Wooderon Games of the Year 2015: #7

I am always willing to give Nintendo a chance, and will sing their praises at every opportunity. That being said, even I’m going to struggle to see them much more on this list as we arrive at number seven. A game that means a lot to me and could have easily found itself further up.

As I’ve said before, this is all my opinion and the games I personally got the most enjoyment out of. I’m not rating these games critically, think of it more at the top games I recommend you play after the year is up. So, I’ll give a recap of the list so far and then move onto the new entry:

#10 Halo 5: Guardians

#9 Ori and the Blind Forest

#8 Splatoon

#7 Dragonball XenoVerse

Played on the Xbox One | Released 27th February | Developed by Dimps

There was a time where it looked like Dragonball Z was just another source of nostalgia for me, something that I would constantly find myself thinking about, but would be viewed by everyone else as an old curiosity. And yet, here we are in the year of 2015 with a brand new Dragonball show airing and what might be the best video game based on the property there has ever been.

Don’t get me wrong. By no means am I saying this is a perfect game, far from it in fact. It has problems and balance issues by the bucket load. But this game is a celebration of Dragonball Z and it revels in that, allowing players not only to create their own fighters, but insert themselves into the story of Dragonball Z.

The story of Dragonball Z has been iterated more times than I want to count in all the video games. But XenoVerse takes the well trodden story and turns it on its head. The player created time patrollers have to insert themselves into well known events from the show’s history and take the glory from whoever normally wins that fight. It’s the ultimate Dragonball wish fulfilment.

The game has an incredible level of customisation, allowing players to chose their race, their clothes, their stat built and their super movies. The game also had online functionality built in so the world hub is filled with other people’s O.C.s. The game’s story was plenty original, even when it was jumping into the past. It had some new villains and some animated cut scenes that looked like they were out of the show.

It’s obvious a lot of care went into the game, as the models for the characters all look fantastic. The game is bright and colourful and very much in the spirit of the show.

It still could have been a better game technically though. It can be totally broken in some aspects and feel like banging your head against a wall at others. The ability to have a number of enemies on screen was cool, but the abuse of the Super Saiyan power (even by the computer controlled enemies) made winning a fight almost impossible thanks to never ending beam attacks. On top of that, the very high level fights could take up the entire fight timer before managing to beat the three enemies with their five life bars each.

I’ll openly admit that this game is pretty heavy fan service, but I’ll prance with it in a flowery field all the same. I grew up with Dragonball Z and I feel like this game was made by people like me, for people like me. If you’re not like that, then XenoVerse will do nothing for you at all. But I had a ton of fun with it and it kept me smiling despite never ending Kamehameha spam.