Graphically, Dragon Ball XenoVerse is a huge step forward for the series. How could it not be? This is, after all, the franchise’s first appearance on next generation consoles, and since it never bothers with PC, the jump seems massive. It’s a clean-looking, explosively colorful game that is an absolute pleasure to behold, most of the time. This holds most true for the character designs and animations, which have been painstakingly and lovingly gleaned from the source material with very little disparity. As always, there are some issues; most of these have to do with the environments, which are mostly made up of bland and uninteresting no-man’s-land. And let’s be frank about this; destructible environments are a must in a Dragon Ball game. Toki Toki City is a decent enough hub world, but it isn’t any fun to explore and isn’t memorable enough to warrant splitting it into three separate areas.
Dragon Ball XenoVerse replicates the instantly-identifiable sound effects from the show, from the cartoony "PSH"es that mark the landing of each hit to the laser blast sounds that accompany Ki attacks and the massive explosion noises that are invariably the end result. Outside of that, the sound design is characteristically lousy. Another atrocious J-Rock anthem serves as the game’s main theme; whatever happened to "Rock the Dragon" or any of the other better-known music cues from the series? We’d get a better sense of immersion if it felt like we were playing an episode of the show instead of one of those crappy homebrew YouTube music videos. And the voice acting, while faithful to the show, is almost redundant at this point; the voice cast for the anime must be tired of having to repeat these same lines over and over.
