better is that the game isn’t resource intensive. Even on my extremely outdated gaming PC (Ivy Bridge Pentium dual core @ 2.9 Ghz, 4 GB RAM, and an nVidia GT 240,) the game ran at a smooth 50-60fps on 1366 x 768 with everything at max settings.
Buy or Not?
It’s a must Buy if you’re a fan of Dragon Ball Z. Even if you don’t count the fact that it’s the first and so far only Dragon Ball game on the PC, the game is a solid fighting game and an addictive RPG all rolled into one, and will most likely keep you busy for a few weeks of playing, at the very least.
