Into Age 1000 with Dragon Ball Xenoverse 3.
My wife and I have a running gag: “everything is Dragon Ball.” Beam battles? Dragon Ball. People yelling while they power up? Dragon Ball. Defeating your foes only to recruit them to your cause through the power of friendship? Dragon Ball. Pondering your orb?
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Believe it or not, also Dragon Ball. Goofy transformations with bigger, better hair? That’s Dragon Ball, baby. Unless it’s also Sailor Moon. You could make the argument. And who could blame you? Sailor Moon is cool. But it’s impossible not to think about how much just about everything else is or owes something to Dragon Ball while playing Dragon Ball Xenoverse 3.
Dragon Ball Xenoverse 3 marks a transition for the series.
The series itself is going through something of a transition after the passing of creator Akira Toriyama, though. While Toriyama wasn’t involved in every minute detail of what Dragon Ball was anymore – it’s far too big for that now – he was the series North Star, the thing to which everything else looked for guidance.
For the first time, Dragon Ball has to figure out what it is without Akira Toriyama. But not quite yet. Dragon Ball Xenoverse 3, and the Age 1000 setting itself, were based on Toriyama’s work, and at TGS I got to go hands-on with the game’s multiplayer and speak to Masayuki Hirano, Executive Producer of the Dragon Ball Xenoverse series, about what’s next for the series and carrying on Toriyama’s legacy.
Unlike But Why Tho?’s previous experience with Xenoverse 3 (or my own, for a different website that you may or may not have heard of), my demo this time was all about multiplayer. After selecting our characters – I chose a Saiyan and equipped him with a pre-selected set of gear that would make him better at punching other guys in the face – my team (which consisted of three Namekians and me) was dropped into Fifty-Foe Fracas.
There were 50 guys, and my team and I had to take them all out. And man, we got smoked out of the gate. I mean, straight walloped. And then we were right back to mission select. We were in and out inside of two minutes. It was that bad.
And that’s the first lesson Xenoverse 3 teaches you: you have to work together and have some idea of what you’re doing. Now, I played a lot of Xenoverse and Xenoverse 2 back in the day. That part was like turning on the TV and finding one of your favorite films has just started. Comforting, easy. You know the words and the actors and the scenes, and you’re here for the vibes. I had all that down. Basic combos, energy attacks, specials.
What my group didn’t have down was teamwork. Nobody was working together. We’d all run off in different directions and gotten squashed. Game over. After being dropped back into the hub world with our tails between our legs, some of us swapped our characters (I stuck with my Saiyan) and we tried again.
This time, we were a little more careful. Less running around trying to punch guys in the face, more paying attention to where we were, who we were fighting, what the rest of us were up to. More strategy than what you’d expect from Xenoverse if you haven’t played it, maybe, but that’s part of the fun.
Multiplayer fun is a focus in Xenoverse 3.
That doesn’t mean that there are set classes or you have to play a specific way, though. “There is no tank role or healer role for people to choose because we believe Dragon Ball fans all want to charge in there and punch guys,” Hirano said when asked about how players would be able to use different playstyles.
“We want to make sure that the game was balanced and tuned to be able to do that and everyone can kind of prove, ‘Hey, I’m the strongest,’ in their own way. So, that is up to player choice and player customization. That said, if you are going into a mission with a bunch of your friends and you feel that, ‘Hey, we can optimize this mission if we do decide to have different roles,’ then that’s entirely up to you. And that might be one way to navigate that particular mission. But we have balanced and tuned the game so that everyone can charge in headfirst and punch guys.”
We got to put that theory to the test in our next mission, called (you’re never gonna believe this) Communication is Key. Normally, missions in Xenoverse games are about Hitting People Really Hard Until They Go Away, but this one was a little different.
This time, we had to defend a couple of communicators from the Ginyu Force and a bunch of other mooks. This time, I opted for a human (listen, a lot of people were playing Namekians, okay?) and we got to business. Only we fell prey to one of the classic blunders: we got so focused on punching dudes in the face we forgot to defend the communicators. The communicators can’t be destroyed if there’s nobody left to take them out, right? Seems like a good strategy. Not so much, it turns out.
Back in our Age 1000 hub, it was time to take stock. Our current strategy wasn’t working. I opted to stay with a human – what can I tell you, our team was obsessed with Namekians and/or the Frieza Race – and switch it up.
I picked up Kefla as a Soul Switch (a character you can change into for a limited time) and then grabbed a few new abilities and picked up Goku as a Soul Assist that I could call for aid. I also made sure I had a massive ultimate in Tien’s Tri-beam, and several attacks that let me close distance quickly. My plan was simple: bounce between the communicators based on what was happening and where I was needed, and stay focused on the objective.
And this time, we did it. Barely. It took a lot of Tri-beams, several assists from Goku, and more than a few moments as Kefla to pull it off. Despite what the anime might have you thinking, those Ginyu Force cats are pretty tough. Frankly, I think we also got lucky.
I landed a last-second Tri-beam that knocked out a couple of guys who were using the communicators for batting practice when it was on the magic pixel that I’m pretty sure saved us. But we won, and the mission was quite different than what you might expect from Xenoverse. But to Hirano, things weren’t as different as they might seem.
“In order to make that [kind of mission] fun, of course, it goes back to the customization where players can change their play style or their skills,” he said later. “So we give people a wide range of things that they can do, and perhaps everyone can kind of define their own way they want to become the grandmaster or the strongest in the universe, so to speak. But again, in the end, you’re going to have to be punching dudes. So I think there will be some fine-tuning and different ways to approach it, but it’ll all kind of point towards your ability to be the strongest.”
“We have balanced and tuned the game so that everyone can charge in headfirst and punch guys.”
But our last mission would be the toughest. It was called Canning the RepliCans, and man, were there a lot of RepliCans. We were in some sort of facility: grey metal walls, long cylinders growing out of the floor and filled with weird blue stuff, weird robots shaped like robots and also Dragon Ball characters, you know the deal. I switched it up one last time.
I kept rolling with a human, but I made Kefla my Soul Assist and decided to rock the Kaio-Ken instead of a Soul Switch. It turned out to be a good decision, because the Kaio-Ken is fantastic. It takes a bit to build the charge you need for it, but once you have it… whew. You chew through people. Things were going really well. Then we ran into GU:REL Toppo and Jiren. Fancy RepliCans, I guess? But they packed all of the punch of their namesakes.
I’d like to tell you we won that one. I really would. But I have a thing about lying during previews; it’s rude. We came really, really close. Agonizingly close. And I’m not saying it was all my teammate’s fault, but I will say I only died once, costing just one of the precious lives in our pool. If we’d had thirty more seconds, we could have done it. But we didn’t, and none of the other groups in our session did, either. Them’s the breaks.
The one thing that stuck with me through it all was how much it felt like Dragon Ball. That should be obvious, but part of the joy of a good licensed game is being able to live in that world, spend time with those characters, make your own adventures in that place.
Part of that comes from the design of Xenoverse 3’s major city. I only got to spend a little time in it between missions, but Xenoverse has always excelled at being a place where people just hang out, and Xenoverse 3 carries that spirit forward. When I asked him about designing something players could use as a third space, Hirano was quick to credit Toriyama.
“One element that [Toriyama]… emphasized with H1000 is that there’s a place for people to gather and offering players many different ways to have fun. And take, for example, in the original Xenoverse, we had Toki Toki City and Conton City in Xenoverse 2. Same with Xenoverse 3: there needs to be a place where people can feel that sense of relief and enjoy and progress their characters the way they want to. So that is very intentional.”
”I think having that space for players to play the game, but not have to play the game, so to speak, is quite key,” Hirano continued. And that is something that we’ve seen players do indeed want from past universe games.”
“I think one of the beautiful things of the Xenoverse series is [that] the entire concept centers around the player jumping into the world that [he] has created.”
Hirano also emphasized that all of Age 1000 sprung from the mind of Toriyama himself. And while Dragon Ball’s legendary creator might no longer be around to shepherd the series, that doesn’t mean you won’t feel his presence here.
“Toriyama left behind a lot of resources and materials, from character designs to the world setting of Age 1000 and a lot of lore world-building, etcetera. So our task then became, ‘Well, how do we take all of this wonderful material and translate that into a video game?’ And I think one of the beautiful things of the Xenoverse series is [that] the entire concept centers around the player jumping into the world that [he] has created.”
“We always kept that concept, making sure the player feels like they are jumping into the world, that they’re being immersed in that world as we took the materials and built the video game,” Hirano ended.
It’s a tall order and a heavy weight to carry. But from what I’ve played of Xenoverse 3 so far, the team behind it seems more than capable of doing Toriyama proud.
Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 is set to release in 2027 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC (via Steam).
