I grew up watching Dragon Ball Z and always imagined being part of that universe. I also grew up wanting to have a Dragon Ball game but for many different reasons I never had one.

Dragon Ball Xenoverse made these two desires happen, but instead of writing a long review from this point of view I will direct you to Ron Dunwell’s review because he did it better job than I could:

[I]f you are a Dragon Ball Z fan, especially one who has always daydreamed about leaving a personalized mark on the show, you could definitely find $60 worth of value in this package.

In fact, if you are were a nerdy kid from the 90s who used to imagine yourself as a Super Saiyan fighting alongside Goku and his friends, you kind of owe it to yourself to pick up Dragon Ball Xenoverse and finally have that experience all these years later.

The original Dragon Ball series and most of Dragon Ball Z were a boy’s club that bordered, at times, into misogynistic attitudes (hello Master Roshi). So it was a nice surprise to see that you can create female characters in the game.

I’ve been playing the game with a lady saiyajin and the only weird thing has been when people refer to her as a man, for example a dialogue that went like this “So you are the guy Shenron brought to help Trunks”.

They went to the trouble of thinking about having female character models and voices just to drop the ball in the dialogues. That is a very dumb mistake.

I mainly blame more than anything on the poor job done with regards to localization, the whole thing is so poorly translated that in times I’ve had to use Google to figure out what a character was asking .

Some comments have said that female characters have lower stats than male ones. I can’t really comment about that because I haven’t played with a male character yet. But the game progression hasn’t felt hard at all and every time I’ve failed a mission it’s felt like any time in the series where Goku got beaten up badly and had to train more and get more strong before fighting an enemy again.

So aside from that, this game has been entertaining because the weird cooked up story about changes to events in the Dragon Ball timeline has allowed me to insert myself into the events of Dragon Ball Z and relive them side by side with the original heroes.

The fights can feel repetitive at times, but they do have the massive feeling of the fights in the series. It would have been nice to have the environmental destruction caused by the fights to be permanent and not disappear immediately so you can look at the destruction caused at the end of the fight.

Bottom line, if you’re a fan of Dragon Ball you’ll probably enjoy this game.