I feel like a fish out of water. The degree of unfamiliarity I’m feeling towards a lot of the new content in
Dragon Ball XenoVerse 2 can be compared to a person having seen only
The Phantom Menace and
The Last Jedi. I must reiterate: treat this as an informative breakdown rather than a review, as this content was clearly not produced with someone like me in mind. Its value to me is substantially less than it will be to someone who views Akira Toriyama’s long-running action anime franchise as the alpha and omega of Eastern entertainment.
I don’t mean to mock your tastes if you count yourself among the latter camp, but considering that this expansion seems to be the direct result of fan requests, it will almost certainly please the hardcore fans. But what’s the meat of it? Well, as it so often is with fighting games, a hefty portion of the new content is dedicated to additional characters.
Having abandoned Dragon Ball Z shortly after the conclusion of the Perfect Cell Saga, the new characters introduced in Extra Pack 1 are meaningless to me. For example, I don’t know who Dabra and Tapion are, and Android 13 obviously just reminds me of 16, 17, and 18. And of course, Dragon Ball, in all its variations and spinoffs, runs absolutely hogwild with the distinctly (and bizarre) Eastern storytelling conceits of fusion and absorption: two or more people, through an invariably insane process, becoming a single being that is more than the sum of his/her parts, at least as far as power is concerned. The flavor of the month (pun intended) is Buu (Gohan absorbed).