Xenoverse 2 Story mode Rant and Open discussion (spoilers.)

[SnomsOvipositor]

This was originally going to be a rant about how the supreme kai of time is boring for no reason, but the more i thought about it, I realized it was an overall problem with the story. While I always thought the time patrol was a neat concept that was explored alright enough in xenoverse 1 (given that it was just the start of the franchise) and that Xenoverse 2, while definitely expanding it into the right direction with the DLC Stories (I'll talk about that later,) dropped the ball when it came to doing anything with it in it's story mode. First let's talk about X1. It was the first game so of course it makes sense that they're not gonna go too deep with it's story because it's experimental. If they threw the budget into an overbearing story then it might be a little hard to follow, and thus maybe drive away possible players. X1 simply being a retread of Dragon Ball Z's story works because it is the basic duty of a time patroller. The only reason you get wrapped in more then that is because the danger reveals itself to you to kill you. It's simple and it does it's job, drawing players in with nostalgia and a good enough spin on it to make it worth playing over all the other game that just retread DBZ. That plus the Bardock vs Broly secret story missions was a nice touch to send the story off with a bit of original spice. All in all for the first game in series X1's story does it's job.

X2 does not have the luxury of being the first game in the series, and being simply on par with the first in terms of anything interesting is not a W on it's part. Everything that I could excuse in X1 I cannot excuse in X2. Which is why I didn't get too deep into the bad stuff about X1 because ultimately this game's story does the same sh*t (sometimes better, sometimes worse but) in way that somehow makes it feel even more mediocre. The Villains are once again Mira and Towa from the first game, picking off from the cliffhanger at the end of X1's story, as the main villains. Now it certainly makes sense for them to come back after that cliff hanger. It'd be nothing more then a middle finger to said cliffhanger if they didn't. But as main villains? Really? Towa is a really generic villain. A scientist that even her mess ups are "All going according to plan" and her being the sister to Dabura never really comes into play in the main story and (up until the dlc) was just a fan fiction-esq way to make her interesting. Sadly, the only interesting thing about her was her relationship with Mira. Showing care for him, but in the same way you show care to your bed. If your bed breaks then you can't sleep, making it so you don't feel sympathy for her really at all when you kill Mira and more so to Mira himself. But even then, Mira is an equally generic character in X1. He is a blank slate with no personality who just does Towa's orders and needs energy constantly. While his design was cool, and that personality makes sense for him given he's a bio-android thing, it doesn't save him from being such a forgettable antagonist compared to Demigra and Towa, who despite also being not the most interesting, have goals and motivations while Mira is a jobber. Mira in X2 was a step in the right direction with the character, making him question if Towa actually cares for him and is agitated that his own desires mean nothing to her while she constantly placates the movie villains with buffs and fruits and allows them to run free doing whatever they want in history (meanwhile Mira is forced to take the sidelines and fight against X1's hero so the story can ignore them both for a bit.)

This does eventually pay off in the ending where Mira absorbs Towa to fight against you and chase he's real aspiration in his life: Beating the living ♥♥♥♥ out of people. Sadly, as mentioned, he's forced to the sidelines most of the time so it feels like you barely get time to interact with him. So sadly, while Mira did grow as a character, you barely got to see or experience any of it before they play his death off like a big thing, (even though he was basically killed in the first one,) despite the fact you barely knew them. A simple fix to this would have Mira kill towa and absorb the egg but instead of the player killing him, you spare him or he is able to barely survive the kamehameha and get away. That way Mira can still continue growing and in Xenoverse 3 or even in a DLC story he would be a lot more interesting character and Villain in general. As is, Mira remains as wasted potential and an underwhelming final boss for X2.

The Incorporation of X1's hero is Insulting. Them being a blank slate that doesn't speaking lines makes sense, but doesn't help when ultimately they do nothing in the story besides scare off Slug/Turles, be a yes man to trunks and SKOT (which is all you were in the first game let's be honest,) and get their butt whooped and controlled by the villains. Any sense of "Wow! This was the hero before me who defeated Demigra! That's crazy" is gone cause they just come off as everyone's b*tch in this story. Any feeling of "Damn this person fought alongside Goku and saved the universe!" Is an afterthought because you're too focused giving them 1 more L by breaking the mask controlling them just so they can immediately be erased from existence. (The fight to break the mask doesn't even use the loadout you gave them in Xenoverse 1, which makes it just another supervillain fight when it could have actually been neat.) Your X1 character does nothing but lose and it makes sense why they would immediately replace their holo statue after you beat Mira just as a final testament to how trash they are. All that and the fact that you can't even play them in parallel quests and versus mode despite them being able to be transferred into the game, make me think I would have rather seen the original animation for DBS in this game in place of watching my old oc get absolutely clowned on for 3 hours.

"Well Ovipositor, all you've done is talk about the old characters in the story and stuff, what about the new characters and the new story?" Might be what someone is saying (probably not) but to that I respond "What New Characters? What New Story?" It is the same exact frickin story mode as X1 just worse. In X1 you actually interacted with a lot of the timeline like getting your body swapped with Ginyu's, people commenting on your race, and helping Krillin cut off Great Ape Vegeta's tail. Now it's like you might as well not even be with the DBZ characters, as most of your interactions are stuck with the Movie Villains' shenanigans. To be fair the movie villains invading the canon timeline were a nice touch and moments like when Cooler comes out of no where in the final battle with Frieza to help his brother legit made me lose my sh*t when I first played the story, but that's pretty much the only cool new thing in the story. The rest is just the same DBZ story you see all the time in pretty much every Dragon Ball game with barely anything new or interesting added on. That was fine in the original game, they needed that factor to get players in and it was charming for the time. They try to put up an illusion of "Your choices have a decision this time" with you being able to select the order you want to play the story in, but it has barely any weight at all. I don't even understood why they added it if they were determined to do nothing with that the entirety of the main story. I think maybe the devs wouldn't have done this if they had any confidence in the interesting world and concept they have set up in the DBM, but it's clear they didn't have that till Dragon Ball Heroes came along. They do nothing with the Supreme Kai of Time to make her fun or interesting. They do nothing with the Elder Kai besides have him show up and get people to go "Look! Elder Kai! I know Elder Kai!" Which I think could have saved the story if they weren't that way. Make the decisions about weather you want to change time for the better in some lesser cases or keep order in and the politics and atmosphere would change in Conton City depending on what you wanted to do in the end. Hell this could even help the Mira battle thing i was talking about where you can choose to either spare Mira or kill him in the end.

I'll finish up complaining and get to something positive now. The Main story is garbage. mediocre, underwhelming, and boring. But I was pleasantly surprised by a lot of the late game dlc stories. While the early games are mostly just retreading super, the late game ones add pretty much everything I wanted from the main story mode (Except the X1 protagonist's pride back but hey I'll take what I can get) with some great scenarios and a story that retreads the past in a way that definitely isn't boring. Starting off: The Villain. Fu is the main antagonist of the late game and is the son of Towa and is also a scientist who experiments with history. Not because he's evil, or "pLaNs To ReViVe ThE dEmOn ReAlM" (Jesus I hope that plot point doesn't come back It is so dumb,) it's because he's genuinely interested what would happen if he messed with things and states at the end of the infinite history story that he might actually start changing history for the betterment of the Z Warriors and other people. That is an interesting character. Fu has an eccentric personality, a fun motive, and actually makes conflict that doesn't just "Ruh Roh Raggy, X is in the timeline of Y and you have to stop X because he's not supposed to be fighting Y." And this mainly is because you can actually choose if you want to help him or fight against him in infinite history. It can be that scenario only if you want it to be. They actually did something with the multiple choice mechanic and made it really fun! In fact you can do more then that in some of the side dlc stories. Speaking of them, they're also pretty good. The Broly Movie one is actually crazy hype with a whole bunch of Super Saiyan action and finally a showing of the long debated "Jiren vs Broly" debate. The Conton city vote pack story actually lets you fight Super Baby in an actual story mission for once, and you can choose either Goku or Vegeta to turn super saiyan 4 and get the W. Hell even the Supreme Kai of Time gets some character as she's shown to be more liberal with what she does with time when she has the chance and is only so against changing history when it effects the main timeline. SKOT actually seems a lot more chill and interesting in the DLC while in the main story all she does is just give Beerus and Goku food poisoning. The DLC stories are such an upgrade from the main story and it gives me so much hope for X3.

But sadly, that doesn't fix the fact that an average player unwilling to pay over 100 bucks for all the dlc has to sit with a throw away story mode with 0 substance and no purpose. It is a disgrace how pathetic the storymode is, and I do really hope whoever wrote the DLC stories gets to work on the plot to X3. Because if X3 is yet just another retread story... that will possibly the most disappointing thing for such a hype successor.

Anyways, I mainly made this post cause I don't interact with the dragon ball community that much and I don't know the general consensus on how people think about DBX's various stories and I'd love to see what other people think. This entire rant is opinion afterall, and i'm putting this out here fully expecting people to disagree with me, but I'd really like to know everyone's thoughts.

(Also if you read this entire essay, then thank you so much. I have put in over 3 hours writing this thing now and it means a lot for someone to have read it in its entirety. I appreciate it.)

[ᴅᴜsᴛɪɴ ᴡᴇᴇʙᴇʀ]

Well let me inform you a bit. Dragon Ball Xenoverse follows the "Dragon Ball Xeno Timeline".
As of now there are 3 Dragon Ball Timelines: Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball GT and Dragon Ball Xeno. Dragon Ball Xeno's timeline follows a parallel universe where Dragon Ball Z, GT, and Super all cross over. The first game in the Dragon Ball Xeno Timeline is Dragon Ball Online. This game debuted back in 2010 on PC in the asian regions (Taiwan, China, Korea and Japan.) the store to this game has been stated by Akira Toriyama as the Canon Future of the Dragon Ball Series.

https://dragonball.fandom.com/wiki/Dragon_Ball_Timeline

This is the timeline which includes all continuity involved. The Xeno Timeline is a lot deeper than what you see in Xenoverse 1 and 2

[SnomsOvipositor]

Originally posted by Master Xen:

Well let me inform you a bit. Dragon Ball Xenoverse follows the "Dragon Ball Xeno Timeline".
As of now there are 3 Dragon Ball Timelines: Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball GT and Dragon Ball Xeno. Dragon Ball Xeno's timeline follows a parallel universe where Dragon Ball Z, GT, and Super all cross over. The first game in the Dragon Ball Xeno Timeline is Dragon Ball Online. This game debuted back in 2010 on PC in the asian regions (Taiwan, China, Korea and Japan.) the store to this game has been stated by Akira Toriyama as the Canon Future of the Dragon Ball Series.

https://dragonball.fandom.com/wiki/Dragon_Ball_Timeline

This is the timeline which includes all continuity involved. The Xeno Timeline is a lot deeper than what you see in Xenoverse 1 and 2

That's interesting, but that just further shows my point that they could do 100 better things other then "Your character is with the DB Characters during the events of DBZ and DBS." Like I said that works fine for Xenoverse 1 because it's gonna be the intro to many of the players into the series, but especially now that I know there is a lot more they could have used for this, I think it's even more inexcusable for X2's story to just do a retread of the DBZ series when you had alot of other things they could have done.

Though since I'm ragging on the DBZ reenactments so much, I should clarify I don't think that travelling through the old arcs should be removed entirely. Maybe just make it less of a major part of the Xenoverse story and maybe recenter on the Xenoverse itself as the main plot and introduce people who didn't know about this, like myself, to more about it and such.

Thanks for sharing by the way. Much Preesh.