Dragon Ball Xenoverse is the latest video game spawned from one of the most popular anime series of all time, especially if your formative years took place in the late 90s. Spoiler alert: It's alright.
DBXV offers a new take on the Dragon Ball Z sagas. Someone's messing with the DBZ timeline, and it's up to you and your created character to help the Time Patrol set things right! The story is pretty ridiculous, but who cares? Kamehame-HA!
The main campaign plays out in single player quests. The Supreme Kai of Time and Time Patrol Trunks will give you missions, usually (always) asking you to defeat a number of classic and new villains. Raditz, Vegeta, Ginyu, Beerus, etc. You know the drill. The bad guys are sporting a menacing purple aura, suddenly becoming more powerful due to a demon manipulating the...
I kind of zoned out right there because I need me some Special Beam Cannon. Let me sum up: Time travel. Stronger bad guys. Your created character is important and powerful. Help Goku-- or Gohan, or whoever. If you're in it for the plot then telling you more will only spoil it. If you don't care about the story then you know it's all a nonsense, anyway. DBZ plot is just something that fills space between super beings grunt-screaming while powering up before they unleash energy-blast-hell on each other. Remember the episode where Goku and Piccolo learned to drive? I do.
The real meat of the game comes from the three player online cooperative Parallel Quests, not the story mode. Weird, I know. These can be played offline with worthless friendly AI or online with two real life, over-powered, Death Ball spammers. Here you’ll be able to play as one of the many unlockable characters from the Dragon Ball universe or your own created character.
There are over fifty Parallel Quests, and each one offers different gear, items, transformations, buffs, power poses, and sweet signature super/ultimate moves for your created character. If you want your custom avatar to learn how to become a Super Saiyan, or how to use the Galick Gun technique, this is where you’ll learn those abilities, and so much more.
The catch? You must fulfill super-secret requirements to trigger an additional fight at the end of each match to get the best rewards. The Super Saiyan catch!? The rewards are RNG’d from a prize pool specific to each quest!! The Super Saiyan Level 2 catch!?! You might get squat!!! Yup. May as well call yourself Eric Nies because you’re about to GRIND, baby. Go sit in a corner if you got that reference. Seriously. Go.
Check out our Dragon Ball Xenoverse Co-Op FAQ for the tips on how to get the most out of your Parallel Quests.
Unfortunately, the majority of the co-op missions (which are the best part of the game) can only be unlocked by completing the single player story, which is rather lame. Several missions have difficulty spikes, and some require you to keep your CPU partners safe. Keeping AI partners alive sucks. I’m looking at you, Krillin (of course it’s Krillin). While there aren’t a ton of escort-style missions, the ones that do exist can bring progress to a halt. If you get stuck on a mission you must grind earlier battles to level up your stats and hope you get better moves to drop for your created character. Also, you’re stuck with your original created character for your first playthrough of the single player portion of the game. Upon completion of the story mode you’ll unlock seven more character slots, but you’ll want to choose wisely when you first start out.