Hard as it is to believe, Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 is ten years old this year. That’s a long time to support anything, but Xenoverse 2 is one of those rare games that found a community that stuck with it. Nothing lasts forever, though, and Xenoverse 3 is looking to shake things up by moving the series to Age 1000. At SGF, I got to play Xenoverse 3 and talk with producer Masayuki Hirano about Age 1000, making a brand new Xenoverse game after 10 years, and why my character’s room was so damn messy. Turns out, like almost all things Dragon Ball, there’s a reason.
My demo started with a character select: Earthling or Saiyan. Now, normally, I’d pick a Saiyan. I mean, who doesn’t love your hair getting progressively bigger and more yellow as you power up, am I right? But for this demo, I played an Earthling. Can’t win ‘em all, I suppose.
But there I was in Age 1000, in the most cluttered room you’ve ever seen in your life. Books and magazines everywhere, half-unpacked cardboard boxes atop plastic tubs, a sofa smack in the middle of it, and a desk and computer sitting next to what looks like one of the pods that Vegeta and Nappa arrived in during the Saiyan Saga. Listen, I’m a pack rat; I get it. But man, it looks like my girl never got done unpacking, or maybe never even started.
No time to tidy things up, though. I had a mission, which meant heading down to the lobby and outside to meet up with my team. Along the way, I saw old favorites like Trunks (natch, if you know anything about the Xenoverse lore) and Vegeta… from the Saiyan arc. Maybe he was there to get his pod back. Who knows? Either way, he was sure to let me know that helping me was less work than carrying back my body bag. Rude.
I also got to walk around the city a bit. One of the coolest things about Dragon Ball is its malleability; it can be just about anything it wants. But what does it mean to jump ahead that far in time? What might a Xenoverse game set in the far future be like? What would it allow the player to do?
Hirano tells me that a lot of that comes from the late Akira Toriyama himself: “He designed the characters, kind of came up with the setting and the lore in this [universe]… The Dragon Ball Xenoverse as a franchise has always been about a new Dragon Ball experience, something you can’t experience in any other game or in any past game.”
But the team had to do a lot of work to make that a reality. “We didn’t communicate directly with Toriyama-sensei, but he and his team, we worked very closely together… We had a lot of different interviews when he provided resources and documentation about how the world works and like, “Hey, can we do this? Is this allowed? How does that function?” So there was a lot of alignment in that regard. Of course, Toriyama-sensei has provided us with different settings for different games in the past, but I think with this, what he has done, we wanted to… realize it as closely as possible for Xenoverse 3.”
Once I was on my mission – joined up with characters like Brett, who you might have seen in the trailers – it was time for some classic Xenoverse action. I was in a kind of icy canyon, full of enemies who wanted nothing more than to make sure my team and I would need the Dragon Balls if we wanted to keep breathing.
I won’t lie to you; it’s been a hot second since I’ve played Xenoverse 2. But it’s just one of those games you can jump back into. It didn’t take long before I was flying into enemies at full speed, hitting them with a good ol’ fashioned combo, and canceling that into one of my special moves, like the kamehameha or Kaio-ken combo that broke Nappa’s back. It was fast and snappy and felt pretty slick. If you’ve played any of the Xenoverse games, you’ll be right at home, but it’s easy to pick up and play even if you haven’t or haven’t in a while.
While I was taking out mooks, I got to play with a couple of Xenoverse 3’s new additions. First, there are ultimate attacks: these aren’t new, exactly, but I did get to try out a crazy strong kamehameha that lets you target multiple guys at once and then unleash the power of the kame style in grand fashion. When you’ve got a group of baddies that absolutely, positively has to die in Xenoverse 3, accept no substitutes.
Perhaps less flashy but no less exciting is the Soul Assist, which allows you to call in a character to help you out. My Soul Assist was Vegeta from the Saiyan Saga. Turns out his talk about teaming up wasn’t just for show. When I called him in, he’d appear and we’d team up for a two-person Galick Gun. Rad. Naturally, all of this stuff is on a cooldown timer/meter because video games are only to be fun sometimes, but it does rule when you pull one of these techniques off, and it’s especially useful against bigger enemies.
Once all the mooks in my little ice canyon were dealt with, it was time for the Big Bad Booty Daddy of my demo: Broly himself. You ever had a “Boy, I sure am glad I’m not alone in this fight against the boss” moment. Yeah? Well, that’s Broly. Super Broly. Not the one from Z. Important distinction.
Anyway, Broly’s how you’d figure. He likes to form this big energy field around himself and shoot ki blasts everywhere. Hard to dodge unless you find the sweet spot amidst his barrage or hide behind one of the big ice shards conveniently placed around the environment. That works great until Broly remembers he’s Broly and his ki blasts break through the thing, but hey, them’s the breaks. Otherwise, he does Broly things: shoots giant energy waves from his mouth, smashes you into the ground and flings you mad yonder, and so on. Oh, and he blocks by crossing his arms and staring at you. It’s a nice touch. When he’s not doing that (or shooting energy blasts), your job is to get in his face and give him the business. And that’s where Xenoverse 3’s other cool new twist comes into play.
The trick in question is called Soul Switch, which does exactly what it sounds like as your character pulls a blue flame into their chest and transforms into another character, complete with all their wonderful toys. This time around, I got Trunks, and if you’re reading this, you probably know all of them by heart. Burning Attack? It’s there. The slick sword combo into energy blast that put Frieza down? Yup. Tossing a dude into the air and then hitting him with a massive energy blast? That, too. Soul Switch is a neat mechanic; it lets you be in the world with your own character while calling on a Dragon Ball character to not only power you up when you need it, but live out what it’s like to be that character for a while. Pretty neat, and it worked pretty well against ol’ Broly. After a little back and forth that involved me saving one of my characters (c’mon, Brett, you can do better), Broly finally went down.
I felt like I had a decent idea of what Xeniverse 3 was, but I still had more questions. How do you add stuff like Soul Switch and Soul Assist and the Age 1000 setting and keep Xenoverse feeling like Xenoverse? According to Hirano, it came down to being in dialogue with the community, seeing how they’d played the series, and figuring out what they wanted to do in that world. Ultimately, he told me, Xenoverse 3 was built around three core pillars: the story, the new characters, and customizability. Speaking of customization, Hirano told me that he thinks there’s a level of customization in Xenoverse 3 that wasn’t in the original games, and the team got there by approaching it with a different mindset.
“For lack of a better way to describe it in one and two, I think… we wanted to make it as balanced as possible, but what that also does is it doesn’t allow for a lot of differentiation and strategy,” Hirano said. “I think once people figure out the optimal way to navigate something, that just becomes how you do it and then a lot of the customization just becomes cosmetic rather than strategic. In Xenoverse 3, we wanted to really open up that strategy differentiation. So think about having four people in your party as you go on these missions: you can actually kind of almost assign roles just by how you like to play and what you prefer.”
That sounds good to me, and I’m looking forward to digging into that in the future. But I had one more question. One more thing that was bothering me: why was my character’s room so messy? The question got a laugh, but I also learned a little more about Xenoverse 3 as a result.
“Well, first off, that room will get tidied up,” Hirano assured me. “COA, the little robot AI that you saw in there, is going to assist with that. But the idea of Xenoverse 3 is the player is really just immersed into this world. You embody that space and actually there’s going to be some story background to this, but you kind of fall into… that’s actually Bulma’s room/office/storage unit. So it’s her fault that it’s messy, but that’s kind of the backstory… that’s not your fault.”
Makes sense to me. Xenoverse 3 already seems full of potential and fun new ideas for the series, but I know I’ll be paying attention to that room as soon as I get more time with it. I may just be an Earthling in Age 1000, but I do want to live in a nice space. That’s one of those things that’s always true, no matter what year it is, even if you are palling around with Goku and the gang.
Will Borger is an IGN freelancer. You can find him on Bluesky @edgarallanbro.
