Dragon Ball Z has quite a history when it comes to video games, the simple yet engaging combat of the Budokai, the portable RPG goodness of The Legacy of Goku, or the chaotic fun of Budokai Tenkaichi. But things had been pretty miserable when it comes to Dragon Ball games after the Budokai Tenkaichi series ended back in 2007, and the games that released afterwards had mixed reviews at best. Fortunately, after years of struggling both critically and commercially (Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Z couldn’t even break a million after two months of its release) Dragon Ball Z has returned to the spotlight with Dragon Ball Xenoverse, which not only has had quite a success in terms of sales, but the public in general seems to really enjoy it.
Dragon Ball Xenoverse was announced on E3 2014 for Pc, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One and it gathered a lot of attention previous to release thanks to the ability to create your own character and use a lot of options when it comes to customization, with a big plus being the fact that the story was very different from what we”ve seen in previous DBZ games. Xenoverse released on February 2015 and thanks to character creation, a decent online mode and good combat mechanics it has sold to this day 4 million units. Critics found a lot of issues with the game, but they saw some very interesting features that gave it the potential of making a great sequel out of it with the proper amount of polish.
That´s where Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 comes in, which has built on top of the foundation given by the first game and its certainly trying to improve some of the mistakes made before. It released back on October and critics found that not every problem had been fixed, but it was an improvement from the original experience. And it has performed incredibly, reaching 1.4 million units shipped on a week.
The Future of Dragon Ball is looking quite exciting, thanks to Dragon Ball Super and the new movies it looks like the Dragon Ball brand has received a shot in the arm. Hopefully the next Xenoverse game (because you know there will be another one) will reach the levels of polish that Dragon Ball Z Budokai 3 and Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3 received.