What do you think of Dragon Ball Xenoblade?

You mean Xenoverse.

Anyways, I really liked it at first, but I swiftly got tired of it once I was encountered by the staples of Japanese gaming.

First of all, the grinding. Getting a specific item is extremely tiresome and based on ridiculous amounts of luck. There are some missions where you have to go through triple stacked RNG and pretty much every good item has at least two stacks of RNG required. What does it mean? Well, it means that you have to find a specific trigger to cause an event to happen, BUT this event doesn't always happen even when you trigger it correctly. Then if you're lucky to trigger the special event, you have to also be lucky enough to get the item drop. And some of these items have drop rates of down to 0.8%. zero point eight fucking percent. And to get the chance to get that item, you need to do something that doesn't even have 50% chance to trigger and we're starting to talk drop rates of less than half a percent and that is insane and outright torture. I tried to get a Z-soul for Vegeta's master quest and ended up playing the mission 15 times and the required event triggered once and even then I didn't get the item.

Secondly, we come to the cheating CPUs. A difficulty curve is natural for a game and important if you want to game to remain engaging and challenging, but as is common in Japanese games, Xenoverse does this by having the CPU outright cheat. As you get up there in difficulty, the CPU should get more difficult through better AI and maybe raised stats, but Xenoverse increases the difficulty by giving the CPU unlimited Ki, unlimited stamina or super armor that stops them from flinching. Artificial difficulty like this is the laziest kind of difficulty one could ever come up with and I take great exception to it. Essentially, the only way to beat these CPU opponents is to cheat yourself by being really cheap and spamming ultimates until they die.

Finally, what could have been the game's saving grace, the online play. I think that good co-op can save almost any game. As long as you have a good friend to play with, it's all good. Xenoverse laughs at this logic. The server issues are immense and in most cases you are unable to connect to the servers at all, leaving you in offline mode which is functionally identical to if you have pirated the game. They recently "fixed" the server issues so now you generally get past the first server connection check, letting you pick between single- or multiplayer online lobby but then failing the second check, looping you back to the character selection screen. At this point you can't even pick offline lobby and you simply can't play. Even if you're lucky and end up in a game with a good friend, the net code is so amazingly terrible that the sync errors are severe. Jerky camera, teleporting characters and enemies who ignore damage (because they're not really there) sucks all the fun that could've been had out of this online mode. The balance of the game is shit too so there's no reason to ever play VS online; everybody is using the same cheap Ki blast spam build.

Basically, it's a game that looks great on paper and for the first couple of hours you play it, but after a point it rapidly dissolves into garbage.

 

Well, at least I can agree with you on that. Budokai 3 was... Ah, it was just great. Me and my friends played that game to death and we all became ridiculously good at it. In fact, I once placed on the podium in a tournament a long time ago.

I bought the HD version for PS3 a couple of years ago, but I was saddened to see that the skills hadn't stayed.

 

I was never a fan of Budokai 3. I find the Dragon Rush just completey ruins it. So repetitive, and entirely luck based. I like Infinite World, and even Budokai 2, much better. Budokai Tenkaichi 3 is my favorite DBZ fighting game though.

As for Xenoverse, never played it, but I want to. Grinding sounds like it might be annoying, but I don't think I'd mind as much as other people. And aside from that it just seems really cool.