Saiyan Battle Of Xenoverse

Brings all the frenzied battles between Goku and his fiercest rivals, such as Vegeta, Frieza, Cell and many more, with new gameplay design. Players revisit all famous battles from the series through their own custom-created Avatars, which are connected to Trunks and many other characters. With the help of Trunks, travel through time and intervene with the past to restore Xenoverse

Takes most of what I like about the anime and role-playing games and combines them into a single, great-looking package. It’s strange, then, that it mostly neglects the single most important thing that makes Xenoverse great: the fighting.

As much as I wanted to love the combat, I couldn’t. Every different combination of face buttons and resulting varying animations led to the same outcome: punching your opponent and making them fly far away from you. The strategy behind these fights never gets very deep, and I settled into a repetitive but effective pattern of punching and kicking a villain across the map, then charging up to get enough Ki to use an ultimate attack.

Defense is in the same boat: when an enemy starts to get a combo going, dodging isn’t worth the stamina cost and blocking requires almost psychic-like reflexes to pull off, meaning I never really used them. Instead, I helplessly took the assaults, then returned the favor until someone’s health invariably ran out.

With combat a lackluster affair, the most enticing part of XenoVerse is the ability to create your own fighter. From Saiyans to Namekians, there’s a wide range of races to choose from, each with unique stats and fighting styles. Everything from their gender, size, shape, and voice is customizable. I settled on Muu, a mute female Majin known for her high defensive capabilities, fast speed, and slow stamina recovery.

With character creation comes leveling up and stat allotment – an odd choice for a fighting game all about aliens with world-destroying energy beam powers and masculinity complexes to feature such heavy role-playing influence, but it’s cool to see a character I invested time in grow and ultimately become more powerful. The pacing of character progression in XenoVerse is great, as new powers and skills are unlocked gradually – and there are a lot of them. Crafting a skill set of hard-to-acquire special moves that worked with my fighter was half the fun.

Great game for someone like me who enjoys anime, fighting, and role-playing games. Customizing my own character’s equipment and move pool is fantastic...but it’s hard to get excited when combat feels hollow, especially for a franchise all about heroes