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The city acts as the main hub where you pick up various missions and can chat to NPCs. With my character made, I was dropped into Conton City. Saiyans have high attack but low health, Freeza folks have high spiritual energy but poor defence, and humans are all-rounders.
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The choice of race is the only important one, since it will directly affect your character’s core stats. You can choose your race, which includes everything from Saiyans to humans and Freeza folk, and from there you can edit your face, hair style, height and body type as you see fit. The character-creation system adds to that premise. This is basically an officially licensed fan fiction that lets you create your fighter and take part in Dragon Ball’s most iconic moments.
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It sounds silly, but it works to great effect and gives Bandai Namco free rein to let you revisit pretty much every iconic battle in Dragon Ball’s rich history. It’s your job as a member of an elite group of Time Patrollers to ensure they don’t succeed, and that Dragon Ball’s history remains untainted. The premise is as ridiculous as you’d expect: a bunch of baddies appear and are trying to muck with history to ensure the heroes lose. Xenoverse 2 is, at its heart, an open-world battle RPG designed from the ground up to deliver that sense of nostalgia to Dragon Ball fans. However, for those who didn’t spend the past two decades throwing phantom Kamehamehas at their friends, the game may not quite deliver. Luckily for budding Super Saiyans, Xenoverse 2 generally delivers top-notch fighting worthy of the Dragon Ball Z brand that will put any fan of the series on a serious nostalgia high. That’s why any game carrying the series’ hallowed branding has some pretty big shoes to fill. I could pretend this was because of its close-to-nonsensical storylines, but the truth is that it was because it had the most ridiculously over-the-top and entertaining fights I’d ever seen – forget Muhammad Ali versus Joe Frazier, Goku versus Freezer’s where it’s at. The series was an entry point for most western teenagers into the awesome world of Japanese animation during the ’90s and early ’00s, and it remains one of the most influential animes of all time.
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