Dragon Ball: Xenoverse 2 Special Edition

The store page sells you the largest and most detailed Dragon Ball world ever built, and after a lot of hours orbiting Conton City I can tell you the world is the least important thing in the box. Reality check: this is an arena brawler with a create-a-character build system bolted to an MMO-lite hub town, and the hub mostly exists to make you jog to the next mission counter. You pick a race (Saiyan, Earthling, Namekian, Frieza Race, Majin), pick a body type and a voice, then start patching sabotaged timelines as a Time Patroller. The framing story is thin. The loadout game underneath it is genuinely good. Combat runs on three resources and you have to read all of them. Health, ki, stamina. Ki fuels supers and ultimates, stamina fuels vanishing (the teleport dodge), guarding and boost, and draining an opponent's stamina to zero triggers a stamina break that leaves them wide open. That single mechanic is the neutral game: bait the dodge, drain the bar, punish. Time-to-kill in PvP is long by fighting game standards, so matches are decided by resource discipline rather than one lucky opener, which I like more than I expected to. You assemble a loadout from four super skills, two ultimates, an evasive and an awoken skill (transformations like Super Saiyan or the Frieza race forms), and you learn most of them from mentors who train you in the field. Stat points split across health, ki, stamina, basic attack, strike supers and ki blast supers, so a melee pressure build and a zoner build actually feel different in the hands. Where it disappoints is nearly everything around the fighting. Online is lobby-based and only as good as whoever is hosting, so once a raid or a busy multi-player quest fills up you will eat rubber-banding, hits that register a beat late, and the occasional teleport rewind. It is playable, not clean. If you have spent years in shooters where you can feel an extra 30ms, you will clock it in the first session. Parallel Quests, the mission grind that supplies gear and skills, dole out drops on RNG that is not shy about eating your evening, and the standing community advice is to farm the same handful of missions on repeat, which tells you plenty. PvP balance skews toward whoever brought the strongest transformation and the best Super Soul, and the ladder population is thin enough that you meet the same regional grinders over and over. The camera also loses the plot in crowded fights, cheerfully locking onto a target behind a rock while three others pile onto your back. There is a lot of content here, though, and it kept growing for years after launch: story arcs pulled from across the anime, Expert Missions built as proper multiplayer boss fights, the Hero Colosseum figure-battler side mode, split-screen and online PvP, co-op, leaderboards. Roughly nine in ten Steam reviewers land positive, and that tracks with what the thing actually is: a hobby you dip back into rather than a tight twenty-hour package. It is also badly DLC-sprawled at this point, so expect your skill list to look small next to a veteran's until you catch up. Play it on a controller. Mouse and keyboard technically works and I tried it out of stubbornness, but the camera and the flight controls want an analog stick, and no polling rate on earth saves you from binding vanish somewhere awkward. Bring a friend as well, because the co-op and raid content is where this is at its best, and solo Parallel Quest farming with AI partners who ignore objectives gets old fast. If you want a technical fighter with frame-tight punishes and honest netcode, this is not it and it will annoy you. If you want a character builder with hundreds of skills, a long grind and people to run missions with, it holds up better than most online games of its vintage.

Fred · Scout Team

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