Reviews// Dragon Ball: Xenoverse 2

After having a good waddle around to familiarise myself with the locales, it was time to get stuck into the meat of the game. One massive bonus to Xenoverse 2 is the sheer amount of things you can do whilst in Conton City. You have the usual suspects - main story and side missions, as well as being able to train under your favourite characters and gain some of their signature moves.

Challenge and Parallel quests make a return for those keen to test out their skills, as well as online and offline battles, and of course no Dragon Ball game would be complete without the good old World Tournament. One of the worst additions to this game comes in the form of Krillin's mini quests - Milk Deliveries (Yes, they're as bad as they sound). Annoying time-waster quests that didn't offer enough of a reward in exchange for destroying part of your soul due to sheer frustration. Needless to say I noped right out of doing any of those quests again and concentrated on the more fun side of the game.

Main story missions are delightfully varied, taking away the monotonousness of just facing one enemy after another, and quite often giving you more than one battle area to fight in, giving a nice change to the scenery and overall atmosphere. One downside to these battles, however, is that some of them can throw a steep learning curve at you, almost to the point of being annoyingly unfair, making you back out and then proceed to grind to level up and increase your attributes so that you stand at least a slither of a chance of defeating whatever stands in your way.

Whilst I understand this has to be done to elongate the gameplay, it detracts from the overall immersion into the game, breaking your stride. The thought of having to spend a few hours grinding to make yourself a little tougher is the epitome of boredom and something that thankfully the devs have improved upon in the second installment of the series.

The relief comes in the form of mini quests: certain areas in Conton City contain teleports to areas that have been encased in a time rift - Guru's House, Frieza's Ship and Capsule Corp Headquarters to name a few. Quite often new events pop up in these areas and completing them gives you a very nice boost to your experience bar, sometimes even gaining a few levels at once. These mini quests along with training and parallel missions make it a lot easier and a lot less boring to level up than in the first installment.

Battle is wonderfully fast and furious - just how battles from Dragon Ball should be. There's enough technical fighting through using counters and timing to add a bit of meat to the bones, but it is still basically a straight-up button masher. Battles can still be satisfying though - the tempo is fast: often brutal which keeps you on your toes. Being able to use signature moves such as Kamehameha certainly helps too.

The controller is stretched to its limits in battle, with almost every combination of shoulder holding and button pressing being used to house abilities or items: hold the left shoulder and you have access to items, the right shoulder gives you access to super abilities and holding both shoulder buttons gives you access to your ultimate moves, most of these abilities being earned from training with the various characters that are scattered throughout Conton City. Rewards for battles includes experience points based on your rating, zeni and a new form of currency called TP Medals. These can be used in various shops alongside zeni, as well as a special shop that only accepts these medals.

Overall I was pleasantly surprised with this sequel. There's no room for boredom in this game as you simply never run out of things to do. I believe the devs have achieved the epitome of Dragon Ball game perfection with Xenoverse 2 and it encapsulates everything that a Dragon Ball game should be - creating your own character, brilliant graphics, great story with seamless transitions from in-game cutscenes to cartoon scenes, varied and fast paced battles, entertaining voice acting as well as the usual weirdly funny but slightly cringe-worthy Japanese humour.

Pros:
+ Perfected cell-shaded graphics
+ Varied and fun combat
+ Great character customisation
+ Never run out of things to do

Cons:
- Steep learning curve
- Restrictive use of in-battle items
- Unnecessary restriction of flying around Conton City
- Krillin

SPOnG Score: 9/10